Complicit Enablers
Posted by Phoenix Woman on May 29, 2008
That’s Scott McClellan’s term for the US press corps that, like him, served George W. Bush and his buddies with such humiliating subservience.
Yes, he himself was indeed complicit, all right. But I will give him this: He’s openly stating, in front of tens of millions of eyeballs, what we all know is true and what the press corps is at very great pains to pretend is false, which is that the press have been complicit enablers for Bush every frickin’ step of the way.
The only way he could improve on this — well, besides having come out and said it six years earlier than he did — would be to note that:
1) the press has been increasing its complicit enabling of every Republican president since Nixon, and the GOP in general, as it gets more corporate, and:
2) this is because the corporate media barons are by and large in the tank for the GOP.
Rupert Murdoch isn’t the only, or even the first, right-wing ideologue to exercise iron control over a network. Murdoch’s news director, Roger Ailes, worked for GE/NBC’s Jack Welch well before he worked for Rupert, designing NBC’s news division to be just what the archconservative Welch wanted it to be. Even now, when much of Corporate America is seeing that the Republicans, especially the Bush/Cheney neocon bust-out variety, are actually bad for business, the corporations behind our media still give the GOP every benefit of every doubt, ignoring the boards bristling from Republican eyes while inventing bogus motes to attack in Democratic optics. (I mean, really: Freaking out over flag pins?)
Just as Scott McClellan liked the paychecks he got for spinning Bush/GOP atrocities, Tim Russert and Richard Cohen and Katie Couric and pretty much any other other prominent newsie not named “Lara Logan” or “Keith Olbermann” (or not working for what used to be Knight-Ridder before McClatchy absorbed it) is complicit because they liked and still like the even bigger paychecks than McClellan’s that they get for spinning for the GOP.
That’s why the press has largely hidden from our view such tidbits like the one McClellan discusses both in his book and on the Today show this morning: The idea that George W. Bush authorized the leaking of Valerie Plame’s identitiy, destroying both her CIA career and the Middle Eastern intelligence network she’d spent years cultivating.
To paraphrase Upton Sinclair yet again, it’s difficult for people to understand something when their salaries depend on their not understanding it.
4 Responses to “Complicit Enablers”
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Charles II said
This is what I wrote Keith Olbermann:
John Dean was right to describe Scott McClellan’s interview as a “modified limited hangout.” The story McClellan is telling was full of holes, which a more aggressive interviewer might have opened up.
The main point to focus on in judging McClellan’s sincerity is the reason he gives for working for George Bush, namely that Bush was reaching out across partisan lines. But the very first act of the Bush White House was accusing the Clinton staff of having trashed the place! That was a lie. McClellan surely knew that it was a lie and one wonders if he helped to spread it.
On the partisanship issue, he also suggested that GHW Bush had been misled by his aides in the smearing of Michael Dukakis. This was the same GHW Bush who called Bill Clinton “Bozo,” and Al Gore “Ozone Man,” had Clinton’s passport file searched, and behind the scenes provided encouragement to the endless scandal mongering against Clinton. Again, McClellan was demonstrably misrepresenting GHW Bush’s partisanship.
McClellan is attempting to re-write history to cast George W. Bush as someone who was misled– not a bad guy, just not quite up to the job. This is the same excuse that Bush has been using his entire life. One wonders whether he didn’t ask McClellan to write the book in just this way. It’s not like McClellan is telling us much that we don’t already know.
Charles II said
Oh, yes… Scott McClellan was also the guy who called on Jeff Gannon.
Have any of his interviewers asked what he knew about Gannon’s after hours visits to the White House?
MEC said
“the reason he gives for working for George Bush, namely that Bush was reaching out across partisan lines. But the very first act of the Bush White House was accusing the Clinton staff of having trashed the place! That was a lie.”
Even before Bush was in the White House — indeed, as soon as the Supreme Court declared him the next President — Bush was showing how bipartisan he wasn’t. As reported in Salon (and only in Salon), when Bush gave his victory speech in the Texas legislative chambers, the Democratic legislators were not only disinvited from the speech, but barred from entering their own chamber.
Phoenix Woman said
Oh, yes… Scott McClellan was also the guy who called on Jeff Gannon.
Have any of his interviewers asked what he knew about Gannon’s after hours visits to the White House?
FOX and BushCo and Gannon/Guckert are going one better than that, Charles: They’re kinda-sorta hinting that a) McClellan has something to hide in his personal life that’s about to be revealed, and b) it just might have something to do with Jim “Jeff Gannon” Guckert.