That phrase haunts me, a phrase I heard throughout the presidential campaign during 1999 and 2000 from friends and acquaintances as their rationale for voting in a president who didn’t have much on the ball.
From The New York Times review of Seymour Hersh’s book, Chain of Command: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/17/books/review/17IGNATIE.html?8bu
Quote, by MICHAEL IGNATIEFF for the NYT:
"At the end of the book, Hersh confesses that he still hasn't got the whole story. 'There is so much about this presidency that we don't know, and may never learn,'' he writes. 'How did they do it? How did eight or nine neoconservatives who believed that war in Iraq was the answer to international terrorism get their way? How did they redirect the government and rearrange longstanding American priorities and policies with so much ease? How did they overcome the bureaucracy, intimidate the press, mislead the Congress and dominate the military? Is our democracy that fragile?'
"Yes, our democracy is that fragile. Checks and balances in the American constitutional system are functioning poorly. With some creditable exceptions -- Senators Byrd, Kennedy, Biden come to mind -- Congress did not subject the case for war to critical scrutiny. The courts deferred for too long to presidential authority, and only now with the recent Supreme Court decision, on the rights of enemy combatants at Guantanamo Bay, that ''a state of war is not a blank check for the president,' have they begun to claw back some of their prerogatives of judicial review. Nor, in the lead-up to war, did the press, Hersh included, subject the administration case on weapons of mass destruction to the critical scrutiny it cried out for. They were taken for a ride, and so were we.
"What we have learned since, however, about the secret war fought in our name and to our discredit, we owe to reporters, chief among them Sy Hersh. This book reminds us why tough, skeptical journalism matters so much: it helps to keep us free."
I can’t help but continue to point my disturbed, restless finger at our fourth estate, the press, the profession of journalism. I wonder if there are any journalists still standing to follow in Hersh’s footsteps. If there are any good people left in the profession, when they fell the trees of dishonesty and injustice, we damn well better be in the forest to hear the crash.
