Bush, GOP Escalate Their Attack
On Remaining Independent Press

By William Finucane

George W. Bush’s White House has more than the terrorists to battle; now he has the liberal media challenging him, if feebly. Oh there has always been a scuffle between them. A liberal press is invariably opposed to a conservative president. This is one of the checks and balances built into the system.

Now, however, the conservatives in Congress want more than the official slap on the wrist – which the House of Representatives administered June 29, 2006. The public chastisement was given to the New York Times for revealing details of a money-moving scheme involving international terrorists. Never mind that Bush and other administration individuals openly talked about it themselves; never mind there might be legal questions. None of that mattered. What mattered was that the NYT actually played its role as a member of the Fourth Estate.

That scenario, to the reactionary mindset, is dangerous.

Bush essentially has control of the executive, legislative and the judicial branches now – perhaps loosely as yet in the judiciary, but closer than ever – and now faces the only power he cannot readily command, at least yet: a liberal press.

Bush had lots of conservative press on his side. In fact, despite conservative claims to the contrary, the America press is overwhelmingly owned and controlled by Republicans, and in recent years a large segment is owned and operated by dedicated conservatives.

Yet the remaining stalwarts of the liberal press can still criticize him.

And of course that bothers him – deeply. Mr. Bush apparently believes he is always right and anyone opposing him must, ipso facto, be wrong. What else, of course, can be expected from a president who claims to have been informed and touched by God.

But seeing this opportunity to slap back at a liberal press, conservatives sprang forward. Some members of Congress actually wanted to prosecute the NY Times for telling the people about the government’s secret plan to track terrorist money in foreign lands.

Of course this is exactly what the Times is supposed to do. That is its reason for being.

Still, Rep. Peter King, chairman of the House of Representatives Homeland Security Committee, wanted the government to sue the New York Times for treason. When one is trying to determine whether there is a war going on between a presidential-congressional cabal on the one side and a newspaper on the other, a call for a treason charge is one of the less subtle hints that something quite serious is occurring.

It is wonderful to see those in power react because it proves that a liberal press does, after all, still exist in America. It is not vigorous and is not widespread, but it doing what a press is supposed to do: question everything.

Other papers like the Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times and Boston Globe published the same story, but it was a day late. The NY Times, in fact, had been holding the story for months, considering whether to not to publish it, which of course is not to the credit of the paper. Yet in the end, the Times published.

Delay, thoughtful or not, was what the NYT did with its earlier story about Bush tapping domestic phone calls without getting warrants, as the law prescribes. NYT executives waited a year before publishing that story, which is a clear indication of how feeble even the best of the American press has become.

So, with a few months or even a whole year’s wait between getting a story and publishing it, the NYT is not exactly a blabbermouth journal spewing half-truths. It gave Bush lots of time to question or revise his administration’s policies. He did not. Fair enough, the stories got published.

In both stories there is uncertainty about the legality of the Bush approach. That is, first of all, an excellent reason to run a story – government officials involved in breaking the law. If the government can break the law, government stops representing the people and becomes a dictatorship. There is no privilege involved here, either for the chief executive and his office, or for any so-called national security concerns; such illegal actions must be brought to the attention of the public if democracy is to survive.

When television, radio, newspapers and magazines all line up to chant the same mantra, praising Bush, this indicates that some if not all of the people sitting in publisher’s boardroom and offices are no longer news publishers or news executives.

Such publisher’s and top news executives have become co-conspirators.

Elsewhere, the High Court did shoot down Bush’s plan to invent a new way to prosecute prisoners who are somehow not really prisoners at Cuba’s American prison in Guantanamo.

Whether that will show the High Court actually has a backbone or not is much too early to tell. But the Congress is busily redrafting new law to cover this problem, and the Congress belongs to the Republicans.

At the same time, the nation has Karl Rove, fresh from the grand jury that found nothing on which to indict him. Vice President Dick Cheney's chief aide, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, was indicted as a result of the investigation into the leak of CIA operative Valerie Plame's identity to reporters two years ago. That was just eight days after Plame's husband, former ambassador Joseph Wilson, published an opinion article in the Times accusing the Bush administration of twisting intelligence to exaggerate the threat posed by Iraq.

Ah, there’s that NYT getting involved again. Flash-forward, and the immediate result is that Rove is back at Bush’s side. Never, ever underestimate the power Rove wields. He is Bush’s backbone.

In a way, whether it was meant to do so or not, the condemnation of the NYT was the administration’s slap in the face for a March 2006 incident. Bush’s once secret surveillance of private citizens’ phone conversations without warrants was being discussed in the Senate Judiciary Committee. Sen. Russell D. Feingold, D-Wisconsin, proposed to censure the president for the activity. The proposal was not going to succeed, of course, but it did put a splotch on Bush’s name.

Under Bush's theory of government, Feingold said, the nation no longer has a constitutional system consisting of three co-equal branches of government. "We have a monarchy," said Feingold.

"This is 'Alice in Wonderland' gone amok," said Senator Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont referring to legislation that George Bush and his administration have twisted to their own ends. "It is not what we in Congress said, and it certainly was not what we in Congress intended."

But whatever the Congress wanted, the practical application was a belching of so-called "law" from Bush and company that he intends to prosecute faithfully. That is because he believes what he says. What is more, almost always the Congress has gone along with Bush; Republicans may not believe in Bush’s view of the world as fervently as Bush does, but it believes enough to let Bush push it.

And all the unhappy Democrats seem able to do is – well – nothing.

Not since Bush took office have the Democrats done anything to thwart him. There have some half-hearted complaints about a Republican majority in the Congress and a conservative group of Supreme Court; there have been a few complaints about invading people’s privacy. But there has been no concerted attack on Bush and his anti-constitutional reign.

This is not the year for each Democrat to stake out their own unique platform and try to beat the other Democrats in a doomed preliminary election. They will get nowhere doing that. It is, in fact, a certain road to ruin for Democrats; and that will be a loss for the nation.

Democrats are fools to act this way. Think back to when the Republicans were in the minority in Congress! They never stopped screaming about this, that and the other thing involving the Democrats, and their complaints were by and large nitpicking; they were empty challenges, but they made them anyway.

Think about when William Jefferson Clinton was president, and for virtually his entire two terms the Republicans screamed about everything, and spent millions and millions of tax dollars trying to prove that somehow Pres. Clinton was evil. They persecuted the family of Vince Foster by claiming over and over, even after they were proven officially wrong, that Foster was murdered at the behest of Bill Clinton. But the truth was simple: Vince Foster broke under the relentless lies and accusations that were cast at him by the Republicans, and printed in papers like the Wall Street Journal and its infamous editorial pages. He committed suicide and Pres. Clinton lost a close friend.

But of course the GOP didn’t stop there, it spent many millions investigating the Whitewater land deal, where the Clinton’s lost money, only to find in the end that, guess what, it was a bad deal and they lost money. There was no crime of any sort; the GOP screamed and screamed, but there was no misuse of power or malfeasance. But in the end, they caught Pres. Clinton in a tawdry affair, and conveniently forgetting that other 20^th century presidents, including at least one Republican, had been caught in even more flagrant indiscretions, they leaped at the chance to discredit the president.

Now, however, the actions of this president, George Bush, offers the Democrats true substance; there is a vast array of unprecedented and often unilateral moves by this president that should and could be questioned. But the Democrats are politely silent.

Yet that is exactly how they are trying to win back the Congress and the White House.

In fact, with such policies Democrats are not much different than Republicans. If there is a gaping rift between average Americans and the political parties, the current campaign shows that that the rift involves both the Republican and the Democratic parties.

Perhaps the nation needs to find a new party – as it has done in the past – to show its true difference from the stand-pat parties pretending to represent the people; the people who are growing poorer year by year.

Maybe that will happen.

Maybe it will not.

Either way, it seems glaringly obvious that the only place the people of the United States can currently turn to keep the country adhering to its democratic ideals and its Constitutional principles is the so-called liberal press. It is imperative that the nation’s publishing houses remain free and, hopefully, aggressive and willing to report on everybody, including the president, in fact explicitly on the president and the Congress.

If the political parties, especially the GOP, can successfully condemn the liberal press, intimidate it, quiet it, then there will be nothing left with which either party’s excesses can be revealed to the public, and so democracy and adherence to the Constitution would fade into the background. Years ago, that would have been laughable. Now it is chillingly plausible.