Rich: "a second-term imperial presidency that outstrips Nixon's in hubris"

understandinglife

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Sat Jun-11-05 05:47 PM
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Rich: "a second-term imperial presidency that outstrips Nixon's in hubris"

Edited on Sat Jun-11-05 05:50 PM by understandinglife

Don't Follow the Money

By FRANK RICH
Published: June 12, 2005

THE morning the Deep Throat story broke, the voice on my answering machine was as raspy as Hal Holbrook's. "I just want you to remember that I wrote 'Follow the money,' " said my caller. "I want to know if anybody will give me credit. Watch for the accuracy of the media!"

The voice belonged to my friend William Goldman, who wrote the movie "All the President's Men." His words proved more than a little prescient. As if on cue, journalists everywhere - from The New York Times to The Economist to The Washington Post itself - would soon start attributing this classic line of dialogue to the newly unmasked Deep Throat, W. Mark Felt. But the line was not in Woodward and Bernstein's book or in The Post's Watergate reportage or in Bob Woodward's contemporaneous notes. It was the invention of the author of "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid," "Marathon Man" and "The Princess Bride."

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Not without reason. Had the scandal been vividly resuscitated as the long national nightmare it actually was, it would dampen all the Felt fun by casting harsh light on our own present nightmare. "The fundamental right of Americans, through our free press, to penetrate and criticize the workings of our government is under attack as never before" was how the former Nixon speech writer William Safire put it on this page almost nine months ago. The current administration, a second-term imperial presidency that outstrips Nixon's in hubris by the day, leads the attack, trying to intimidate and snuff out any Woodwards or Bernsteins that might challenge it, any media proprietor like Katharine Graham or editor like Ben Bradlee who might support them and any anonymous source like Deep Throat who might enable them to find what Carl Bernstein calls "the best obtainable version of the truth."

The attacks continue to be so successful that even now, long after many news organizations, including The Times, have been found guilty of failing to puncture the administration's prewar W.M.D. hype, new details on that same story are still being ignored or left uninvestigated. The July 2002 "Downing Street memo," the minutes of a meeting in which Tony Blair and his advisers learned of a White House effort to fix "the intelligence and facts" to justify the war in Iraq, was published by The London Sunday Times on May 1. Yet in the 19 daily Scott McClellan briefings that followed, the memo was the subject of only 2 out of the approximately 940 questions asked by the White House press corps, according to Eric Boehlert of Salon.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/12/opinion/12rich.html?hp

I urge everyone to read this op-ed by Mr Rich and to contact him and thank him for being one of the few, persistent voices for truth in all of the corporate news media.

Peace.

Art by Emad Hajjaj; published in Al-Ghad Newspaper, Amman, Jordan

www.missionnotaccomplished.us - don't stop at 500,000 signatures; don't stop at 10,000,000 signatures; don't stop until Bush and the neoconsters are indicted and prosecuted for their heinous crimes against humanity and our Constitution.