06.26.06
Balls
Bill Keller, the executive ediitor of the New York Times, sent an amazingly ill-considered and moronic letter to those of his readers who wrote him to protest his paper’s publication of the details of yet another secret Government operation to interdict terrorists. Check it (emphases mine):
Some of the incoming mail quotes the angry words of conservative bloggers and TV or radio pundits who say that drawing attention to the government’s anti-terror measures is unpatriotic and dangerous. (I could ask, if that’s the case, why they are drawing so much attention to the story themselves by yelling about it on the airwaves and the Internet.)
What an incredible fucking asshole. This is the rationale of the man who runs the most influential newspaper on Earth? That it’s his conservative critics who are to blame for “drawing so much attention” to his treasonous disclosure of a program intended to help us track the financial transactions of our enemy?
It’s an unusual and powerful thing, this freedom that our founders gave to the press. Who are the editors of The New York Times (or the Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post and other publications that also ran the banking story) to disregard the wishes of the President and his appointees? And yet the people who invented this country saw an aggressive, independent press as a protective measure against the abuse of power in a democracy, and an essential ingredient for self-government. They rejected the idea that it is wise, or patriotic, to always take the President at his word, or to surrender to the government important decisions about what to publish.
As Professor Reynolds observes to devastating effect:
A deeper error is Keller’s characterization of freedom of the press as an institutional privilege, an error that is a manifestation of the hubris that has marked the NYT of late. Keller writes: “It’s an unusual and powerful thing, this freedom that our founders gave to the press. . . . The power that has been given us is not something to be taken lightly.”
The founders gave freedom of the press to the people, they didn’t give freedom to the press. Keller positions himself as some sort of Constitutional High Priest, when in fact the “freedom of the press” the Framers described was also called “freedom in the use of the press.” It’s the freedom to publish, a freedom that belongs to everyone in equal portions, not a special privilege for the media industry.
One reason people like Keller don’t see anything wrong with ratting out our Government in this way is that they do not see us as being in a legitimate war or struggle against Islamofascism. They see the War for Iraq, in particular, as a purely partisan endeavor in which they share no obligation to forbearance.
Don’t forget: the New York Times is publishing classified information that was illegally supplied to them by assholes in the intelligence community because both they and their suppliers are more interested in harming the Bush Administration than they are in doing right by those who are sacrificing their lives for our country’s safety.
If this were the America that my grandparents’ generation fought and died for, Bill Keller and the rest of the assholes who are publishing these details would be in jail. That’s a fact.
Of course, the anti-war Left are using the argument that the Times is merely defending our civil liberties. But that’s a ruse. This is only about undermining the Bush Administration. Because these disclosures —which are, on their face, illegal— affect virtually none of the assholes who think it’s so goddamned important that the whole world know about them.
I hope this Administration makes an example of the New York Times. Oh, and don’t confuse that with any further antipathy towards the First Amendment you might imagine I harbor. I simply think it’s time to stick a shiv in the Grey Lady’s ribcage.
