Washington Post Death Spiral Watch (Yet Another David Broder Edition)

Matthew Yglesias reads David Broder:

David Broder: I have not worried about the fundamental commitment of the American people since 1974. In that year, they were confronted with the stunning evidence that their president had conducted a criminal conspiracy out of the Oval Office. In response, the American people reminded Richard Nixon, the man they had just recently reelected overwhelmingly, that in this country, no one, not even the president, is above the law. They required him to yield his office. That is not the sign of a nation that has lost its sense of values or forgotten the principles on which this system rests...

And Yglesias worries:

Matthew Yglesias: I don't think anyone can seriously dispute that the current President of the United States violated the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act or any number of legal commitments to refrain from torture. Some people think these violations were good policy. Many of those who regard those violations as good policy, also maintain that higher constitutional principles grant the President the right to break the law. Which is precisely what you could say on behalf of Richard Nixon.... But Bush won't be hounded out of office. I'm not exactly sure what accounts for the difference.... I have a vague sense that at that time America's elites operated with some sense of conscience and dignity, and it was taken for granted even among Republican leaders that one couldn't just break the law. These days, a misleading deposition taken in the course of a frivolous lawsuit aimed at avoiding the revelation of an affair is a grave national crisis, but it's taken for granted that only a lunatic would believe that Bush or any of his henchmen should be held accountable in any way for repeated violations of the law. I don't really know what changed, or why David Broder and other gatekeepers of elite consensus can't see that something's gone wrong here, but I'm not happy about it...

I think Matt is (a) right to be worried, but (b) wrong in thinking that things were very different back in 1974. His problem is that he assumes that David Broder does not casually lie--that back in 1974 David Broder really was pleased at the prospect of "the American people remind[ing] Richard Nixon... that in this country, no one, not even the president, is above the law..." and really was worried "about the fundamental commitment of the American people," but has not been worried since is simply a lie.

Broder wasn't.

He seems to have thought that it would be exciting if impeachment would fail, and looked forward to the prospect of Richard Nixon getting his political revenge.

Let's roll the videotape:

David Broder, July 10, 1974: David S. Broder (1974), "If Congress Refuses to Impeach..." Washington Post (July 10), p. A 30: [T]he case of Richard Nixon is moving... toward... the House vote on impeachment.... Suppose... few Republican defections... enough Democrats cross the line to exonerate Mr. Nixon...?... The cloud over Mr. Nixon's future would disappear... go back to being a full-time President. Congress could go back to legislating. Messrs. Doar, Jenner, and St. Clair could return to their firms.

But politically, the fireworks would just be starting.... [T]he anti-impeachment majority [would] lash... out against the Judiciary Committee members for spending $1.5 million and uncounted thousands of manhours.... [T]he tidal wave of public sentiment... sweep over the Congress... the White House charge [that the impeachment investigation was nothing but a partisan assault on the integrity of the presidential office] would surely have been proven.... The President's supporters in the country would cry vengeance....

Democratic candidates would find themselves on the defensive... a 93rd Congress which did little but posture on impeachment.... Resurgent Republicans... vindicated President... predictable public reaction against the press and the Democratic Congress....

Republican congressmen... who had broken ranks to vote for impeachment would find themselves pariahs.... If they managed to escape repudiation by the voters this year, they would be guaranteed strong pro-Nixon primary opponents in 1976. Many of them would undoubtedly wonder whether there was any way to remain in public office as Republicans.... Political scientists would... [ask] whether the friends and foes of President Nixon would not constitute themselves into separate parties, obliterating past affiliations.

All this is well within the realm of possibility. All that has to happen is for the House to exonerate the President by voting no bill of impeachment.

Note what Broder does not say: he does not say that it would be a bad thing for a majority in congress to vote that Nixon's crimes--illegal as they were--did not warrant impeachment, and thus to vote that the president was in a sense above the law. He doesn't say that at all. If he was worried "about the fundamental commitment of the American people" back in 1974, he did not think those worries were worth sharing with the Washington Post's readers.

When dealing with the Post these days, you simply have to fact-check everything.

Why oh why can't we have a better press corps?

Comments

[howard]

wow: devastating, prof, just devastating.

[M. Carey]

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

[Nick Kaufman]

Is this from an editorial, a "news analysis" or a reporting article?

[Joe Klein's conscience]

So, Broder's never really changed at all. He was just able to hide it because "Teh Google" never existed back then and people weren't as involved as they are now, especially against the TradMed.

[PeeDee]

This was why it was so critical in '1984' that historical records were themselves continuously altered to fit the new truth. Is this risk truly behind us? Do we need a grass-roots certificate authority to check-sum distributed news caches (something like github) to know what really happened, who really said what? Should we start embedding facts that are likely to suffer 'evolution' in open source code?

[Nathan Myers]

It's hard to be certain based on excerpts, but I read this as a warning: if you impeach, you had better succeed, or suffer. Of course nobody suffered for having failed to impeach Clinton. I suppose it depends on whether the person you impeach has any scruples.

One might conclude that Broder didn't think, in 1974, that anyone would care whether he "worried about the fundamental commitment of the American people", but he thinks they care now. Or, perhaps he's telegraphing that he thinks that something changed in 34 years, and we are now "a nation that has lost its sense of values or forgotten the principles on which this system rests...". He is very clever to have sneaked such a bold statement past his Editors.

[John Emerson]

Broder is being kept alive by necromancers. One of these days the spell will be broken and he will collapse into a odoriferous heap of quivering putrescence.

[Joe]

Broder recently announced in his periodic Washington Post "chats" that he thinks the best way to approach a presidential election is to ignore any changes in policy brought up during the heat of the election and instead choose a leader based on pre-campaign policies. This approach, coincidentally, allows him to ignore all of McCain's recent panderous flip-floppery. As far as I can tell, Broder has not described this approach before.

[jerry]

Film comes in reels that can clearly roll. Videotape comes on reels too, but those reels are encased in a rectangular cassette. Furthermore, film frames are linearly recorded on film, whereas videotape tracks are written diagonally across the tape (and may even overlap?)

I think we can "review the videotape", but I don't think it makes sense to "roll the videotape."

[abject funk]

People like Broder cling to power while pretending not to. The worst types of enablers and serious people on offer must have some kind of shrine or secret ritual that allows the to consider themselves journalists while also undermining, in real time, the efforts of Woodward and Bernstein. At the same goddamn newspaper.

Witness the career paths of said W and B, and I suppose the forces encountered are simply overwhelming.

Yech. Please send me the antidote: Hersh.

[sglover]

"It's hard to be certain based on excerpts, but I read this as a warning: if you impeach, you had better succeed, or suffer."

Well, that was the core of the argument that Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) gave me, when I asked him at a "town hall" meeting why the Pelosi Dems weren't pursuing impeachment. "Think of the precedent you set if you try and it doesn't work?", was the gist.

I didn't find it convincing then, either. On the other hand, it **did** confirm my suspicion that we're now essentially a well-armed banana republic. I note that Van Hollen has risen pretty rapidly to leadership positions in the Dem congressional apparatus, and presumably represents the "philosophy" of the "opposition" party.

Hell, forget about impeachment -- name one thing the Dems have done to head off a truly catastrophic attack on Iran? Other than some (unsupported) efforts by Webb and maybe a few others, I'm not aware of any, and if Seymour Hersh is correct, the Dems are STILL enabling the war schemes of the Bush/Cheney gangster syndicate!!!

I realize it makes me a "purist" and a crank and so forth, but in light of all the Dem complicity, I just can't give a damn about this next election.

[M.O.]

Nathan Myers, David Broder is an expert at insinuating to defend his favored Politician. Compare the quoted article to "Bush Regains His Footing" in the Washington post on Friday, February 16, 2007; Page A23 http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/02/15/AR2007021501271_pf.html (the infamous, at least in the blogospehere, Bush Bounce article).

Broder does the exact same thing; fantasizes about a deeply unpopular Republican President turning the current political situation around on the Democrats bringing them to their knees.

He does it as usual by out right lies and half truths, cherry pickin and any means necessary to defend the powerful (Republicans that is). Take for example this paragraph;

"But congressional Democrats are leery of seeming to withhold resources from the 150,000 troops who will be fighting in that country once the surge is complete; that is why they blocked Republicans from offering resolutions of their own in the House or Senate pledging to keep financing the war. Democrats did not want an up-or-down vote on that question, but Bush has placed it squarely before them."

Can you spot the huge Republican talking point that is repeated without refutation? Can you see what he does after that?

Or this;

"At his news conference, he also stepped away from personal confrontation with the rulers in Iran, making it clear that he does not necessarily hold its political leadership responsible for shipping arms to the insurgent Shiites fighting in Iraq. He insisted the U.S. military would do whatever is necessary to halt the shipments and protect the troops, but he said repeatedly that these defensive measures are not a prelude to aggressive action against Iran.

All this is to the good. But Bush, unlike Clinton, is in the middle of a bloody civil war, which can be ended only by the Iraqis themselves. All he claims to be able to do is to provide some breathing space for them by attempting to reduce the violence. As he said, "What really matters is what happens on the ground. I can talk all day long, but what really matters to the American people is to see progress."

And whether the American people will see it, no one knows."

Summary of what's between the lines
1. Bush is no longer confrontational.
2. Iran is belligerently shipping arms to Iraq
3. But Bush WILL defend the troops.
4. Clinton had it easy, this is not childs play we are talking about!
5. It's not Bushs fault that there is a civil war, it's the Iraqis.
6. The American People are not smart enough to see what I, David Broder, see.

Seriously, read the two articles, the glee is right under the surface. This is what David Broder does. Infact the whole article can be summarized by, "Bush is back! Democrats in trouble" Just as the folks at Sadly No! would say;

Shorter David Broder. "Nixon is gonna win this, then what bitches! THEN WHAT!"

[jerry]

Here's a picture that claims to show the overlapping diagonal tracks of a videotape.

http://oldsite.capital.edu/cc/it/media/ctltrk.html
http://oldsite.capital.edu/cc/it/media/pic/VHS.gif

[Awake!]

Impeachment does not initiate a crisis, it is the device established by the authors of the US Constitution to deal with crisis once it has occurred: They expected the executive to over-reach and expected the congress to obey their oath of office in response; the term "impeachment" appears again and again in the founding document for that reason.

Sly revanchists such as Broder are of no interest to me but hearing congress-critters argue that impeachment is risky or extraordinary fills me with despair since I am forced to conclude they are either ignorant of the founding principles they swore to serve or understand them and are faithless and foresworn.

See http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/07132007/profile.html

[kharris]

In considering the difference between then and now, consider that then, the US had a draft and it now does not. The children of the upper class were not prone to go in either case, but the children of the majority of voters were vulnerable to the draft when Nixon was President, and the war was unpopular. Now, the war is unpopular, but the children of the majority of voters have not been vulnerable to having to fight this unpopular war.

As to the notion that politicians were nicer and more honorable then, consider that Dole was a then and, till recently, now politician. Then, he backed Nixon all the way. One of the lawyers on the Nixon side of the proceedings back then ran for the GOP nomination in this election. Back then, it was not a sure thing that Nixon would be impeached or convicted.

I like MY, mostly, but his wunderkind status as a thinker is tarnishing as he goes. He writes about a history some of us lived through as if he also has personal knowledge, and gets it wrong. He writes about economics and gets it wrong. He is adopting pundit ways, writing about things of which he knows little as if he knows lots. He should stop.

[Potato Head]

When I read this week's Broder column I wondered the same thing about his implicit self-portrait from 1974. I was a teen Watergate junkie who lived in DC at the time and my most vivid recollection was the surprising LACK of support for the impeachment--or even invesigating Nixon--in the press. Even in the Washington Post, Woodward and Bernstein's reporting was initially relegated to the city pages (they were city reporters at the time) and given pariah status. It's really a rewrite of history to suggest that civic leaders were gung ho to hold Nixon accountable, until Alexander Butterfield's revelation of the White House taping system made protestations of Nixon's innocence untenable. And even then you had a significant chunk of the chattering classes arguing the Nixon's only mistake was not destroying the tapes.

[howard]

Potato Head, i've long said that the bush administration is staffed at senior levels by people who think the only thing nixon did wrong was to fail to burn the tapes.

[Reader]

Broder's comment on Obama and McCain "debating the 'patriotism issue. . .'" is outrageous as well:

"The threat outlined by the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation in its report, "E Pluribus Unum," strikes me as a bit exaggerated. But with Barack Obama and John McCain debating the 'patriotism issue,' having a coherent discussion of this matter -- and this short pamphlet is admirably written and well-researched -- is a useful contribution."

Perhaps Mr. Broder overlooked that this "coherent discussion" of "patriotism" is based on the Republicans' sleazy effort to question the patriotism of an African American with a foreign-sounding name.

[Reader]

At least Colbert King today saves a shred of reputation for the Post (see my comment on Broder, just above:

"Perhaps the most sobering aspect of Obama's speech on the eve of the nation's birthday was his need to defend his patriotism at all.

"It makes you wonder how Independence Day orators 150 years from now will look back upon this Fourth of July.

"What will they make of freedom-loving people who, at the dawn of America's fourth century as a nation, question the patriotism of a U.S. senator because he doesn't wear a flag pin in his lapel or because he has a name that doesn't sound like theirs?

"What will they say about our professed fidelity to religious freedom when they find out that many of the Americans who thank God for their religious liberty are also ready to turn their backs on a candidate if they think he is a Muslim or Mormon?

"Or because he's black?

"What, come to think of it, would Frederick Douglass think?"

[sglover]

"I like MY, mostly, but his wunderkind status as a thinker is tarnishing as he goes."

He's as much a part of the Atlantic's "death spiral" as Sullivan and McArdle and the rest of the "talent" there. The site isn't much worth a visit any more.

[jerry]

"He writes about economics and gets it wrong. He is adopting pundit ways, writing about things of which he knows little as if he knows lots."

Just to emphasize, the "crime" is not writing about things you don't know anything about. It's writing as though you do know lots. It's one reason why I think our touchstone *should* be reality, empirical, and with open discussions where we don't willy nilly call dissenters trolls, or racists, or misogynists.

And yes, one day Matthew Yglesias will be sitting in his Washington brownstone, enjoying the best parties, and busily protecting his village. And the shame is that this threatens to happen to most of our most successful progressive liberal bloggers. (One reason among many I would truly like to see Duncan Black run for *any* office. And I'd also love to learn that Digby has gotten a political/historical analyst job at KCRW.)