Why The Cheneys Won The National-Security Cage Match
My thoughts keep drifting to our first foray to the beach of the season this weekend, but I just can’t shake the horror I have felt from the mainstream media “reaction” to the Dick Cheney-Barack Obama national-security cage match on Thursday. And the media’s fawning obeisance to Liz Cheney, who is her father in a pants suit.
Lest I not be clear, as highly unusual as it was I think the former vice president had every right to defend at length the Bush torture regime, although I subscribe to the view that his out-of-the-bunker road show that commenced with the Obama inauguration is an effort to inoculate himself against possible future legal action and not just the work of a bald-faced saboteur. Unlike Jazz, who posted on his daughter here last night, I believe she has no such standing or right, let alone any expertise.
But what keeps bothering the hell out of me is that a news media that was deeply complicitous in allowing Bush administration excesses — from an immoral war to assaults on the rule of law — to go substantially unchallenged once again rolled over in viewing the dueling speeches as a “debate,” as if the subject were global warming or bank bailouts, and the dutiful daughter’s nonstop media appearances to reinforce that view as really big news.
Lincoln-Douglas was a debate. Cheney-Obama most certainly was not. But by framing it as such, that complicit media tacitly endorses the former vice president’s view that the administration did not torture and to declare its extreme interrogation methods as such is to libel the torturers and their dungeon masters.
At the end of the day Dick and Liz won the day by successfully framing the day in daddy’s terms and not even a long soak in the ocean is going to wash that reality away.
Shaun Mullen is a former The Moderate Voice columnist. Over a long career with newspapers, this award-winning editor and reporter covered the Vietnam War, O.J. Simpson trials, Clinton impeachment circus and coming of Osama bin Laden, among many other big stories. He blogs at Kiko’s House.
One Response to “Why The Cheneys Won The National-Security Cage Match”
WHY THE CHENEYS WON'T LEAVE THE SCENE: A QUESTION OF JOURNALISTIC DEONTOLOGY!
The latest case in point, is Liz Cheney's appearance on the Scarborough Show with her critical and undermining views of the President presented in effect as critical views to the Obama speech delivered in Egypt under the disguise of expressing her opinions. For comments/expressions of opinion on the President's policies, her views as well as those of her father have been given such a broad artificial reception by the media that runs very contrary to the expression of opinion as we've come to know it. These views are rather given almost the same weight and placed on par as the political stances of a legitimately elected president with a legitimate mandate for the policies he is undertaking while the Cheney's hold no such legitimate mandate and with no accompanying political accountability whatsoever. The issue here is that such attitude by the media is contrary to what we've come to expect from normal implicit democratic rules. If the Cheneys had any pretense for policies they wished to be implemented after the Bush Administration, the solution would have simply been for Dick or Liz to run for president. Since they didn't, it is artificial for the media to strive to present them as a counterweight on par to the Obama administration's policies well beyong what will be expected for the opinion of a simple citizen that the Cheneys are now notwithstanding their previous political roles. And by the way, by extension is it acceptable that any citizen, no matter what self-righteous pretense they might have, to be artificially given a similar counterweight role on par with the President on any policy issues of the Obama administration while not holding any legitimate political mandate for which they will be politically accountable for their stances? It can be understandable, that the Cheneys can be of direct concern when it comes to matters of direct relation to political issues having to do with Cheney's role in the Bush administration. But to raise their views on the policies and stances the administration should take on par with the President undermines appropriate journalistic deontology because as we should all know by now “elections do matter”.
What strikes the mind here is that the Cheneys have perfectly understood this “naïvété” of the media and are using this “media confusion about fairness” to artificially strive to extirpate Mr. Dick Cheney from accusations of introducing torture policies during the Bush Administration among other political accusations. Their strategy is very simple. Legally, Cheney can't make it (they know that secretly). In all courts of law, so-called EITs are definitely torture practices. Besides, the facts as we know them are overwhelmingly against him and the Bush Administration, and Dick Cheney's contradictions are extensive. The real strategy of the Cheney's here is totally otherly: turn it “political”. First, saying torture works and was for the good of the country should elicit the fervour of many Americans. Afterall, all what is needed is that a substantial number of Americans polled buy to this argument, and then the issue’s legal underpinning may be undermined. Secondly, posing artificially as the right wing counterweight to the Obama's administration policies elicits the impression and fervour in some quarters particularly to the right that he is making the President moderate and thus he is political useful. A look at this second political trick shows how the media has effectively been manipulated: knowing fairly well that in his administrative role the President will have to take practical and pragmatic postures with respect to the release of photos of abused detainees as well as on other policies, all what Dick simply have to do is to posit that he is against releasing the pictures and pretend to take critical policy issues postures on the right, making him seemingly a moderating influence on the President. Thirdly, the Cheneys simply have to claim that Obama is following the Bush Administration’s policies he criticized pointing to his strategies in Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantanamo. In this case too, the media is manipulated as they ignore the fact that the Obama administration does not have the luxury of starting from scratch as Bush had on all these issues but rather adopts a “course correction strategy” of the situations to bring them as close as possible to what he advocates. The fact is that, the underlying strategy of Dick and her daughter is to make this three steps political trick extirpate Dick from the accusations levied against the former administration. The sad thing is that the media is “naïvely” falling for these political tricks!