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| Oct Dec |
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It seems that the former chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the now disgraced Kenneth Tomlinson, may have been up to something else beyond his now well-documented effort to swing public broadcasting to the right. In that campaign, Tomlinson took the CPB, which was created to be a firebreak against politicization of public media, and tried to turn it into a sort of Political Correctness Bureau to promote Bush administration policies and attempt to punish its critics.
It seem that, in addition to this bit of partisanship, Tomlinson may also have been busy pursuing that other favorite activity of the Republican power elite -- funneling public money into private pockets. The details are outrageous enough -- for instance, there's a $400,000 severance package for one official carefully structured to avoid public disclosure. Now an audit has Tomlinson's successors squirming. (Details from the Times are here.)
What strikes me, though, is how the whole scandal is a win/win sort of thing for the right, no matter how it turns out, since conservatives don't really believe in the idea of public broadcasting anyway and would be happy to see it vanish in a puff of free-market dust. If Tomlinson's meddling achieved its goal by slanting coverage, well, mission accomplished; if he got caught, that would just discredit the whole enterprise. If Republican appointees manage to reward their pals, great; if they get caught, well, gee, public broadcasting has become a sinkhole of corruption -- let's shut it down!
We are so deep into the universe of foxes staffing the henhouse that this stuff is almost making sense.
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I want to do my little bit to combat the latest big lie from the Bush administration and its allies in Congress, which is that their opponents advocate an immediate precipitous withdrawal from Iraq. Their furious attacks have been in response to Congressman Jack Murtha's call for a new policy last week. The Congressional Republicans did their very best, with their stunt of a withdrawal resolution on Friday, to muddy the waters and leave the American public with the idea that Murtha just wants to ship home the entire U.S. force tomorrow.
The truth is that Murtha is a conservative hawk of a Democrat who is known as a staunch advocate of the military that he (unlike the leaders of the Executive Branch) served in and fought under. Best as anyone can tell, his surprising and unusual change of heart arose mostly from his concern for the welfare of both individual soldiers and of the entire U.S. military. The guy has sources and connections in the Pentagon, and when he talks about how urgently we need a new plan, you can bet that this is what he is hearing from inside the armed forces.
If you paid attention to what Murtha actually proposed last week (this Slate piece by Fred Kaplan offers a good recap) you know that he didn't say, "Let's get out now" -- he said, essentially "Let's get out within six months, moving our troops to a position outside of Iraq, from which they can continue to strike and to influence events without being sitting ducks for suicide bombers."
That might or might not be a smart plan, but it is at least a plan. The central complaint that most Democrats and an increasing number of Republicans have with the administration is that there's no plan in sight. Murtha says that the American public is far ahead of the politicians -- the people have already made up their minds, the war is a failure. This friend of the military's response is, let's get out in an orderly fashion while there's still a chance of keeping the U.S. military from completely imploding under the pressure of multiple deployments, inadequate equipment, and, most of all, a nonexistent strategy.
Given that we actually do need that military at this moment in history -- since there is this other little war still underway, against the people who, unlike Saddam Hussein, really did attack us on 9/11 -- it might behoove us to pay some respectful attention to the congressman from Pennsylvania, instead of smearing him.
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