Cheney's Legacy Project and the Return of the Media Cringe

The Sunday-morning yak shows on the networks have long since all adopted the late Tim Russert's habit of confronting guests with previous statements that contradict what they currently say. It's the shows' way of demonstrating their "toughness."

But what happens when a member of the Bush Administration, making another stop on the Bush Legacy Project tour, appears live on one of those programs? Judging by Sunday morning's Face the Nation, what happens is a return to the respectful or intimidated cringe that typified Washington media during the run-up to the Iraq War.

Bob Schieffer had the usual stack of papers in front of him as he questioned Vice President Cheney. But, as Cheney trotted out old and new boilerplate -- the intelligence was wrong, all our surveillance and interrogation procedures were done "by the book" -- Schieffer sat as mute as a chastised third-grader.

This is not 2003. At least two well-reviewed and meticulously sourced books--"The Dark Side" by Jane Mayer and "Angler" by Barton Gellman--could supply a week's worth of material with which to challenge and contradict Cheney's bland and ballsy assertions. The names of the intel agents in the UK, Australia and the US who publicly said before the war that the intel did not show what the administration claimed (and still claims) are, or should be, well known by now to the producers of "serious" television news broadcasts. They are, for the record, Dr. Brian Jones, Andrew Willkie, and Greg Thielmann.

Do the producers of such programs think it's presumptuous to submit high officials to the kind of grilling they brag about when Senators or other lesser beings undergo it? Or do they get their big "exclusive" part of the Legacy Tour only by agreeing to cut off what remains of their gonads?