I read this article by uber Beltway insider Peter Baker in the Washington Post yesterday and I was astonished and angry at its effrontery. The enablers of George Bush and Dick Cheney’s homicidal madness want us to feel sorry for them because they feel a bit bad about what they did? And Baker thinks this is reasonable?
I don’t think so.
It had been four days since Meghan O’Sullivan left her job at the White House. Just four days since she gave up her Secret Service pass, her classified hard drive and her entree to the president. Four days since she gave up any day-to-day responsibility for Iraq.
Too soon, evidently, for the dreams to end. “In fact, I was dreaming about Iraq last night,” she said. “And I woke up and thought, ‘When do you think this will stop?’ ”
Well for some, it never will – and I hope it never stop for you either, Meghan.. I hope you never have a quiet night’s sleep ever again.
Personally I’d like to see every member of the White House staff appointed by this administration strapped to spiked chairs 24/7, with their eyelids propped open, made to watch the Abu Ghraib tapes and listen to the screams of tortured children, the children whose shrieks of agony they are responsible for – but I think there’re too many of them that would enjoy it.
Karl Rove feels guilty for leaving in a time of war, yet he wants to reinvent himself as more than simply “the Bush guy.” Peter H. Wehner rues lost friendships with those estranged by the war. Dan Bartlett is relieved to shed the burden of worrying that any day could bring another terrorist attack.
They left for different reasons — new professional opportunities, a gentle or not-so-gentle nudge, young kids, the hope of having young kids — but the cumulative exodus of so many key people at once has transformed the White House as it heads into the dwindling months of the Bush presidency. Rove and Bartlett are gone, and so are their fellow Texans, Harriet E. Miers and Alberto R. Gonzales. Tony Snow, Sara M. Taylor, Rob Portman, J.D. Crouch, Peter D. Feaver, J. Scott Jennings and a host of others have left.
There is so much turnover that on one recent Friday there were four farewell parties or last-day exits. Bush poses for so many Oval Office photos with departing aides it feels like an assembly line. Officials said the transition is a function of so many aides having stayed longer than in past White Houses. “When you look at the people who are leaving, these are people who have been here since the beginning,” said Liza Wright, who herself left last month as White House personnel director. “And it’s a killer of a job.”
I think the author may have got those words garbled. Not “it’s a killer of a job” – more like ‘the killers are on the job”.
What the hell is this article? Is it not the job of the fourth estate, the other check and balance, to hold government to account? Since when has it been the job of the Washington Post to curry sympathy for war criminals?
One former senior official said nearly everyone who has left the administration is angry in some way or another — at the president for making bad decisions, at his staff for misguiding him, at events that have spiraled out of control
They’re angry? Sheesh.
But then what can you expect from one half of yet another Washington Village insider power couple, but an apologia for this gang of murdering redneck yahoos in suits? As the first to break the story Baker certainly advanced their cause during the Clinton/Leinsky affair: why should now be any different? As we all know, a blowjob is worse, much worse, than a million dead – a million dead’s a mere bagatelle that you can just feel a little bitter about – compared tio actual White House fornication, it’s nothing.
Baker served as the Post’s White House correspondent covering the Clinton Administration. During this time he co-wrote the original story on the Lewinski investigation and went on to become the Post’s lead writer on the scandal and impeachment battle. Baker went on to author the New York Times bestseller, “The Breach: Inside the Impeachment and Trial of William Jefferson Clinton.” Baker started with the Washington Post in 1988 as part of its Virginia staff. Prior to the Post, he worked at the Washington Times.
[My emphasis.]
Well, there you go: yet another beltway insider making his own reality. There have been questions asked about not just the tone but the substance of Baker’s reporting, not only on Clinton/Lewinsky but on the current administration and its lies. The man just sucks up Bushco spin like it was mother’s milk.
But as always, the DC Village looks after its own, even it means denying reality.
To have to publicly admit that what Bushco has done and what Baker’s condoned with his reporting, well, the cognitive dissonance alone could make Baker’s head explode. Therefore he appears to feel compelled to sanitise the record with an appeal to sympathy, a human interest story – in asking for undersanding for the war criminals, he’s asking for understanding and sympathy for himself, their enabler.
Matt Yglesias, though I’m not generally a fan of his, does have an apt phrase for this kind of revisionism on the fly: he calls it legacywashing.
But there’ll be no legacywashing at the Hague, not if we the electorate have anything to say about it, which remains to be seen – but if we have our way, useful idiots and propagandists like Baker and his ilk will be right up there on the stand with the criminal Meghan O’Sullivans and David Addingtons, as co-accused.
