Tilted Forum Project Discussion Community - View Single Post - The NY Times vs. The President. Who determines the People's Legitimate Right to Know?

host · 07-06-2006, 10:02 PM

On September 19, 2001, just eight days after the 9/11 attacks, the WSJ published the following on it's editorial page:

Quote:

http://www.opinionjournal.com/editor...ml?id=95001169
<img src="http://www.opinionjournal.com/images/logo.gif">
REVIEW & OUTLOOK

A New Presidency
How Bush should spend his windfall of political capital.

Wednesday, September 19, 2001 12:02 a.m. EDT

<b>So much for Florida, and Jim Jeffords's Senate betrayal too. Those teapot tempests happened in a different country a long time ago.</b> In the wake of last week's terror attacks, most Americans are putting their trust in President Bush and want him to succeed. This gives him a historic opportunity to assert his leadership, not just on security and foreign policy but across the board.

The White House temptation will be to subjugate everything else to the priority of getting bipartisan support for the war on terrorism. This is the mistake the President's father made during the Gulf War, agreeing to raise taxes in 1990 because he felt he couldn't challenge the same Democratic Congress he needed to vote for war against Saddam Hussein. His father, of course, had the disadvantage of having to build support for his war effort and only reached a 90% job approval rating after he won in the Persian Gulf.

George W. Bush now finds himself in far better political circumstances, with nearly universal public support before he undertakes any military action. The public will not soon want to hear from critics who appear to be angling for partisan gain. This means that for the next few months Mr. Bush will have enormous political capital to do whatever he says must be done to help the war effort and buttress national strength. But the lesson of history is that Presidents must spend political capital or they will lose it. And when they spend it and win, they accumulate even more capital.

Moreover, the assault on U.S. territory has altered the national dialogue in a way that makes Mr. Bush's agenda far more achievable. Domestic matters are less pressing than national defense, and cultural disputes will give way to the goal of re-energizing the national and global economies. The welfare-state issues that often benefit liberals, in short, are being replaced as priorities by the more fundamental questions of peace and prosperity.

First and foremost Mr. Bush has an opportunity to rebuild the nation's defenses. This seemed impossible only eight days ago, but now Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld is likely to get all the money he needs. Much of that will go, as it should, for urgent military tasks. But Congress is also likely to agree to a major down payment on modernizing a military still operating under Cold War modes of thought.

Throughout history the periods of greatest military innovation have been wars. Now is the time to push for money for next-generation weaponry and electronics that will keep the U.S. well ahead of not just terrorists but all adversaries. Democracies are reluctant to spend money on defense in peacetime, but in a war they will give the military whatever it needs.

Americans also know that a strong economy is essential to any war effort, and this also gives Mr. Bush a big opportunity. In particular, the phony "trust fund" constraints on fiscal policy have fallen with the Trade Center towers, opening as much as $150 billion a year in surplus for pro-growth tax cuts.

The temptation here will be to settle for a lowest common denominator stimulus, for the sake of bipartisanship. But Democrats will be wary of opposing measures that Mr. Bush insists are necessary for growth. Already Dick Gephardt, the House Democratic leader, has said he's willing to look at new tax cuts. In return for spending that Democrats surely want, Mr. Bush has a chance to insist on faster tax-rate cuts that would increase the incentive to invest not just next week but for years ahead. This will help restore business and stock-market confidence.

The transformed political landscape should also boost other Bush initiatives. Turmoil in the Mideast helps make the case for more domestic energy production, including drilling for oil in Alaska. With the world economy slumping, trade also needs a lift and so Mr. Bush's request for free-trade negotiating authority is likely to be easier.

Mr. Bush can also now demand a complete government as soon as possible, including judicial nominees. Last week the Senate whipped John Negroponte through to be U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, after months of Democratic stalling. If nothing else, Mr. Bush can insist that the Senate give his nominees quick up or down votes, so he can appoint others for the jobs. As for judges, we suspect Democrats in the Senate will hesitate to carry out borkings that clearly undercut Mr. Bush's leadership.

We aren't saying that a crisis should stop political debate, and over time it surely won't. But the bloody attacks have created a unique political moment when Americans of all stars and stripes are uniting behind their President. Voters will have less patience for Washington's partisan parlor games. Mr. Bush won't help himself if he seems to be exploiting this moment of national unity for narrow partisan goals. But that doesn't mean he shouldn't use the moment to press a broad agenda that he believes is in the national interest.

We recall visiting Mr. Bush in Austin in December 1999, when he was planning his Presidential run. One of us asked him why his father had lost his bid for re-election. The son's answer was that when his father was at 90% approval after his Gulf War victory, he didn't spend the political capital on a big agenda. We trust the current President Bush remembers that lesson.

Is the following an accurate description of what has happened in the five years since the 9/11 attacks, or in the seven months since the NY Times reported the warrantless domestic wiretaps story, or in the month since several news orgs published the foreign monetary transaction surveillance story?

Quote:

The Treason Card

By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: July 7, 2006

The nature of the right-wing attack on The New York Times, an attack not on the newspaper's judgment, but on its motives, seems to have startled many people in the news media. After an editorial in The Wall Street Journal declared that The Times has what amount to treasonous intentions, that it "has as a major goal not winning the war on terror but obstructing it", The Journal's own political editor pronounced himself "shocked," saying that "I don't know anybody on the news staff of The Wall Street Journal that believes that."

But anyone who was genuinely shocked by The Journal's willingness to play the treason card must not have been paying attention these past five years.

Over the last few months a series of revelations have confirmed what should have been obvious a long time ago: the Bush administration and the movement it leads have been engaged in an authoritarian project, an effort to remove all the checks and balances that have heretofore constrained the executive branch.

Much of this project involves the assertion of unprecedented executive authority, the right to imprison people indefinitely without charges (and torture them if the administration feels like it), the right to wiretap American citizens without court authorization, the right to declare, when signing laws passed by Congress, that the laws don't really mean what they say.

But an almost equally important aspect of the project has been the attempt to create a political environment in which nobody dares to criticize the administration or reveal inconvenient facts about its actions. And that attempt has relied, from the beginning, on ascribing treasonous motives to those who refuse to toe the line. As far back as 2002, Rush Limbaugh, in words very close to those used by The Wall Street Journal last week, accused Tom Daschle, then the Senate majority leader, of a partisan "attempt to sabotage the war on terrorism."

Those of us who tried to call attention to this authoritarian project years ago have long marveled over the reluctance of many of our colleagues to acknowledge what was going on. For example, for a long time many people in the mainstream media applied a peculiar double standard to political speech, denouncing perfectly normal if forceful political rhetoric from the left as poisonous "Bush hatred," while chuckling indulgently over venom from the right. (That Ann Coulter, she's such a kidder.)

But now the chuckling has stopped: somehow, nobody seems to find calls to send Bill Keller to the gas chamber funny. And while the White House clearly believes that attacking The Times is a winning political move, it doesn't have to turn out that way, not if enough people realize what's at stake.

For I think that most Americans still believe in the principle that the president isn't a king, that he isn't entitled to operate without checks and balances. And President Bush is especially unworthy of our trust, because on every front, from his refusal to protect chemical plants to his officials' exposure of Valerie Plame, from his toleration of war profiteering to his decision to place the C.I.A. in the hands of an incompetent crony, he has consistently played politics with national security.

And he has done so with the approval and encouragement of the same people now attacking The New York Times for its alleged lack of patriotism.

Does anyone remember the editorial that The Wall Street Journal published on Sept. 19, 2001, "So much for Florida," the editorial began, celebrating the way the terrorist attack had pushed aside concerns over the legitimacy of the Supreme Court decision that installed Mr. Bush in the White House. The Journal then warned Mr. Bush not to give in to the "temptation" to "subjugate everything else to the priority of getting bipartisan support for the war on terrorism." Instead, it urged him to use the "political capital" generated by the atrocity to push through tax cuts and right-wing judicial appointments.

Things have changed since then: Mr. Bush's ability to wrap his power grab in the flag has diminished now that most Americans no longer consider him either competent or honest. But the administration and its supporters still believe that they can win political battles by impugning the patriotism of those who won't go along.

For the sake of our country, let's hope that they're wrong.

I think that the NY Times has told us nothing that is beyond our right to know, as far as the legal and illegal monitoring by the NSA and other U.S. intelligence agencies. I am especially concerned about what I perceive as baseless attacks on leading news media orgs by politicians in Washington who seem to forget that we do have a right to know what our government is doing if it circumvents the law or invades our privacy. How can we criticize or support what we have no knowledge of? Shouldn't our sacrifice in investing what it took to enjoy the protection of the most powerful military in the history of the world, in a country that spends ten times as much on it's military, annually, as it's closest rival, entitle us to live in the freeest and most open society on the planet, with the most transparent government?

<b>If we can't manage this....a free society with a free press and an accountable government, who can? Shouldn't the most freedom of information and government transparency and the criticism that is a consequence of governing the freeest and most informed citizenry, be the right and privilege of the most insignifigant and the most powerful democratic societies,</b> the former because no rival is interested in threatening them, and the latter because no threat exists that is substantial enough, compared to their power and stature, to justify the narrowing of access to freedom to know and to freely criticize?

How does muzzling and intimidating the press, when done by an presidential administration that has erred on the side of secrecy and classification of as much information as possible, and has polled increasingly low minority support in the categories of trust and honesty, undeniably for cause; help to raise the reputation of such an administration?

I think that we are on the doorstep of a more desperate time, a time where freedom of the press and official lipservice paid to the concept of "democracy", will be suspended and replaced by more forceful and restrictive edicts of an increasingly desperate administration. They want to keep the control and lack of accountability that, after five years, they have become accustomed to. It is however, 5 years since 9/11 and the administration's performance and reputation are on display for all to see and evaluate.

I think that they are using the circumstances of declining support and increasing opposition, as an excuse to further consolidate power and control.
"in the interest of national security". Do you agree, and are you ready to let them, or will you decide to attempt to get in their way?