Our Awesome Media

Frank Rich thinks that Americans need to pay more attention and hold their government accountable. Tristero thinks—and I couldn't agree more—that, by virtue of the media establishment in which Rich is an entrenched member, maybe he should STFU and look in a mirror—or, at minimum, hold one up to his bosses before he starts going off on the American people, of which I am one who spends all day every day immersed in the news, and even I sometimes have trouble finding the wheat for all the chaff, never mind how difficult it would be if I were one of the millions of time-starved citizens reliant on the bloody Times and the manifestly useless 6:00 news.

Frank Rich's column today is a rant about America's "whatever" attitude towards Bush's torture policies. Normally, I would agree with him, this country is indeed far too complacent. But when Rich's employer, and the paper of record, leads off its Sunday editorial section with a long article about reporters and their cats, blaming the public for not taking the news seriously strikes me as grotesquely misplaced.

Cats, for crissakes.

Meanwhile, Fred Hiatt & Co. pen a heartbreaking sob story on behalf on our nation's poor, long-suffering telecoms, and Glenn Greenwald uses it as Exhibit One in The Beltway Establishment's Contempt for the Rule of Law.

Let's leave to the side Hiatt's inane claim that these telecoms, in actively enabling the Bush administration to spy on their customers in violation of the law, were motivated by the pure and upstanding desire to be "patriotic corporate citizens" -- rather than, say, the desire to obtain extremely lucrative government contracts which would likely have been unavailable had they refused to break the law. Leave to the side the fact that actual "patriotism" would have led these telecoms to adhere to the surveillance and privacy laws enacted by the American people through their Congress in accordance with the U.S. Constitution -- as a handful of actual patriotic telecoms apparently did -- rather than submit to the illegal demands of the President.

Further leave to the side that these telecoms did not merely allow warrantless surveillance on their customers in the hectic and "confused" days or weeks after 9/11, but for years. Further leave to the side the fact that, as Hiatt's own newspaper just reported yesterday, the desire for warrantless eavesdropping capabilities seemed to be on the Bush agenda well before 9/11.

And finally ignore the fact that Hiatt is defending the telecom's good faith even though, as he implicitly acknowledges, he has no idea what they actually did, because it is all still Top Secret and we are barred from knowing what happened here. For all those reasons, Hiatt's claim on behalf of the telecoms that they broke the law for "patriotic" reasons is so frivolous as to insult the intelligence of his readers, but -- more importantly -- it is also completely irrelevant.

There is no such thing as a "patriotism exception" to the laws that we pass.

I don't even know what to say anymore, although this continually seems ever more appropriate.