All a Schorr

I was able to hear a Daniel Schorr piece today on NPR, the thought that it brought to my mind was “The Hopeful Gospel Choir” from Prairie Home Companion. The subject was the evil Karl Rove. Whenever I hear the media talk of him I’m reminded of the movie “Spaceballs”, where the character “Dark Helmet” is a spoof of Darth Vader played by Rick Morainis. Rick is short and doesn’t look very evil, and his helmet is ridiculously large … one just can’t buy him as the nexus of evil, which is exactly the problem the media has with Carl Rove.

 It is clear they hate him, and why not? He was at least partially responsible for the election and re-election of the hated George Bush. The hatred drips a little too thickly though to try to retain any fig leaf of “we are unbiased”. When a picture of him is shown the thought of a cross between a cherub and Porky Pig comes to mind … not flattering of Karl, but not easy to picture as the nexus of evil.

I’ve come to the conclusion that one of the reasons that the media hates W so much is because they THINK that he does exactly what they do. It doesn’t dawn on them that he may believe, have evidence, or in a lot of cases be “right”, they assume that he is making it up and just saying it over and over like they usually do. A few examples:

1. “Clarence Thomas sexually harassed Anita Hill yet …”. Actually no, he made a couple of comments that nearly nobody would define as sexual harassment, even if the comments were made to their wife or daughter. 10 years before the accusation and she moved to two different jobs with him AFTER the supposed “incidents”.
2. “Bill Clinton was never guilty of anything but an affair between two consenting adults yet …” No in many and varied ways. The Paula Jones accusation, finally agreed to and apologized for and paid off by Bill was a case of a male governor dropping his trousers in front of a female employee and asking her to “kiss it”.  Even many liberals would find THAT to be sexual harassment if it was their wife or daughter. Not to mention perjury about the incident and others, forcibly fondling Kathleen Wille in a hallway at the White House and a host of other stuff. The media keeps repeating though … “meaningless waste of time”. 
3. “The Soviet Union is pretty much like the US and will be around as long (or longer as we are). We need to work with them rather than have some fantasy that they are an “Evil Empire” or “Are going away” … nuff said.
4. “There has never been any connection between Iraq and Al Quaeda” … “Iraq was never a threat to the US” … They may or may not believe some of these things, but repeating them over and over is no different than Bush using the opposite in a speech. There is certainly ample evidence to believe that there were and are connections, there may also be enough evidence for some to believe that there were and are none.

What the Schorr commentary does is postulate that:

1). There was never any evidence that Saddam was buying yellowcake in Niger (of course the British investigation, and in fact Joe Wilson himself reached the opposite conclusion until he started lying about it).

2). When Wilson made the claim that there was no evidence (even though it was later proven that he knew and reported that there WAS evidence), the Bush administration decided to “retaliate”.

Based on those two ludicrous assertions, stated as facts, it is “obvious” that the Bush administration would want to retaliate by “outing” a CIA agent that was not undercover and in fact drove into CIA headquarters every day ( I guess that would be DEEP cover) … if you are actually going in to work at a government agency, it is OBVIOUS that you don’t work there … government workers don’t actually go to work, they call in sick and goldbrick. The fact that she was driving into CIA headquarters would PROVE to anyone observing her that she was NOT a CIA agent … therefore the perfect cover for an actual undercover CIA agent. SIMPLE ! 

This is likely one of those things that those "inside the beltway" are aware of that those of us outside just don't understand.

The power of the media is great, but one would hope that this fantasy is a bridge too far. The idea that they are reduced to trying to take down Rove AFTER the re-election does a lot more to expose bias of an extreme nature than it does to shed any interesting light on anything else.