Wallace vs. Clinton

Dallas Morning News | Mark Davis:

“ I don't mean to spoil an entire week of multilayered analysis, but the Bill Clinton spectacle over the weekend on Fox News Sunday comes down to one simple thing: once a bully, always a bully.”

Ed Cognoski responds:

He's talking about right wing Fox News hack Chris Wallace, right? When a Democrat stands up to the right wing revisionist propagandists, it drives the knee jerk conservatives wild. What's their response?

Mark Davis tries to turn the focus away from President Clinton's charges and towards President Clinton himself, calling him names. In fact, President Clinton spoke truth. The incoming Bush administration dropped the ball in the handoff of ongoing anti-terrorism efforts. National security advisor Richard Clarke, who served in both administrations, has admitted just that. President Bush had other priorities, namely tax cuts and, as we later learned to our regret, an obsession with Saddam Hussein.

That President Clinton's charges have merit was made evident when the administration unleashed no less than Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice herself to defend the administration's inept anti-terror policy pre-9/11. And her defense amounted to a claim that this is all old news and it was time to move on. In other words, a non-defense defense.

So, Mr Davis wants to attack the messenger and Secretary Rice wants to move on. Neither wants America to face the truth. President Clinton isn't having it.

Washington Post: The liar was Joe Wilson

At least, that's the way the right wing DallasBlog decided to headline its spin of an editorial by the Washington Post. The Post's editorial itself was headlined neutrally: "End of an Affair". Its lead referred to, not Ambassador Joe Wilson, but Richard Armitage: "It turns out that the person who exposed CIA agent Valerie Plame was not out to punish her husband." It explains that it was Mr Armitage who first disclosed CIA operative Valerie Plame's name to reporter Robert Novak. The Post goes on to blame Vice President Cheney and his chief-of-staff Scooter Libby for carelessness in the handling of classified information in their efforts to discredit Joe Wilson, who had claimed that intelligence about Iraq had been twisted to make the case for war. Only in its last paragraph does the Washington Post spread some of the blame to Joe Wilson himself, for going public with his charges. Ultimately, the charges proved false and going public resulted in the disclosure of his wife's role.

So, that's the story. The Washington Post pretty much plays it straight. Its conclusion is that there is blame enough to go around. It concludes that the Bush administration, rather than hatching an evil plot, was instead merely incompetent. It began with a desire by Cheney, Libby, and Rove to discredit Wilson, led to carelessness with classified information, and instinctively descended into stonewalling and lying under oath.

You would not learn any of this reading the DallasBlog. In its version of the story, the Washington Post concludes that "THE LIAR WAS JOE WILSON". Despite DallasBlog's claim to present "News and Viewpoints", the blog posts are commonly viewpoints presented as news. Even the Washington Post editorial, clearly presented as viewpoint, not news, does better at presenting the facts. The DallasBlog might be a halfway decent right wing blog, but it is an embarrassment as a news source.