I want Todd Purdum's job. A1 today does the public 9/11 commission hearings, and Philip Shenon and Eric Schmitt offer an surprisingly un-spun account of the proceedings ("Bush and Clinton Aides Grilled by Panel"), whose lead focuses on the "series of intelligence reports sent to President Bush in 2001 [that] warned of an imminent, possibly catastrophic" Al Qaeda attack, and on the panel's "harsh questioning of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and other administration officials" about their failure to act on those reports. [If you've got the dead-tree edition you'll notice that the accompanying pull-quotes, one each from Powell, Albright, Cohen and Rummy, tell a different story: everybody did everything that could in reason have been done, and all in good faith, and everybody agrees about this across the board, so please can we all just quiet down now?] Given that there's an attempt to spin the commission staff report, released concurrently with yesterday's hearings, as working to shore up the BushCo position (see Billmon for more on this), it's especially worth noting that Shenon and Schmitt have grasped, and keep more or less firm hold of, the central point:

The reports, and some of the testimony on Tuesday, supported elements of the account offered in recent days by President Bush's former counterterrorism chief, Richard A. Clarke. He has said in a new book that President Bush and his deputies, including Mr. Rumsfeld and Ms. Rice, largely ignored the Qaeda threat in the months before the attacks and left the nation needlessly unprepared.

Never fear, though, because A1 enlists Todd Purdum to slap a fig leaf of "analysis" over the unaccustomed candor of the straight news piece ("For a Day, Terrorism Transcends Politics as Panel Reviews Failures"). Taken together with the page's festoon of pull-quotes, Purdum's article may be reflective of a fallback position for the Times: let's just focus on the warm glowing warming glow of democracy-in-action to get through the commission proceedings with as little ill feeling and inconvenient remembering as possible.

The setting was a nondescript Senate hearing room, but the scene was as singular as democracy itself: successive secretaries of state and defense with more than 14 years' combined service across Democratic and Republican presidencies being questioned by a bipartisan citizens' commission of familiar faces.

Yes, election-year politics crackled in the air. Yes, Republican panel members prodded and scolded Bill Clinton's cabinet members, and Democrats did the same to President Bush's. But the secretaries themselves often agreed with one other, regardless of party, and their public presence was a powerful sign that terrorism transcends politics — and that blame abounds for failing to fully face the threat in time.

I can sort of get from this that Todd thinks we should all have fuzzies from knowing that our democracy is strong, and that we're all pulling together like a family that buries its differences in a crisis—or like a family that takes a crisis as an opportunity for everybody to blame everybody. Or something. In what sense is democracy "singular"? What exactly does it mean to say that "terrorism transcends politics"? I have a Ph.D. in English literature, I know Paradise Lost backwards and forwards, and I confess I'm hard put to reduce Todd Purdum's writing to sense.

It's all here: opaque celebratory formulas, irrelevant historical asides, incoherent rambling. For sheer pitch of fatuity, though, not much can surpass this:

From the sinking of the Titanic to the bombing of Pearl Harbor to the presidential commission set up to study urban unrest in the 1960's and the 1970's Senate inquiry into intelligence abuses by the C.I.A. and F.B.I., public and Congressional panels have delved into some of the most calamitous events in American history. But usually after the fact. Tuesday's hearing made it clear that the threat of terrorism remains ever present.

Well, yes, Todd, one is rather hard put to set about investigating great public calamities before they've happened. Presumably he means that this investigation is different because "terrorism" continues to be a threat—except that the hearings aren't about "terrorism" as such, they're about a specific act of terrorism, now almost three years in the past, and the failures that may have enabled it. But for Todd Purdum, "terrorism" is simply an incantation, an abracadabra on whose utterance thought ceases.

It's not a long article, but I could linger over it for hours. I'll leave you with this last gem:

For relatives of the Sept. 11 victims, the hearing was a chance, finally, to get the public attention that they believe the commission's work has long lacked. They came with still-broken hearts and photographs of the dead, seeking answers they did not quite expect to receive.

"I want the truth," said Bob McIlvaine, whose son, Bobby, died in the attacks. He wore a green jacket and a pained look ...

Paul D. Wolfowitz, the deputy defense secretary, who was seated next to Mr. Rumsfeld, also wore a pained expression for much of the afternoon.

Really, does Purdum write this crap in his sleep? I suspect Mr. McIlvaine will find that "also" even more grotesque than I do.

posted by michael  5:16:08 PM  
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