Keller Spins His Worst: With Charlie Rose, And Still No Definitive Explanation
(Special Note: Not to be outdone by myself, Marcie actually finishes the interview up in her post that immediately follows this one. It seems that she didn't want to be left out of the pinata party, not that I meant to do so.)
Yes, New York Times Executive Editor, Bill Keller, was on with Charlie Rose this week, and Duane at RadioBlogger was gracious enough to transcribe that interview so everyone could see how much of an inept rube Bill Keller portrays himself to be. I will, as always, interject commentary between the chosen pieces of transcript. If you want to read the whole thing, and I suggest you do, feel free to.
CR: How many times in the last year have you had to make a decision in which the government asked you not to publish?
BK: A couple of times. I mean, there are some of these choices that just come up in the course of events where nobody has to ask. You know, when you have reporters embedded with soldiers in Iraq, and they have access to operational intelligence, obviously we don't publish that. The two big ones obviously were this and the NSA eavesdropping story, where it went up to a pretty high level.
CR: In terms of the administration? Or in terms of the New York Times?
BK: Both.
CR: Okay. Just two times?
BK: Two that it came up to my level.
CR: Both times, you said publish.
BK: Both times I said publish.
Despite the administration asking them--numerous times--not to do so, Bill Keller still gave his paper the green light. That's called throwing caution to the wind in the Left's circle. We refer to it better as "I don't like you because you're going to get me killed."
CR: In one case, you held it for how long before you decided to publish?
BK: More than a year. The story that we published was different from the one that we had when we initially talked about publishing it, and it got better over that time. We learned more. You know, there's a kind of balancing act you do between the risks of publishing and the public service aspects of publishing, and that balance shifted substantially over the course of that year, which brought us to the point where we felt we could publish it.
Where THEY felt they could publish. And what, the administration and national security be damned? There's a word for this sort of demeanor. It's called arrogance. Without even the slightest regard to the security of America, Bill Keller gets to decide what is and isn't publishable? Who ALL died and made him president?
BK: Well, again, it's a balancing act. What is the public's value in getting this information out? And on the other hand, what are the concomitant risks, if any? We felt in this time, in this case, that the value of publishing it was that this program was part of a larger tendency on the part of the Bush administration to expand executive powers in the War On Terror without the kind of oversight that has been customary from Congress. That was the principal concern that people who knew of the program raised with us. On the other side, we felt that the administration's arguments that publishing would damage national security, in the end, were not very convincing, and...
CR: What was their argument? I mean, damage national security is a large word...
BK: Right.
CR: ...that we need to hear specifics.
BK: Right. Well, they, you know, damage to national security is something that you hear a lot.
CR: Exactly.
BK: I mean, there are people who will argue that writing about Abu Ghraib was damaging national security, because it's undermining morale.
Would Bill Keller care to share where anyone in the administration called the release of the Abu Ghraib story a matter of "national security?" To my recollection, the administration chastised the papers for making hoopla out of hubris, and pointed to the fact that, yes, such stories can hurt troop morale. Anmd that is most especially true when you have the MSM painting with a very broad brush. They, the MSM, indicted the military as a whole rather than the group of soldiers who abused those prisoners. And, for the uninformed (like Bill Keller, and apparently Charlie Rose), national security means exactly that. Anything concerning the safety and general well-being of the nation and its citizens. And by letting our enemies know--with epiphany-like specificity--they are being watched and listened to is a detriment to the efforts needed to protect this nation. The NSA program tracked Internet activity of our enemies. Does he think that al-Qaeda is more stupid than the people of this nation? Has he not watched how quickly movements can grow out of a grass-roots-like movement of people in this nation? I think that Harriet Miers, John Roberts, and even to a latter degree, Samuel Alito, elicited such a reaction. Hello? Is anyone home in Bill Keller's brain?
BK: They made two cases. The lesser of the two, and the one that was presented to me, really as something of an afterthought, was that this will inform terrorists of something that they don't know. I find it hard to believe that people at the Treasury Department and the White House really believe that, given that they have publicly testified repeatedly to the fact that they go after all the information they can get about international financial transactions that are behind terrorism.
Irrelevant to what they testified about. The point is that they didn't reveal the details that the New York Times did. Operational details is exactly what the terrorists didn't have. And the Times exposed that. Sure, everyone knows we're going to keep an eye on financial transactions. How does anyone think that we have nailed CAIR directors, one after another, but supporting terrorists abraod through their charity programs. but no one knew the scope of our actions, and that was the mitigating factor between admitting we are, and telling the world how we're doing it. For an editor, Bill Keller's pretty dense. And it also bears noting that Bill Keller's vaunted journalists--Eric Lichtblau and James Risen--proclaimed that this program was secret in their original story. Going back to the story itself there are six different times where the Times acknowledges this program was "secret," "classified," or "hidden" from the public's knowledge. (And that was just on the first page of the story, which Marcie posted.) So, in this answer, Bill Keller has seriously contradicted himself.
CR: Is there anything since this story broke that has been significant or had consequences? Do you know of anything that's changed because you published the story?
BK: No, I know of nothing that...well, of course, there's been a rather loud noise directed at us.
CR: Which is why you're here, yeah.
BK: But no. And so far, nobody in the administration, and no member of Congress that I'm aware of has claimed that any consequence has occurred as a result of this story, or any unpleasant consequence. And there's been...
CR: Well, have these bankers said we'll no longer participate in this, and therefore...because we don't believe that the U.S. government can keep secrets?
BK: No, but you know, you remember when we did the NSA eavesdropping story, one of the arguments made was well, this is going to embarrass the telecommunications companies, and they're going to stop giving us access to the nodes where the communications take place. And that hasn't happened, either, which was, I have to say, a track record that we took into account when we weighed the pros and cons of publishing this story.
The rancor directed at them is well-founded. People are ticked at them because they keep doing this sort of thing. And as long as the New York times continues to do this, they deserve every verbal beating they receive, and personally speaking, it's time to put these "three stooges" on a stand, and compel some testimony. Secondly, Bill Keller is a newspaper man, and yet he hasn't heard that the Belgians and the Canadians have pulled out of the program because it was exposed? Um, how stupid does one truly have to be to work at the Times? FrontPageMag's War Blog has the insight into the investigations, and the Arizona Republic had blurbs two weeks ago that both would suspend any activity with SWIFT until their investigations are done. Bill Keller's intellectually dishonest answer regarding the banking program is just that. It's a lie. They have, and we already have stories relating to that. And as for the NSA program, the telecommunications companies being embarrassed had nothing to do with the outrage over the Times story about that. No one that I'm aware of in the administration said anything about them being "embarrassed." There was outrage over the fact that, like the SWIFT story, the Times was releasing operational details, and that's where the crux of the arguments are coming from.
CR: That's interesting. You took that track record, meaning they had less credibility this time that they did the last time you had to make a call?
BK: I think that's fair to say, yes. We had been warned of dire consequences before, and they had not happened. That's not new, either. I mean, remember during the Pentagon Papers, we were warned that the publication of the secret history of the Vietnam War would enable the enemy to break codes, it would damage diplomatic alliances, and none of that happened.
Again, we have journalists bringing up legal matters that they know nothing about. The Pentagon Papers case was one that involved the government TELLING a media outlet that they COULDN'T run the story. The courts said that they could, and the government's response was unconstitutional. NO ONE in the Bush administration told them that they couldn't run the story. They asked them not to print it for matters of national security. Citing the Pentagon Papers is extremely deceitful as it has nothing to do with either of the stories the Times has run in the last six months.
CR: Okay, but why do you think they're angry? I mean, is it some...hey, why do you think they're angry? ...
BK: Some of it clearly is political. I mean, it...
CR: Political in what way?
BK: Well, you know, one of the more cynical members of my staff observed that a lot of the denunciations of the Times since this story published were from microphones at Republican Party fundraisers, you know, that beating up on the New York Times is red meat for a certain portion of the conservative base.
Whoa. Time out. I contribute to the RNC, and I receive invitations to GOP fundraisers. I have never heard anyone step up to a microphone and go after the Times at any of these functions. Sure there are people on the floor who gripe about the MSM in general (and aside from the MSM itself, who doesn't gripe about the media) but no one has stood up from the GOP and denounced the Times at a fundraiser. So I challenge Bill Keller to put up or shut up. Cite some instances where it has been done since the revelation of EITHER program.
CR: Okay. That's what I wanted to get at. Is it they're embarrassed by what?
BK: I think they're embarrassed by the fact that this is an administration that has put a high premium on holding its secrets close, and has not had a very good record of doing that.
The administration's embarrassed? That's his excuse for why the administration and Congress are upset? Oh please. Would it be equally embarrassing to the Times if one of their own went to a competitor and told them about a major news scoop the Times was working on? Heck no, the Times would be just as ticked as we are. And it would have nothing to do with embarrassment regarding an inability to keep things on the QT. Their anger, in such a situation, would be because someone opened their mouth and revealed their secret. That's why the administration is up in arms. They want the leakers stopped, but they also want the media to quit blowing the cover of these operations.
I'd like to note here that the Times has no problem brow-beating the administration over the Valerie Plame non-covert, low-level CIA analyst "scandal" (and I do use the term loosely because it is anything but a scandal), and yet they have no problem blowing these operations where a virtually incalcuable number of intelligence analysts and operatives are put at risk when they decide to flap their yaps.
CR: But that's no reason to be as angry as they are, and throwing around a word like treason, is it?
BK: You probably should ask the people who are yelling treason.
While I will admit that there have been a few people who have tossed around that word, the sensible people on our side of the aisle have not. No, we recognize that, in the essence of the law, the Times did break the law. They did receive, in essence, stolen goods (that being the classified material), and that they did knowingly and willfully publish it. By publishing it, they released material deemed secret by the government, of which they don't have the right to do that. So, is it treason? No. Did they break the law? Yes, and they should be held to account for it.
CR: You make the call. Was it because, as you said, it was a Bush administration, and last time they cried wolf, and there was no wolf?
BK: No. I think absent that experience, in this case, it would have been a close call, it was a close call, it might have been a closer call, but I think we still would have published. You know, we hold stuff out of the paper all the time when we believe that lives would be put at risk. That's just the responsible thing to do, and you know, it gets a lot of attention when you publish something they don't want, but you don't get any attention when you don't publish. But this just did not feel like one of those cases...
In other words, had the administration given the Times the worst case scenario of the fallout over this program, they still would have run with it. Bill Keller says basically that above. That's the bolded section up there. "I think we still would have published." Lord, you have to wonder how an inept buffoon like him got to the level of arrogance he possesses.
CR: Does it hurt them in any way that you published this story? In any way? I mean, are their friends going to say you can't keep secrets? Or is anybody going to say...
BK: Possibly. I think that's kind of what I meant by embarrassment. Not just before the American people, but it does probably make allies wonder a little bit about how porous this administration might be in the future.
OK, so to Bill Keller, the "embarrassment" the administration is feeling (which they aren't) is the highest consequence that he can think of? Am I getting that right? So, he doesn't think that by blowing the NSA program and the SWIFT program that the consequences wouldn't be, say, another attack on the US that wasn't preventable because the monkeys at the times kept blowing all of our classified programs to track these bastards down? That never crossed his mind? It seems to have crossed his mind about a week ago when he and Dan Baquet wrote the pathetic column for the LA Times talking about how they "aren't neutral" in this war, and how things like terrorism do matter to them. I guess he forgot about that, huh?
Look, to our readers, I implore you to read the whole thing. You will see an arrogant man trying to literally spin his way out of a jam he created, and has since tried to distance himself from. The Times, and other MSM outlets, seem to have this haughty chutzpah that they are above everyone else. That they are above even the elected representatives of the people. What they seem unable to grasp, or they are simply unwilling to do so, is that when you do things like this--when you release vital national security secrets--and our enemy is watching, they're going to find out. If Bill Keller thinks that our enemy could care less about what stories are written over here, he needs to rethink that.
Newsweek ran the phony story about a Koran being flushed down a toilet at Gitmo, and the Muslim world lost its mind. We have heard and seen video and audio of Osama bin Hidin' and Zarqawi utilizing similar talking points from our elected officials. We watched as the world fell under the weight of riots across the globe over the Mohammed cartoons, but few MSM sources chose to print them over here, out of fear of reprisal. To say that people outside the US don't read our newspapers, our magazines, or watch our news is a bubble mentality I can't even fathom. I don't graps the world these nutters live in.
But I can tell you one thing: His explanations are contradicotry. His spin isn't working. And the allegations he throws around regarding this program are lies. He's changed his story on the Times' actions more than John Kerry flip-flopped in 2004. Heck, he might have beaten John Kerry in that department in three weeks where Kerry's had a lifetime of flip-flops. But Bill Keller has no one to blame but himself. People aren't getting talking points from the White House. Solid people, such as the guys at PowerLine, Hugh Hewitt, Michelle Malkin, Captain Ed Morrissey, and Glenn Reynolds have taken the Times to task because they know what the Times has done. This is why the bloggers are the shock troops against the Times.
We know what they've done. We know why they've done it. And quite frankly, we're sick of them doing this. The time to hold them accountable is now. The administration must move to stop this sort of reporting, or it will continue. And one of these days, a report like that is going to get our soldiers or intelligence agents killed, or we're going to get hit again.
Publius II
(Special Note: Not to be outdone by myself, Marcie actually finishes the interview up in her post that immediately follows this one. It seems that she didn't want to be left out of the pinata party, not that I meant to do so.)
Yes, New York Times Executive Editor, Bill Keller, was on with Charlie Rose this week, and Duane at RadioBlogger was gracious enough to transcribe that interview so everyone could see how much of an inept rube Bill Keller portrays himself to be. I will, as always, interject commentary between the chosen pieces of transcript. If you want to read the whole thing, and I suggest you do, feel free to.
CR: How many times in the last year have you had to make a decision in which the government asked you not to publish?
BK: A couple of times. I mean, there are some of these choices that just come up in the course of events where nobody has to ask. You know, when you have reporters embedded with soldiers in Iraq, and they have access to operational intelligence, obviously we don't publish that. The two big ones obviously were this and the NSA eavesdropping story, where it went up to a pretty high level.
CR: In terms of the administration? Or in terms of the New York Times?
BK: Both.
CR: Okay. Just two times?
BK: Two that it came up to my level.
CR: Both times, you said publish.
BK: Both times I said publish.
Despite the administration asking them--numerous times--not to do so, Bill Keller still gave his paper the green light. That's called throwing caution to the wind in the Left's circle. We refer to it better as "I don't like you because you're going to get me killed."
CR: In one case, you held it for how long before you decided to publish?
BK: More than a year. The story that we published was different from the one that we had when we initially talked about publishing it, and it got better over that time. We learned more. You know, there's a kind of balancing act you do between the risks of publishing and the public service aspects of publishing, and that balance shifted substantially over the course of that year, which brought us to the point where we felt we could publish it.
Where THEY felt they could publish. And what, the administration and national security be damned? There's a word for this sort of demeanor. It's called arrogance. Without even the slightest regard to the security of America, Bill Keller gets to decide what is and isn't publishable? Who ALL died and made him president?
BK: Well, again, it's a balancing act. What is the public's value in getting this information out? And on the other hand, what are the concomitant risks, if any? We felt in this time, in this case, that the value of publishing it was that this program was part of a larger tendency on the part of the Bush administration to expand executive powers in the War On Terror without the kind of oversight that has been customary from Congress. That was the principal concern that people who knew of the program raised with us. On the other side, we felt that the administration's arguments that publishing would damage national security, in the end, were not very convincing, and...
CR: What was their argument? I mean, damage national security is a large word...
BK: Right.
CR: ...that we need to hear specifics.
BK: Right. Well, they, you know, damage to national security is something that you hear a lot.
CR: Exactly.
BK: I mean, there are people who will argue that writing about Abu Ghraib was damaging national security, because it's undermining morale.
Would Bill Keller care to share where anyone in the administration called the release of the Abu Ghraib story a matter of "national security?" To my recollection, the administration chastised the papers for making hoopla out of hubris, and pointed to the fact that, yes, such stories can hurt troop morale. Anmd that is most especially true when you have the MSM painting with a very broad brush. They, the MSM, indicted the military as a whole rather than the group of soldiers who abused those prisoners. And, for the uninformed (like Bill Keller, and apparently Charlie Rose), national security means exactly that. Anything concerning the safety and general well-being of the nation and its citizens. And by letting our enemies know--with epiphany-like specificity--they are being watched and listened to is a detriment to the efforts needed to protect this nation. The NSA program tracked Internet activity of our enemies. Does he think that al-Qaeda is more stupid than the people of this nation? Has he not watched how quickly movements can grow out of a grass-roots-like movement of people in this nation? I think that Harriet Miers, John Roberts, and even to a latter degree, Samuel Alito, elicited such a reaction. Hello? Is anyone home in Bill Keller's brain?
BK: They made two cases. The lesser of the two, and the one that was presented to me, really as something of an afterthought, was that this will inform terrorists of something that they don't know. I find it hard to believe that people at the Treasury Department and the White House really believe that, given that they have publicly testified repeatedly to the fact that they go after all the information they can get about international financial transactions that are behind terrorism.
Irrelevant to what they testified about. The point is that they didn't reveal the details that the New York Times did. Operational details is exactly what the terrorists didn't have. And the Times exposed that. Sure, everyone knows we're going to keep an eye on financial transactions. How does anyone think that we have nailed CAIR directors, one after another, but supporting terrorists abraod through their charity programs. but no one knew the scope of our actions, and that was the mitigating factor between admitting we are, and telling the world how we're doing it. For an editor, Bill Keller's pretty dense. And it also bears noting that Bill Keller's vaunted journalists--Eric Lichtblau and James Risen--proclaimed that this program was secret in their original story. Going back to the story itself there are six different times where the Times acknowledges this program was "secret," "classified," or "hidden" from the public's knowledge. (And that was just on the first page of the story, which Marcie posted.) So, in this answer, Bill Keller has seriously contradicted himself.
CR: Is there anything since this story broke that has been significant or had consequences? Do you know of anything that's changed because you published the story?
BK: No, I know of nothing that...well, of course, there's been a rather loud noise directed at us.
CR: Which is why you're here, yeah.
BK: But no. And so far, nobody in the administration, and no member of Congress that I'm aware of has claimed that any consequence has occurred as a result of this story, or any unpleasant consequence. And there's been...
CR: Well, have these bankers said we'll no longer participate in this, and therefore...because we don't believe that the U.S. government can keep secrets?
BK: No, but you know, you remember when we did the NSA eavesdropping story, one of the arguments made was well, this is going to embarrass the telecommunications companies, and they're going to stop giving us access to the nodes where the communications take place. And that hasn't happened, either, which was, I have to say, a track record that we took into account when we weighed the pros and cons of publishing this story.
The rancor directed at them is well-founded. People are ticked at them because they keep doing this sort of thing. And as long as the New York times continues to do this, they deserve every verbal beating they receive, and personally speaking, it's time to put these "three stooges" on a stand, and compel some testimony. Secondly, Bill Keller is a newspaper man, and yet he hasn't heard that the Belgians and the Canadians have pulled out of the program because it was exposed? Um, how stupid does one truly have to be to work at the Times? FrontPageMag's War Blog has the insight into the investigations, and the Arizona Republic had blurbs two weeks ago that both would suspend any activity with SWIFT until their investigations are done. Bill Keller's intellectually dishonest answer regarding the banking program is just that. It's a lie. They have, and we already have stories relating to that. And as for the NSA program, the telecommunications companies being embarrassed had nothing to do with the outrage over the Times story about that. No one that I'm aware of in the administration said anything about them being "embarrassed." There was outrage over the fact that, like the SWIFT story, the Times was releasing operational details, and that's where the crux of the arguments are coming from.
CR: That's interesting. You took that track record, meaning they had less credibility this time that they did the last time you had to make a call?
BK: I think that's fair to say, yes. We had been warned of dire consequences before, and they had not happened. That's not new, either. I mean, remember during the Pentagon Papers, we were warned that the publication of the secret history of the Vietnam War would enable the enemy to break codes, it would damage diplomatic alliances, and none of that happened.
Again, we have journalists bringing up legal matters that they know nothing about. The Pentagon Papers case was one that involved the government TELLING a media outlet that they COULDN'T run the story. The courts said that they could, and the government's response was unconstitutional. NO ONE in the Bush administration told them that they couldn't run the story. They asked them not to print it for matters of national security. Citing the Pentagon Papers is extremely deceitful as it has nothing to do with either of the stories the Times has run in the last six months.
CR: Okay, but why do you think they're angry? I mean, is it some...hey, why do you think they're angry? ...
BK: Some of it clearly is political. I mean, it...
CR: Political in what way?
BK: Well, you know, one of the more cynical members of my staff observed that a lot of the denunciations of the Times since this story published were from microphones at Republican Party fundraisers, you know, that beating up on the New York Times is red meat for a certain portion of the conservative base.
Whoa. Time out. I contribute to the RNC, and I receive invitations to GOP fundraisers. I have never heard anyone step up to a microphone and go after the Times at any of these functions. Sure there are people on the floor who gripe about the MSM in general (and aside from the MSM itself, who doesn't gripe about the media) but no one has stood up from the GOP and denounced the Times at a fundraiser. So I challenge Bill Keller to put up or shut up. Cite some instances where it has been done since the revelation of EITHER program.
CR: Okay. That's what I wanted to get at. Is it they're embarrassed by what?
BK: I think they're embarrassed by the fact that this is an administration that has put a high premium on holding its secrets close, and has not had a very good record of doing that.
The administration's embarrassed? That's his excuse for why the administration and Congress are upset? Oh please. Would it be equally embarrassing to the Times if one of their own went to a competitor and told them about a major news scoop the Times was working on? Heck no, the Times would be just as ticked as we are. And it would have nothing to do with embarrassment regarding an inability to keep things on the QT. Their anger, in such a situation, would be because someone opened their mouth and revealed their secret. That's why the administration is up in arms. They want the leakers stopped, but they also want the media to quit blowing the cover of these operations.
I'd like to note here that the Times has no problem brow-beating the administration over the Valerie Plame non-covert, low-level CIA analyst "scandal" (and I do use the term loosely because it is anything but a scandal), and yet they have no problem blowing these operations where a virtually incalcuable number of intelligence analysts and operatives are put at risk when they decide to flap their yaps.
CR: But that's no reason to be as angry as they are, and throwing around a word like treason, is it?
BK: You probably should ask the people who are yelling treason.
While I will admit that there have been a few people who have tossed around that word, the sensible people on our side of the aisle have not. No, we recognize that, in the essence of the law, the Times did break the law. They did receive, in essence, stolen goods (that being the classified material), and that they did knowingly and willfully publish it. By publishing it, they released material deemed secret by the government, of which they don't have the right to do that. So, is it treason? No. Did they break the law? Yes, and they should be held to account for it.
CR: You make the call. Was it because, as you said, it was a Bush administration, and last time they cried wolf, and there was no wolf?
BK: No. I think absent that experience, in this case, it would have been a close call, it was a close call, it might have been a closer call, but I think we still would have published. You know, we hold stuff out of the paper all the time when we believe that lives would be put at risk. That's just the responsible thing to do, and you know, it gets a lot of attention when you publish something they don't want, but you don't get any attention when you don't publish. But this just did not feel like one of those cases...
In other words, had the administration given the Times the worst case scenario of the fallout over this program, they still would have run with it. Bill Keller says basically that above. That's the bolded section up there. "I think we still would have published." Lord, you have to wonder how an inept buffoon like him got to the level of arrogance he possesses.
CR: Does it hurt them in any way that you published this story? In any way? I mean, are their friends going to say you can't keep secrets? Or is anybody going to say...
BK: Possibly. I think that's kind of what I meant by embarrassment. Not just before the American people, but it does probably make allies wonder a little bit about how porous this administration might be in the future.
OK, so to Bill Keller, the "embarrassment" the administration is feeling (which they aren't) is the highest consequence that he can think of? Am I getting that right? So, he doesn't think that by blowing the NSA program and the SWIFT program that the consequences wouldn't be, say, another attack on the US that wasn't preventable because the monkeys at the times kept blowing all of our classified programs to track these bastards down? That never crossed his mind? It seems to have crossed his mind about a week ago when he and Dan Baquet wrote the pathetic column for the LA Times talking about how they "aren't neutral" in this war, and how things like terrorism do matter to them. I guess he forgot about that, huh?
Look, to our readers, I implore you to read the whole thing. You will see an arrogant man trying to literally spin his way out of a jam he created, and has since tried to distance himself from. The Times, and other MSM outlets, seem to have this haughty chutzpah that they are above everyone else. That they are above even the elected representatives of the people. What they seem unable to grasp, or they are simply unwilling to do so, is that when you do things like this--when you release vital national security secrets--and our enemy is watching, they're going to find out. If Bill Keller thinks that our enemy could care less about what stories are written over here, he needs to rethink that.
Newsweek ran the phony story about a Koran being flushed down a toilet at Gitmo, and the Muslim world lost its mind. We have heard and seen video and audio of Osama bin Hidin' and Zarqawi utilizing similar talking points from our elected officials. We watched as the world fell under the weight of riots across the globe over the Mohammed cartoons, but few MSM sources chose to print them over here, out of fear of reprisal. To say that people outside the US don't read our newspapers, our magazines, or watch our news is a bubble mentality I can't even fathom. I don't graps the world these nutters live in.
But I can tell you one thing: His explanations are contradicotry. His spin isn't working. And the allegations he throws around regarding this program are lies. He's changed his story on the Times' actions more than John Kerry flip-flopped in 2004. Heck, he might have beaten John Kerry in that department in three weeks where Kerry's had a lifetime of flip-flops. But Bill Keller has no one to blame but himself. People aren't getting talking points from the White House. Solid people, such as the guys at PowerLine, Hugh Hewitt, Michelle Malkin, Captain Ed Morrissey, and Glenn Reynolds have taken the Times to task because they know what the Times has done. This is why the bloggers are the shock troops against the Times.
We know what they've done. We know why they've done it. And quite frankly, we're sick of them doing this. The time to hold them accountable is now. The administration must move to stop this sort of reporting, or it will continue. And one of these days, a report like that is going to get our soldiers or intelligence agents killed, or we're going to get hit again.
Publius II
posted by Syd And Vaughn | 11:56 PM
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