Richard Cohen, in today's WaPo, reminds the wingnuts currently dancing around the Schädenfreude Maypole about the fall of the Mighty Columbia Broadcasting System that their own Fearless Leader and Deity could learn something from CBS about accountability:
It took no less a sage than President Bush to put the firing of four high-level CBS News employees in perspective: "CBS said they would act. They did. And I hope their actions are such that this doesn't happen again." This from the man who fired not a single person in his entire administration for getting nearly everything wrong about Iraq and taking the nation to war for reasons that did not exist or were downright specious. Lucky for Bush he's only the president of the United States and not the head of CBS.
Let us call the roll: George Tenet, who assured the president that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction? A graceful retirement and the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Don Rumsfeld, who approved a battle plan of such brilliance that a 30-day war against a weak Third World country is still going on and shows no sign of ending? He stays in the Cabinet.
Condi Rice, the national security adviser who allowed the president to tell the world of Iraq's nuclear weapons program when it had none whatsoever? She is nominated to become secretary of state.
Vice President Cheney, who insisted against all evidence and with no evidence that Iraq was fast becoming a nuclear power, and who maintained that there was a link between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden? He stays on the ticket and remains a heartbeat away from the presidency.
But here's the real point: the fact that for Bush's entire life, other people have taken the fall for him. Other people have absorbed his losses. The man has never once had to take responsibility for his actions, and the only generosity of spirit he's demonstrated is to bestow this kind of charmed lack of any need to take responsibility for his actions on his cronies and closest associates.
Whether the documents used in the infamous 60 Minutes story were "forged" (i.e. completely false), or simply transcriptions of actual documents, the fact is that CBS News was extraordinarily sloppy in not anticipating the reaction to a story like this in which all the i's were not dotted and the t's not crossed, particularly in the current media environment in which all of the broadcast media have their noses planted firmly about 10 feet up Bush's rectum. From where I'm standing, CBS' crime is in not doing the kind of homework that would reveal, without any doubt, that the man who has sent 1353 American soldiers to their deaths, sentenced over 10,000 more to a life of disability and post-traumatic stress disorder, and dispatched over 100,000 Iraqi civilians to their eternal rest, couldn't even show up for his cushy National Guard gig. This is what investigative journalism is supposed to be about. However, in an age when news is entertainment, that's no longer the case.
The irony is that everyone seems to have forgotten that for eight years, Bill Clinton was accused by all sorts of people found under various rocks by Richard Mellon Scaife and his ilk, of crimes ranging from drug dealing to rape to murder, all of which were duly presented on cable news as incontrovertible fact -- and the outrage currently emanating from the right over CBS was nowhere to be found. More recently, the Swift Boat Liars' ads were replayed over and over and over again on cable news, with commentary by the talking heads of television, with no investigation or due diligence done to ensure their factuality -- and the outrage currently emanating from the right over CBS was nowhere to be found.
Further proof that the IOKIYAK rule is now etched in stone in the Mainstream Media Code of Ethics: "It's OK If You're A Republican."
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