The Golden Gate

So, Dan Rather is talking about Rathergate and partisanship and the media. San Francisco Chronicle TV critic Tim Goodman liveblogged Rather’s latest, um, account at the annual Television Critics Press tour which is going on right now in Los Angeles. An excerpt of Rather’s remarks ran today on the first page of the Chronicle’s Entertainment Section.

(Side note: Goodman has dubbed the annual TV Press Tour “The Death March With Cocktails,” and his accounts are consistently enjoyable, if one cares about insider reports from the TV industry and rich-and-famous foolery and that sort of thing. You can follow The Death March With Cocktails here.)

And, for easy reference and background, here is an index of the entire pre-election Rathergate memo scandal.)
Below is the full transcript of Rather’s remarks. Rather had just been asked if he felt that he carried any “baggage” from his career in network journalism.

“Yes, I have baggage. I have the baggage of being a graduate of the journalism school out of the University of South Vietnam. I have baggage from the Civil Rights movement in Birmingham. I have baggage from Watergate and covering, as the White House and lead correspondent for CBS News, on the only President in history who resigned. I have baggage from Afghanistan when the Soviets invaded it. I have baggage from two interviews with Saddam Hussein. You bet your life I’ve got a lot of baggage. And make no mistake, I’m proud of it. Yes, I’m biased. I have a very strong bias toward independent journalism, italicized, underlined, put in bold caps. Some - I’m not here to argue all - some of the problems I have and have had with this question of, quote, bias, is misunderstanding what my bias is. I’m committed to independent journalism and, yes, fiercely independent when necessary. And a lot of the times it’s necessary. Not all, but some of what you describe as, quote, baggage, comes from people who have the following view, which they’re entitled to have. This, God bless it, is America, and you can have it. But their view is, to not just Dan Rather, but to a lot of people in journalism, “Listen, Mr. or Ms., you report the news the way I want it reported, or I’m going to make you pay a price. I’m going to hang a sign around your neck that says you were a bomb-throwing Bolshevik or something. And I’m going to mount a sizable and very effective smear campaign on you.”

Now, this doesn’t only happen to me. If you’ve seen “Good Night, and Good Luck,” you know what I’m talking about. And I should - I should be lucky enough to live to the day that I can walk in the same room with Ed Murrow, but I can’t, and nobody before or since him could. But there’s the model for things. If you’re determined to be independent, you’re going to take the heat. If you are determined to be fiercely independent when necessary and say, “No, sir” - or ma’am - “I’m not going to report the news the way you want it reported. I’m not going to be bullied or intimidated. I’m not going back up, back down, or back away to meet your partisan, political, or ideologic agenda. I’m going to play to my bias for independent news” - now, when you face the furnace, you have to take the heat, and some of the time, you’re going to get burned. And I’ve got plenty of scars. I’ve made my mistakes, and some of my wounds are self-inflicted.

But the one thing, if you check the record - and I invite you to check the record - you will not find me cowing to pressure. Now, sometimes that can lead to making mistakes. Sometimes - and I’ve had people tell me, “Dan, this is not healthy for your career.” Well, my answer to that is to hell with the career. I didn’t get into journalism as a careerist. I’m not going to go out of journalism as a careerist. So yes, I’m biased about doing independent journalism. And you bet I’m prejudiced. I’m prejudiced toward reporters - and America is filled with reporters - who want to do the right thing. Increasingly it’s difficult to do the right thing because of what I described before. You stand up and ask the tough question. You ask the toughest question you know how of the highest power you can find, and I guarantee you the second your backside hits the seat, there are going to be people coming after you. But you know, that goes with the territory. I wouldn’t have it any other way. That news, real news, news at its best, is a wake-up call, not a lullaby. And I’m not in the lullaby business.”

Captain Ed has ANOTHER great post. He also has some reasonable seculation and asks some daunting questions. Quotable:

One of the reasons that the DoD may have sat on the captured IIS files without translating or releasing them, some speculate, was that the contents may embarrass some of our allies in the overall war on terror. One document released yesterday seems to support that analysis. According to document CMPC-2003-000878, the Russians gave more active support to Saddam prior to the March 2003 invasion than previously known — and they used Syria as a conduit…

[...]

This doesn’t have much to do with WMD, of course, but the revelation of the movement of tank engines — seventy of them for every armored unit — has to raise some eyebrows about the relationship between Washington and Moscow. It also should remind people about the materiel conduit that Syria supplied to Saddam Hussein and Vladimir Putin, and whether or not that conduit operated bidirectionally. Perhaps the WMD that the US seeks did not stay in Syria at all, but made its way to Russia instead.

UPDATE and BUMP: Another look at our friends in Moscow comes in document CMPC-2003-001950, which details a meeting with the Russian ambassador in March 2003. The diplomats discussed the evacuation of Russian citizens from Iraq, but also discussed current American military assets deployed in the Gulf theater[...]

Be sure to check out all the materiel our Russian “allies” gave to Saddam in The Captain’s post.

Captain Ed has a great post about Yale’s courtship and eventual rejection of Hashemi, the Taliban’s former diplomat at large. Quotable:

It’s odd that Yale would have trotted out the diversity argument, considering the regime that Hashemi represented. Let’s recall that the Taliban beat women for not covering themselves from head to toe and men for shaving their faces. Ancient Buddhist carvings, considered artistic and historical treasures, exist no more thanks to Taliban tolerance. The Taliban also reintroduced the lovely Islamic tradition of tolerance by crushing homosexuals to death or throwing them off of towers.

The latter point seems especially germane when it comes to Yale. After all, they have taken the position that the American military cannot stage ROTC classes at the campus due to their “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy regarding homosexuals in the military (which I also oppose, for several reasons). Yale’s students and faculty argued that the university would benefit from having Hashemi’s diverse viewpoint represented on campus, but they kicked out the military for a much milder viewpoint and action than that of Hashemi and his colleagues.And while they argue that Hashemi would have benefited the Yale community by his inclusion, no one appears to wonder whether Yale students might benefit from having the ROTC on campus and the diversity of political opinion it might create.

Yale invited Hashemi — he didn’t just show up and fill out an application. They went out of their way to get him to choose Yale, because as their admissions office stated, they didn’t want to lose another “high profile” candidate to Harvard. Regardless of all the arguments about diversity and openness, all of which get belied by Yale’s policies towards the American military, Yale obviously chose Hashemi as a tweak at the Bush administration. They thought that Hashemi’s presence would embarrass the White House and give Yale some sort of moral authority.

Instead, they have demonstrated themselves to be hypocrites, and still do with this decision.

A letter to the editor at the Lansing STate Journal:

Islam or death

I read Le Roy Barnett’s letter (“Muslims, speak up,” June 26) about Muslims’ opinion on Abdul Rahman’s conversion to Christianity.

Islam is not only a religion, it is a complete way of life. Islam guides Muslims from birth to grave. The Quran and prophet Muhammad’s words and practical application of Quran in life cannot be changed.

Islam is a guide for humanity, for all times, until the day of judgment. It is forbidden in Islam to convert to any other religion. The penalty is death. There is no disagreement about it.

Islam is being embraced by people of other faiths all the time. They should know they can embrace Islam, but cannot get out. This rule is not made by Muslims; it is the supreme law of God.

Please do not ask us Muslims to pick some rules and disregard other rules. Muslims are supposed to embrace Islam in its totality.

Nazra Quraishi
East Lansing

Hat Tip: LGF

Most disturbing about all this, however, is the initial observation made by the WSJ’s editorial writers:  “A single liberal retirement from the Court would thus put Hamdan‘s reasoning in jeopardy.”

How can this be?  How can it be that we’ve reached the point where highly-charged SCOTUS decisions often break along partisan / ideological lines?  (And before you go noting Kennedy’s break, note, too, that Kennedy defected on Kelo, as well, expanding “public good” to mean “whatever a local municipality can justify by arguing that it will bring in more revenue”.  And to be fair, I think Scalia guilty of the same flawed “reasoning” in Raich).

The answer to why this is now so, I think—how “reasoning” become so completely relativistic—is that we no longer have a unified strategy for how to interpret, with the idea of a Living Constitution often acting as a judicial shortcut for failed legislative initiatives, which has the practical effect of codifying a strained (and logically problematic) idea of interpretation and how it is made to work, allowing its proponents to move back and forth between readings that cite legislative intent and readings that deny the importance of that intent in new and different “contexts.”

Be sure to read the whole thing

Hoping We Fail: Who loses and who wins in the high-stakes poker in Iraq?

This was a piece Victor Hanson wrote in 2003. It was recently re-presenced on his web site with this preface:

The recent hysteria and rush to judgement over alleged Marine crimes at Haditha, and the downplaying of the significance of the capture of al Zarqawi suggest that many, here and abroad, simply wanted the United States to lose in Iraq, for a variety of political reasons. Almost three years ago, VDH outlined the motives of these parties and suggested it was unwise to bet against the Americans in Iraq, especially since democracy would eventually emerge and ties between al Qaeda and Saddam’s police state would probably come to light. [em. mine]

And of course, those ties are now coming to greater light through the slow, painful, understaffed and underemphasized process of translating Iraqi documents into English.

However Stephen F. Hayes has been on the case for a few years. This post is not the oldest, nor the most recent, but it had the highest google ranking for the terms I searched.

Anywho…

Hoping We Fail is an excellent roundup of all the usual suspects and some of their underlying pathologies that lead them to root for failure–or perceive it as primary where there is more evidence for success on the balance.

It begins thusly:

It is not hard to determine who wishes the United States to succeed in rebuilding Iraq along lines that will promote consensual government, personal freedom, and economic vitality: hardly anyone. At least, few other than the Iraqi and American people.

A long-ish piece by Victor Davis Hanson that covers many elements of this war we are engaged in. As always with VDH, it is well constructed, complex,  multi-faceted, and worth reading.

I give you this excerpt not as a good representation of the peice as a whole, but becasue this is one aspect that is particulaly poignent for me right now.  All the more reason to go read the whole thing.

Finally, we are witnessing a larger existential war, in which Iraq is the central, but not the only, theater. Put simply: will the spreading affluence and liberality of Westernization undermine the 8th-century mentality of the Islamists more quickly than their terrorists, armed with Western weapons, prey on the ennui of a postmodern Europe and America — with our large gullible populations that either don’t believe we are in a real war, or think that we should not be?

Americans know exactly the creed of the Islamists and what they have in store for us nonbelievers. Yet if we are not infidels, can we at least be fideles? That is, can we any longer articulate what we believe in, and whether it is worth defending?

The problem is not that the majority of Americans have voiced doubts about the future of Iraq — arguments over self-interest and values happen in every long war when the battlefield does not daily bring back good news.

Instead, the worry is that too many have misdirected their anger at the very culture that produced and nourished them. [...]

Emphasis mine.

A rational editorial from the pages of a Canadian Newspaper:

Thu, June 29, 2006

EDITORIAL: It’s time to stand with Israel

The Toronto conference of the United Church yesterday joined the Ontario division of the Canadian Union of Public Employees in calling for economic sanctions against Israel and a boycott of the Jewish state to protest its policies in the Palestinian territories.

Basically, both are calling on Canadians to choose sides in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Fair enough. We choose Israel, which cannot be expected to negotiate with a Palestinian government led by Hamas, a terrorist group whose founding charter calls not only for the destruction of Israel, but for the annihilation of the Jewish people.

Further, we urge Prime Minister Stephen Harper to continue Canada’s sensible policy of refusing to recognize Hamas and denying it foreign aid until it unequivocally recognizes Israel’s right to exist and renounces terrorism.

Like Harper, we support the creation of an independent Palestinian state living in peace beside a secure Israel.

But that has never been Hamas’ goal. [...]

Read it all.  What’s next? Pigs fly and France goes hawkish on the WOT?

Hat tips: LGF & Meryl Yourish