This entry first appeared on Eric Alterman's blog, Altercation.
You know, if the Bush administration says it can pick up an American citizen off the street, hold him incommunicado, refuse him the right to a trial and refuse to explain what the nature of his crime is, I think this pretty much makes the United States Constitution inoperative. Sure, not many of us are likely to face the problems that Mr. Padilla faces, and for all I know he is a bad guy. But our Constitutional protections are supposed to apply to bad guys as much as good guys. What's more these dishonest incompetent ideological extremists are almost always hiding something significant whenever they claim to be operating in our national security interests, and you'd have to be an idiot (or a White House reporter or a Fox News anchor) even to be able to pretend to believe them this time. I'm sure when this is over we will find out they are just covering up their own incompetence and dishonesty. But the lack of outcry over this naked police state tactic is one more example of how increasingly hollow are our claims to be an example to anyone of anything, save hypocrisy. Read the sad story here.
And while we're on the topic of their contempt for the Constitution, a thousand dollars says George W. Bush pardons I. Lewis Libby before leaving office, even money. I mean this. Any takers? We can put the money in escrow and the winner promises to give $250 to UNICEF, here, for help for people with AIDS in Africa. I'll do it twice if I get two takers. (Good post on the whole array of poverty/disease in Africa issues by Sam Rosenfeld here. And thanks, on behalf of all of us, I hope, to Nick Kristof for heroic reporting like this even though we may find him unbearably annoying in other contexts.)
It was a sad day in Boston yesterday, as 34 people, minimum, here, accepted the Boston Globe's buyout offer and the quality and importance of serious journalism took a beating from which it may never recover. That is the way of world, these Times -- a second buyout of New York Times staffers is coming soon too. Newspapers must change or die, and right now, they look to be dying. I wish I had a better idea and I hope it's not too painful for those affected, and their families.
Not to be flip about so serious a topic, but I cannot help but smile when I see that the profession will at least henceforth be spared the efforts of that incompetent op-ed editor Nick King, who last year enabled the efforts of Jewish McCarthyite Globe columnist Cathy Young aimed at yours truly. Good riddance to you, Nick. Let's hope Cathy is next.
Alas, Jewish McCarthyism is going nowhere. Take a look at this "Scrapbook" item from the Weekly Standard. I don't know Nir Rosen and have not seen much of his work, but based on what the Standard has printed here, their argument seems to be: We disagree with Mr. Rosen about the war, and even more with his description about the nature of the illegal settlers on the occupied territories of the West Bank. But instead of making a case for our position we will simply assert that "No wonder Rosen has such great access to the Baathists and jihadists who make up the Iraqi insurgency. He's on their side."
One could just as easily assert that Messrs. Kristol and Barnes are "on their side," since they so slavishly supported an invasion that the CIA, among others, predicted would vastly increase the level of terrorism aimed at the U.S. and create a threat like this one where there was none before. Shame on everyone involved.
Someone keeps writing me to tell me I have to write a Nation column comparing/contrasting Bob Woodward and Sy Hersh. Maybe I will. In the meantime, I sorta did, for Salon, eight years ago, when Sy's career was at a kind of low ebb, here. The rest of the Alterman-on-Woodward oeuvre here, and I wrote a column about his much better one here. (And by the way Tapped guys, that first one is nearly two years earlier than Kuttner's to say nothing of the Salon one, which is um, seven years before Kuttner's. But Hey Mikey… )
One more thing about Woodward. The first time I ever noticed the name of the writer Charles Pierce was because of a brilliantly reported story in Esquire in which Woodward behaved (journalistically) quite badly. I asked him about it and saved the e-mail: I don't think he'd mind. Woodward had written what the great man called "one of the prime pieces of bogus journalism that promoted the 'waste, fraud, and abuse' meme that helped devastate the SSI program." Pierce told me:
He wrote about a woman in the Social Security office in Harrisburg, who was riffling through files which she told Bob were rife with cases of SSI fraud. Oddly enough, not a single example made Woodward's story. (The woman turned out to be the office loon. She left the job shortly thereafter to start a second career as an aroma-therapist in West Virginia, and, as Dave Barry says, I am not making this up.)
He got called on this twice before I got to him -- once by Jim Ledbetter in the Voice and then by the late Chris Georges in Forbes MediaCritic. Woodward's weak-ass excuse was that he didn't want to "violate the privacy" of the people in the files -- so, of course, his alternative was to let a nutball smear the whole program. (Ledbetter pointed out that he could have written about the cases blind, since he'd kept the biggest secret in journalism for 30 years.)
Anyway, so I finally get to do the story, and I phone-stalk him for a month and I call him back, and this was the first question he asked me: 'How long have you been in the business?'