The White House hype machine gets a boost


There is a definition of insanity that posits that said condition consists of doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. A subspecies of the condition must be falling for the same dodge over and over again. We can laugh at Charlie Brown trying forever to kick Lucy's football, but what about the press constantly falling for a similar dodge at the hands of Republican manipulators? It's not quite so funny because there are real world implications.

The latest example, as reported at TPM Muckraker, is this AP article in which we learn that "Several members of a government board appointed to guard privacy and civil liberties during the war on terror say they're impressed with the protections built into the Bush administration's electronic eavesdropping program."

This would be good news except TPM explains that this board was designed to be a Bush enabler, not the independent watchdog that the 9/11 Commission envisioned when it was first suggested:

The panel in question, the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, is a largely toothless effort. It has no real powers of investigation, such as subpoena power; its members are appointed by the President; and it's not clear Congress has any control over what the group does or to whom they deliver their findings.

This is how the White House-selected panel executes oversight: They sit in a room. An expert (also chosen by the administration) gives a presentation on a given program's constitutional protections. I would hope he entertains a few questions. Then he leaves.

The board can't demand documents; it can't force bureaucrats who actually implement the program -- and who might be aware of malfeasance -- to speak with them under oath. Instead, its sole and complete authority is to take the administration at its word.

You can actually glean some of these facts from the AP article, if you read far enough and employ a sufficient measure of cynicism. The question is not so much why this article is not more clear in describing this "board", but why the views of some of its members are worthy of coverage. It is nothing more than a White House PR tool, and should just be ignored.

Among other things, Bush alone gets to appoint all the members. Apparently some Democratic members were required, because Lieberfriend Lanny Davis is a member. He's the self described "civil libertarian" who wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal attacking "hate and vitriol of bloggers on the liberal side of the aisle" by adopting the usual right wing tactic of using comments as examples of "hate and vitriol", rather than the writing of any actual blogger (A commenter is not a blogger, a blogger is a blogger). It's a bit like attributing the views of letter writers to the newspapers in which they're printed. Most civil libertarians, who actually believe in liberties like free speech, can make this less than nuanced distinction. His readiness to attack his political opponents as haters hardly inspires confidence that Davis is terribly interested in protecting anyone's civil liberties but his own. (His examples of hate speech are in the main rather pathetic examples, but that's another story.)

This manipulation of the press will continue so long as the press lets it happen. This is a rather harmless example, but more than likely we are seeing it in a far more deadly guise in the form of the Iraq Study Group, which will confer a sheen of respectability on Bush's misguided Iraq policy, most likely buying another six to twelve months of respectability for "stay the course" within the elites if not in the rest of the country.
Posted: Tuesday - November 28, 2006 at 09:09 PM          

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