If Accountability Is The Standard

The Dean rides to the rescue of that poor Mr. Cheney in the most predictable way possible. He's been at this forever. I'm surprised he wasn't a John Edwards fan, since he clearly believes in Two Americas, one for the Village and one for everyone else. In 1974, Broderella wrote enthusiastically about the prospect of Nixon beating the impeachment rap and Republicans surging in the midterms. While he lies about that in today's piece, he does admit that he supported Nixon's pardon. He's been covering for Republicans for so long he must feel like an umbrella.

But there's something very interesting, if unintentionally so, in what he says today:

Looming beyond the publicized cases of these relatively low-level operatives is the fundamental accountability question: What about those who approved of their actions? If accountability is the standard, then it should apply to the policymakers and not just to the underlings. Ultimately, do we want to see Cheney, who backed these actions and still does, standing in the dock?

"If accountability is the standard." Nice.

Broder, of course, takes the wrong lesson from this, arguing that the country couldn't take such an assault on cherished criminals like Dick Cheney, and as long as everybody promises to never, ever do it again, we need to bind up our wounds and move forward. But he's giving voice to what many of us have been saying - that low-level interrogators are not ultimately responsible for an illegal policy, and that criminal culpability demands a response from the justice system. That Attorney General Holder has indemnified anyone who got a legal scribbling authorizing torture, in effect privileging the legal memos as legal regardless of what they say, is completely outrageous. Accountability should indeed apply to the policymakers. Hey, Dean Broder, don't bogart our argument!

That isn't just wrong, it's outrageous. It ratifies the most toxic aspect of the whole legal war on terror: that anything becomes permissible if it's served up with a side of memo. Paper your misconduct with footnotes and justifications—even after the fact—and you can do as you please. Prosecution of those who strayed beyond the new rules, without considering the culpability of those who strayed in creating the new rules, would mean that in America, a law degree amounts to a defense. Rep Jerry Nadler, D-N.Y., put it this way earlier this month when he warned that it makes no sense to prosecute the guy who used 8 ounces of water to water-board but not the lawyer who said it was OK to water-board someone with 3 ounces of water. We must either look into both sides of the post-9/11 legal breakdown or neither. The alternative is the same kind of scapegoating that occurred after Abu Ghraib [...]

The American legal system isn't just about crime and punishment. It's a set of guideposts to direct us in the future and to send a message about our values to the rest of the world. This proposed Holder-Durham regime of semi-accountability—we're sorry for that whole torture thing but not sorry enough to investigate seriously how it happened in the first place—serves the dangerous dual purpose of allowing us to reinstate the Bush-era torture rationales, should they be necessary again in the future, and advising our allies and enemies that under desperate circumstances, they can plausibly do the same. Opting to be only halfway responsible means that torture is, going forward, only halfway reprehensible. Ta-Nehisi Coates says, "I really have no doubt that we could—indeed would—start torturing again, in the event of another terrorist attack." If we don't dismantle the foundations of the torture regime, he'll be right.

It's a pretty good rule of thumb that, if Alberto Gonzales supports your torture investigation, it's not a very good torture investigation.

This would be the reason that the prescription should not be just to "fix" everything and move forward, without providing accountability - full accountability - for those who thought they could get a permission slip to violate federal and international law and get useful idiots like David Broder to hold them harmless. The very real threat to the country lies in the breakdown of the rule of law, not the restoration of it. And it might make the authorizers and the CIA sad and gloomy, and lower their morale, but that's precisely the point. In general people ought to be deterred from breaking the law; that's what makes them think twice about doing it. If investigating and prosecuting torture has a chilling effect, that's probably because it's supposed to. Kind of the basis of the entire criminal justice system, but if you want to dismantle that for everybody, at least shoplifters and petty thieves would be on a level playing field with those who murdered prisoners in custody.

At least Broder isn't quite the monster of his "liberal" colleague Richard Cohen, who follows up his "only a fool, or a Frenchman" classic with a robust defense of torture, including a note of how Judith Miller's imprisonment was "a wee bit of torture" and closing with the image of the smoldering World Trade Center. Pitted against that shamefulness, Dean Broder's practically a civil liberties absolutist.

...my 1,000-odd words, Tom Tomorrow's six panels. He wins.

The Barbecue Revolutions

It's taken them far too long, but this election has seen the punditocracy slowly move away from their favorite politician as they see the bankruptcy at work in his campaign style. The unending stream of lies and absurd justifications which are lies themselves (Palin didn't veto federal earmarks because no governor can do that) have taken their toll on McCain's special relationship with the media. I would expect the Minneapolis Star-Tribune to hit McCain in an editorial, arguing (correctly) that his attempts to rev up the culture war seem hollow in the face of the financial meltdown.

In democracies, all political factions run against an elite. Since the New Deal, Democrats have cast themselves against the financial and business elite. Since the 1960s, Republicans have thrashed the cultural and intellectual elite.

Over the weekend, the moneyed class became much more vulnerable. The foolishness of our financial geniuses now threatens to bring economic sorrow to Main Street. Franklin Roosevelt's 1936 attack on "the privileged princes of these new economic dynasties" never sounded so up-to-date.

Americans don't mind wealthy and even rapacious capitalists as long as they deliver the goods to everyone else. But when the big boys drag everyone else down, Americans rise up in righteous anger. The New Deal political alignment endured for decades because the financial elites were so profoundly discredited by the Great Depression. The New Deal coalition dissolved only when prosperity began to seem durable and only after the GOP discovered the joys of baiting Hollywood, the media and the academy.

And I expect to see well-informed editorials from experts contrasting issues, like Barack Obama and John McCain's health care plans.

Sen. Obama's proposal will modernize our current system of employer- and government-provided health care, keeping what works well, and making the investments now that will lead to a more efficient medical system [...]

Given the current inefficiencies in our system, the impact of the Obama plan will be profound. Besides the $2,500 savings in medical costs for the typical family, according to our research annual business-sector costs will fall by about $140 billion. Our figures suggest that decreasing employer costs by this amount will result in the expansion of employer-provided health insurance to 10 million previously uninsured people.

In contrast, Sen. McCain, who constantly repeats his no-new-taxes promise on the campaign trail, proposes a big tax hike as the solution to our health-care crisis. His plan would raise taxes on workers who receive health benefits, with the idea of encouraging their employers to drop coverage. A study conducted by University of Michigan economist Tom Buchmueller and colleagues published in the journal Health Affairs suggests that the McCain tax hike will lead employers to drop coverage for over 20 million Americans.

(like I've said, this is the big under-the-radar issue in this election.)

But I did not expect this from Richard Cohen, who rhetorically lashes himself with a cat o' nine-tails.

McCain has turned ugly. His dishonesty would be unacceptable in any politician, but McCain has always set his own bar higher than most. He has contempt for most of his colleagues for that very reason: They lie. He tells the truth. He internalizes the code of the McCains -- his grandfather, his father: both admirals of the shining sea. He serves his country differently, that's all -- but just as honorably. No more, though.

I am one of the journalists accused over the years of being in the tank for McCain. Guilty. Those doing the accusing usually attributed my feelings to McCain being accessible. This is the journalist-as-puppy school of thought: Give us a treat, and we will leap into a politician's lap.

Not so. What impressed me most about McCain was the effect he had on his audiences, particularly young people. When he talked about service to a cause greater than oneself, he struck a chord. He expressed his message in words, but he packaged it in the McCain story -- that man, beaten to a pulp, who chose honor over freedom. This had nothing to do with access. It had to do with integrity.

McCain has soiled all that. His opportunistic and irresponsible choice of Sarah Palin as his political heir -- the person in whose hands he would leave the country -- is a form of personal treason, a betrayal of all he once stood for. Palin, no matter what her other attributes, is shockingly unprepared to become president. McCain knows that. He means to win, which is all right; he means to win at all costs, which is not.

And Cohen is just an example of a series of columnists who have seen their fantasy world McCain float into the ether. It was never real, but they made themselves believe it. Now the ugliness of Republican electoral politics is on full display, the very tactics that McCain was supposedly against, and the pundits can't believe it. It does not compute. And slowly and gradually they're coming around to a reckoning with themselves.

So is John McCain's own cousin:

Jump ahead to the campaign Sen. McCain is currently running. Clearly, a lot can change in eight years. Our nation has gone from a time of unparalleled prosperity and peace to one marked by debt in the trillions of dollars, record foreclosures, and a global reputation for warmongering and neo-imperialism.

So, where is the straight-talking, commonsense John McCain of 2000? I'm afraid he is long gone, replaced by a desperate version of himself who seems to contradict nearly everything he once stood for.

What becomes apparent in his ideological about-face is just how out of touch McCain really is with America's working families.

There is a quiet revolution going on in the pundit class. I don't think they have much powers of persuasion anymore, but it's striking considering that this was McCain's base.

I Am A Very Famous Journalist

I think Richard Cohen is actually some character being played by Andy Kaufmann:

But Milbank’s not the only Post staffer who’s been dropped from the left’s Christmas card list.

“I used to get a lot more on the right,” said columnist Richard Cohen, who broke with liberals when he supported the Iraq war. More recently, the left has picked apart columns that are perceived as being favorable to John McCain.

“If you’re a little bit critical of Barack Obama, you get really a pie of vilification right in the face,” Cohen said, adding that his liberal critics “were born too late, because they would have been great communists.”

Cohen, the guy who said "only a fool, or a Frechman" would dispute Colin Powell's presentation on Iraq WMD at the UN, lost his credibility years ago. But Fred Hiatt forgot to tell him, so he continues along as if he's just the smartest man in America. He doesn't recognize that a whole lot of liberal bloggers freely criticize Obama, too. What we have little patience for is rampant, relentless stupidity. Which is what defines Cohen.

Cohen was obviously born too late and in the wrong country, because with his silencing of all dissent and belief in his own superiority, he would have made a great African dictator.

Wanker emeritus.

Richard Cohen: Loser

Lest you think that the media is just reporting on the "racial identity" issue instead of actively goosing it, read Richard Cohen's horrible column today, which insinuates that Barack Obama is somehow Louis Farrakhan's best friend and they have tea parties together, or something. Nowadays, according to the press, now only surrogates' statements come from the mouth of the candidate, but the writings of the magazine of the candidate's ministry. Now, Obama denied the insinuation in the column, but what was notable is that Cohen tried to play it both ways, clearly stating that he didn't believe Obama shared the beliefs of his minister, but throwing the smear out there anyway just in case.

This is really something. Cohen says that Obama is voting "present" on the question of whether he agrees with Wright's assessment of Farrakhan -- thus insinuating, without quite saying, that Obama has not taken a position on this.

But earlier in the very same column, Cohen actually quotes a top Obama adviser, David Axelrod, explicitly saying that Obama disagrees with Wright about Farrakhan. Presumably you are meant to forget this fact by the time you get to the end of the column. This suggests that Cohen doesn't think very much of his readers, wouldn't you say?

Maybe Cohen thinks that Axelrod's description of Obama's views doesn't count. Maybe what Cohen means is that until Obama climbs to the roof of the Apollo Theater and denounces Farrakhan with a bullhorn, he's voting "present" and refusing to share his real opinions of him. Whatever. If so, did Cohen even try to interview Obama for this column, so that he could, you know, ask Obama what he thinks? There's no indication that he did. I emailed Cohen to ask him whether he did this. We'll see if he answers.

Cohen says: "I don't for a moment think that Obama shares Wright's views on Farrakhan." Okay, so what's the problem, then? Why did Cohen write the column at all?

This is often an element of the way the media treats race. Unless black people fully repudiate the most extreme and militant views, even if they have little or no relationship to those views, then they are practically equivalent. Richard Cohen has no idea what Barack Obama believes about Louis Farrakhan. But he has no problem associating the two. This is despicable.