Blood in the water. That's the quality David Sanger's news analysis on A1 today has ("When Goals Meet Reality: Bush's Reversal on 9/11 Testimony")—and though it's BushCo that's bleeding, I can't say the article gives me any pleasure. Sanger's narrative today has it that the Bush administration is continually climbing down from "principle" when it finds that back is about to meet wall:

When George W. Bush and Dick Cheney took office three years ago, they made no secret of their intention to restore presidential powers and prerogatives that they believed had withered under the onslaught of Washington's cycle of televised, all-consuming investigations.

But time and again, that effort by the Bush White House has fallen victim to political reality. It did so once more on Tuesday, when the president made a four-minute appearance in the White House press room to announce that he was giving in to demands from the 9/11 commission that he had resisted for months.

His decision to reverse course, dropping his claim of executive privilege preventing public, sworn testimony by his national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, was part of a distinct pattern that has emerged inside this highly secretive White House.

The first reaction to most demands for outside inquiries, or for details about energy policy decisions or intelligence concerning Iraqi weapons or Nigerian uranium, has been to build walls: Mr. Bush, or more often Mr. Cheney in his stead, asserts a clear, inviolate principle that the president and his advisers need the freedom to gather information, develop policy and exchange ideas in private.

But eventually other forces come into play. Gradually pressure builds until Mr. Bush's advisers — including Ms. Rice herself in this case, several officials said — determine that the cost is too high.

At its core, Sanger's analysis is almost limitlessly cynical. Notice the way Sanger maps White House secretiveness to defense of principle. He seems to find nothing troubling about the pervasiveness of secret, unaccountable government under Bush-Cheney; far from it, he's entirely willing to repeat the administration's own flattering spin on its "principled" conduct of its affairs. (Is there any sense in which the Bush-Cheney assertion that "presidential powers and prerogatives" had withered and needed restoration stands up to scrutiny? The way Sanger writes, it's almost self-evidently true. But take a look at FindLaw, which has a very strong 2002 article by John Dean arguing that the Cheney position tendentiously, and alarmingly, misreads recent history.)

What rouses Sanger's insider scorn is the suggestion of weakenss, pure and simple. Approvingly, he offers this anonoymous quote, pretty much the takeaway for the piece:

"I think it goes to a deep feeling, much of it surrounding Cheney and his office, that the powers of the presidency were eroded for years and that this administration has to claw them back," one senior American diplomat who has sat in on some White House strategy meetings said Tuesday. "Then the pressure grows. And grows. And now people know that if you keep it on long enough, these guys will give way."

(The word "pressure" appears more times in the piece than I care to count.) Excerpts really won't do justice to my disgust for the political amorality implied in Sanger's article. Read it, and while you do ask yourself if there's anywhere in the piece where Sanger acknowledges any such thing as a public interest (as opposed to "public opinion," which is simply another source of pressure), any such thing as the people's business. Is government anything more than a matter of elites jockeying for power, and do we really need "analysis" from reporters who appear to believe it isn't?

Update (Thurs., 4/1): A propos of the Bush-Cheney effort to expand presidential prerogative: I missed Dave Neiwert's long, excellent Tuesday post at Orcinus on the subject. He's spot-on in calling the Cheney's agenda "the revenge of the Nixonites," and recurs to the landmark executive-privilege ruling in U.S. v Nixon to provide context. Go take a look.

posted by michael  5:03:07 PM  
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