John McQuaid

Dick Cheney’s campaign of retroactive self-justification, culminating in his AEI speech, is bizarre, and not just for its historical footnote-worthiness, its political thuggery, or its graceless, hectoring tone. What’s strangest is that long after the policies he champions were cast aside by his own administration, and the Republican Party repudiated at the polls, he is still able to hijack an important issue with a campaign of pure rhetorical cant.

Let’s be clear: Cheney is not making an argument about what anti-terrorism policies work best. A genuine argument would engage the difficult issues at hand, asking “what is the best way to fight terrorism?” It would marshal facts to support its positions. It would not be layered with half-truths and bursting with straw men. It would endeavor to convince skeptics. Perhaps there are arguments to be made that “enhanced interrogation techniques” are the most effective ways to elicit information, that illegally warehousing and “disappearing” terrorist suspects is the most effective way to handle them, and that only virtually unlimited executive power can guarantee security. But I have never heard such arguments from Cheney or his supporters.

Instead, all we get are angry, contemptuous assertions. Cheney is, by his own account, self-evidently right. His speech did not acknowledge that he or his Bush administrations had committed a single error. It did not acknowledge that principled people might disagree. The only source of disagreement would be the weakness, arrogance and naivete of his critics, including President Obama.

But of course this has almost nothing to do with the real world of devising policies to combat terrorism. The Bush White House itself abandoned torture when it became clear it wasn’t very useful, was probably illegal, and was terribly damaging politically and strategically. If another 9/11 does occur, American officials will think twice before torturing again. And even if they go ahead and do it, what do you think will happen? Almost certainly a rerun of the same disaster that happened the first time. Cheney’s “comprehensive strategy,” as he calls it, wasn’t very strategic: it was series of ad hoc fishing expeditions accompanied by public bluster that got us mostly grief. It was incoherent, an anti-strategy, one man’s fantasy about imposing his will on a dangerous world. (Maybe there were some successes that can be attributed solely to Cheney’s post 9/11 decisions – who knows? But to figure that out we need some kind of truth commission to evaluate the record.)

Cheney’s demagoguery is nothing new in American politics. But what’s striking is the deference and credibility it’s granted by the media-political world. You’d think that there is an actual debate going on, that Obama and Cheney represent two positions with equal weight that Americans have to choose between. Today’s Washington Post is symptomatic: the print edition features a banner headline: “In Dueling Speeches, a National Security Debate.” The main story hits the familiar beats: “Presidential scholars could not recall another moment when consecutive administrations intersected so early and in such a public way.” Okay, but framing it this way ignores the content of the speeches, and recent history. Obama, whatever you may think of his recent compromises on the terrorism front, is at least wrestling with real issues (as this Post editorial correctly points out) attempting to create a legal framework for terrorism suspects. Cheney’s statements, meanwhile, should be treated with skepticism, as he has a record of brazenly uttering untruths in service to a political agenda marked by its determined detachment from reality. Do his words really deserve the respect, with its implication of importance and legitimacy, that they’re getting?

Besides embellishing a legacy, the current Cheney campaign seems aimed at one thing: setting up Obama for the stab-in-the-back treatment in the event of another terror attack. Please. Terrorism is a serious problem. It requires real strategic thinking. Such posturing may be catnip to the press, but it’s virtually irrelevant to the world we live in, and unhelpful to the hard work of protecting us.

Did Maureen Dowd commit a firing offense by, she says, inadvertently lifting a paragraph from Talking Points Memo? I don’t think so, but what happens hardly reflects well on Dowd or her column.

To recap: Dowd’s Sunday column on the debate over torture contained a paragraph taken nearly word-for-word from a post by Josh Marshall. When a TPMCafe blogger pointed this out, Dowd quickly admitted error and properly attributed the relevant paragraph. The Times ran a correction.

End of story? Surely that’s what the Times and Dowd want, and in all probability their quick response – far superior to the grudging, circle-the-wagons responses to similar problems in the past – will be effective.

But the response raised more questions than it answers. Critics are focusing on the fact of Marshall’s words showing up in Dowd’s column. But in some sense that’s irrelevant. If she had known that paragraph came from TPM, it’s unlikely she would have reprinted it without attribution. (On Imus today, Frank Rich cited this as a reason in her defense.)

But assuming her explanation is true, and she’s soliciting input from friends and cutting-and-pasting it into columns, that’s worse in some ways than cribbing from published work. It meets the dictionary definition of plagiarism: “a piece of writing that has been copied from someone else and is presented as being your own work.” It’s also lazy, shoddy journalism. And it’s virtually undetectable.

Last year Dowd got into hot water for not attributing the reporting work of her assistant. Sunday’s incident gives us an additional window on the slapdash way a MoDo column is assembled. Dowd could be using the vast resources and reach of the Times and her substantial writer’s gifts to produce a great column. That’s the whole idea, right? Instead, it’s like the faux-juice drinks your kids are drinking – perhaps 50% real Maureen Dowd, 50% other ingredients.

The Philadelphia Inquirer’s decision to give a monthly column to John Yoo – author of several “torture memos” offering legal rationales for the Bush administration’s abusive interrogations – is (pick your term): Tone-deaf? Crazy? Morally dubious? Newspapers have made a lot of questionable decisions in recent years, some perhaps unavoidable, some true whoppers. But this is just flat-out wrong.

Many newspapers and other traditional media outlets, fearful of the “liberal bias” charge and watching their audience disappear, have spent the past decade trying to build their credibility with conservatives. There’s nothing wrong with that per se –  they are run mostly by liberals, and we need conservative voices in the political debate. But those efforts went awry during the Bush administration. Confronted by an White House that was wildly overreaching on presidential power, surveillance, torture and the politicization of basic governance, most media lost their bearings. They treated these things as normal, if controversial, activities of government.

Fortunately, the political system self-corrected. But the media’s problems remain. Here is part of of editorial page editor Harold Jackson’s explanation for Yoo’s hiring:

He’s a Philadelphian, and very knowledgeable about the legal subjects he discusses in his commentaries. Our readers have been able to get directly from Mr. Yoo his thoughts on a number of subjects concerning law and the courts, including measures taken by the White House post-9/11. That has promoted further discourse, which is the objective of newspaper commentary.

But other providing a valuable forum for self-justification, I don’t understand what the op-ed page gains with Yoo. There are plenty of talented conservative writers out there. Yoo’s debut column is undistinguished conservative boilerplate.

The only reason Yoo is prominent enough to write a column in the Inquirer is because of his work in the White House Office of Legal Counsel. Hiring him is thus is an implicit endorsement of the legitimacy the legal opinions he crafted there. But those opinions are legally suspect and morally repugnant. Yoo is an advocate of a questionable legal theory of nearly unlimited presidential power, and his memos were instrumental in providing legal cover for techniques that were, by any commonsense interpretation of the word, torture.

Yoo might be a war criminal. At the very least, Inquirer editors should engage that issue directly. Simply hiring him says: we don’t think so. This is an assent to the dangerous notion that if the U.S. government did it, no matter how reprehensible it might be, it must have some legitimacy. That’s sad – and not part of the American journalistic tradition I know.

Update: Wednesday’s New York Times story on this quotes Harold Jackson confirming that Yoo’s hiring was indeed an attempt to address the liberal bias perception: “‘There was a conscious effort on our part to counter some of the criticism of The Inquirer as being a knee-jerk liberal publication,’ Mr. Jackson said. ‘We made a conscious effort to add some conservative voices to our mix.’”

Sorry for my absence over the past couple of weeks – I’ve been on deadline, then stay-in-bed sick for most of that time.

Meanwhile: I have an article up on Yale Environment 360 about mountaintop removal coal mining, which I also wrote about earlier this year for the Smithsonian magazine. The Yale piece deals with the recent moves by the Obama administration to crack down on this practice. The thing is, nobody is sure where this is going: it could profoundly change things, or could end up being mostly cosmetic. It depends on how the politics of it play out – we’ll see.