Tom Maguire has been taking the New York Times to task for its inability to get the story straight when it comes to the trial of Scooter Libby. From Tuesday:
Neil Lewis and Scott Shane give us a laugh with their Libby trial daydreaming:
A surprise revelation came when Mr. Pincus, who writes about national security and intelligence [for the Washington Post], disclosed that he was first told on July 12, 2003, about Ms. Wilson by Ari Fleischer, then the White House spokesman, and not Mr. Libby.
Surprise to whom? Did these two intrepid reporters really think that Walter Pincus had received a Plame leak from Libby?
And yesterday:
Neil Lewis and Scott Shane of the NY Times continue to cover the Alternate Reality version of the Libby trial.
With greatest respect for Mr. Maguire, I have to say I don’t believe it’s reasonable to expect the press to get it right at this juncture. Oh, I think they should get it right, and I'm happy to beat on them when they don't. But the press... well, they've got their story and they're sticking to it.
Let’s face it. The notion that the White House would deliberately burn a covert CIA agent for any reason whatever makes no sense, and it never did. That they would do it over a story as lame as the one Joe Wilson was peddling makes even less sense. But Tim Russert & Co. decided this was a story that would sell, so he threw his, shall I say considerable, weight behind it, and voila! Credibility! MSM heavyweights fell in line, injecting it into their "news" day in and day out as a stipulated related fact to the story du jour. Having jumped on the Joe Wilson bandwagon and given his story legs, there's no way MSM will suddenly decide they've seen the light. This story is their creature.
More importantly, they haven’t achieved the goal that precipitated the Plame game to begin with. That would be the goal of stopping the war in Iraq. Regardless of any facts that come out of the trial - how about those documents proving that Joe's trip was set in motion before Dick Cheney got around to behesting it - we can count on MSM to continue to claim the case for invasion was a lie, there never were any WMD, nor were there any connections to terrorists. They will continue to claim that the war was a mistake, that Joe Wilson was a whistle blower whose wife was a victim of a vengeful White House, that we are losing the war, and that the war can’t possibly be won. MSM are impervious to any contradictory possibilities, and up to now they just have not been getting their way.
If the Democrats were in the majority back in 2003 or if a career Republican politician was in the White House, the invasion of Iraq would have been averted by the mere suggestion from MSM that Iraq was posed no threat. But the cowboy in the White House crossed them up and went ahead anyway. The media and Democratic establishment went absolutely ripshit.
But the Democrats are in the majority now, thanks to stepped up violence in Baghdad dutifully reported by MSM as further indication that all is lost in Iraq. Now the Democrats intend to supplement the anti-war MSM campaign with a campaign of their own.
The legislative strategy will be supplemented by a multimillion-dollar TV ad campaign designed to pressure vulnerable GOP incumbents into breaking with President Bush and forcing the administration to admit that the war is politically unsustainable.
The Democrats and the press will hammer and hammer and hammer, hoping they will eventually get their way. And the beauty of it for the press - they get paid to do it. Come to think of it, the Democrats do too.
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