The Daily Background

By Arlen Parsa
Washington has been buzzing with activity from the second half of the week, as the blogs and the papers are reporting. More so than usual. Perhaps it’s a desire to get issues out of the way before congressional holiday breaks (which incidentally are 2 weeks longer than usual this year).

Read on for the top story this week- and specifically what the reactions of the Press, the President and the Pundits were to it…

Amidst the attempt to wrap things up, several issues appeared predominant.

But the big stunner on Friday was of course the accusation that the President had personally authorized unconstitutional spying on American citizens- without warrants from judges. Although it was at first merely an unconfirmed, though meticulously sourced accusation made by that bastion of reporting accountability the New York Times, it has since been officially acknowledged. By the President himself, no less.

Interestingly, it’s been reported that the White House at first was unsure about how to respond to this report, after apparently being caught off guard upon the actual publication of the article- which they privately asked NYT not to go to press with (”The White House asked The New York Times not to publish this article, [maybe you can guess the reason] arguing that it could jeopardize continuing investigations and alert would-be terrorists that they might be under scrutiny”). Maybe they thought it would work- after all, NYT editors held off controversial stories for the sake of the White House before. Anyways, it seemed for about 24 hours as though the WH would go plame-case on it and refuse to confirm or deny it, claiming to comment either way would be a threat to (you guessed it) national security. Looks like they’ve ever either changed their mind, or decided that they’re endangering national security now.

After the NYT story came out, and the newswires started writing up rush articles, allowing hundreds of other newspapers around the globe to pick up the story, (which they promptly did), it looked like there was no denying it. Instead of taking it like any modestly responsible administration might do, when caught in an obvious attempt to effectively flush the Bill of Rights (which explicitly prohibits monitoring of individuals without prior court judicial pending the presentation of evidence that the subject of the monitoring was involved in some crime) down the figurative toilet, it looks as though the Bush Administration has decided to make the best of it- now saying that they’re actually proud of what they’ve done.

This of course, as any reasonable analyst would have predicted, backfired tremendously. Instead of running headlines like “Bush Defends America By Spying on Americans,” (no link because headline is fictional) the papers were running articles with headlines like “Bush admits ordering surveillance within US,” and “Spying Scandal Draws Heat”.

Heck, one (albeit British) paper even had the nerve to run this photograph next to their story.

Repub talking points on this one have been a bit slow to emerge, perhaps explained by the fact that the story emerged on a Friday and Saturday closing in on the holiday er, Christmas season.

Our intrepid interns have traversed the internet in hopes of finding– aw hell. Who am I kidding, I write this blog myself. Maybe someday I’ll be able to use the oh-so-cleverly-alliterated phrase “intrepid interns,” but not yet. In any case, I wasn’t able to find much in the way of Republican reaction to this, but what I did find was pretty weak in passing (for instance Drudge briefly sporting a headline with something about (unnamed) Congressional leaders approving of the NSA’s unconstitutional techniques- Druge is now waving the headline “Bush: Eavesdropping Helps Save Lives”).

Sheepish Update: Whoops. Looks like I may need those interns after all. Just as I was preparing to send this article to press, I realized that I had missed a few tasty bits of righty rhetoric. If you believe the righties, NYT is- in fact- an organization working hard to “gleefully sabotage the Administration’s efforts to combat terrorism in an effort to discredit Bush himself for political reasons“- amazing. I never would have known without my friends over at good ol DKos wannabe blog “RedState,” thanks guys. I never knew that reporting flagrant ongoing violations of the Bill of Rights was in fact gleefully helping terrorists.

My other friends, over at the perhaps confusingly named, but all the same hotspot of reporting integrity, The Power Line Blog Thing informs us that in fact the glorious President “Slammed” critics by calling them “irresponsible.” I’m not sure what this has to do with the the President OK’ing violations of the Bill of Rights, or exactly where their definition of “Slamming” ends and “weak rhetoric” begins- but PowerLine seems to think it’s important enough to print on their front page.

Thank God I didn’t miss that.

Filed under: NSA Wiretaps, Z-TDB Blog, Uncategorized