As a point of historical interest, let me amplify the point I make over at the Examiner and below about the netroots and Lieberman.

Note that today, there are a number of explanations as to why Lieberman was opposed and why the blogs came out against him.

Let me refer you to a key blog post (from back in January; I saved it when it was new) by Matt Stoller at MyDD.

Believe it or not, I’m not sold on a primary challenge to Lieberman.  As I have written before, Connecticut is a machine state; facing down a machine is not easy.

The issues Matt raises go more to the risks to the progressive blogsphere

We face real risks should we pick this fight. The progressive blogosphere is right now facing a crisis of legitimacy. Though blogs funneled massive amounts of money to Kerry in 2004, to the DNC when Dean was elected, and to individual candidates, we are seen as disorganized, immature and incoherent. We tend not to break through to the established media. Big donors do not fund us, unlike all the other groups in the party. We truly are on our own. Our latent allies – Dean, Reid, Slaughter – cannot work through us because we don’t bring enough to the table. Contrast this to Redstate, which has around 20,000 readers, around 2% of the traffic of Daily Kos, yet has played some role in the current House leadership election contest. They know politics, they take politics seriously, and they are taken seriously as a result. They also have advantages we do not – the founders of Redstate were already members of the Republican political elite.

and he’s not sure why Joe should be challenged

Yet, in picking this fight against Lieberman, we’re not really running ‘on’ something. I see no thread of articulated principles here that would justify a Lieberman challenge. The Sierra Club at least looks at your environmental record. What do we look at? The number of times someone has reiterated right-wing frames? What are we looking for in a candidate, that Lieberman isn’t? I’m looking for principles here, things to wrap ourselves in.

If we are making demands, which supporting a primary challenger is doing, what are they? If we simply make the demand that a candidate not be Lieberman, then what kind of legitimacy does that confer on us as a group? How can other politicians follow that lead? They can’t. And if we are demanding leadership from our party, and from our political system as a whole, we have to show some ourselves.

The he updates, based on the comments (and you should read them all)

UPDATE: I’m really liking the comments so far. Three points in particular are principles that define what he does that we do not like:

– His support for policies that are ruining America’s military and standing in the world
– His support for borrow and spend policies that are bringing the American economy to a grinding halt
– His failure to hold the executive branch accountable

So if I can restate the three reasons:

a) He supports the war;
b) He’s supported Bush’s fiscally irresponsible budget policies;
c) He isn’t vehement enough in opposing Bush (which really reflects back to a) and b) in my view)

Hmmm. The short answer is that he isn’t fighting Bush as hard as he can.

One of the posts linked to in Matt’s piece is by Mark Schmitt at the Decembrist (great blog title, btw):

Another line was certainly crossed by Joe Lieberman last week, when he said, “It’s time for Democrats who distrust President Bush to acknowledge that he will be the commander in chief for three more critical years and that in matters of war we undermine presidential credibility at our nation’s peril.”

Well, if like I and a few others do, you think there is an actual war on, you have a fine tightrope to walk as the opposition party. You need to oppose, but you also ostensibly have some obligation to the greater national loyalty you are supposed to feel ahead of your party loyalty.

Hmmmm. And that’s why Lieberman is being pushed off the island. Because he feels a greater loyalty to the national interest than to his party interest,

Now I’d be remiss in pointing out that Bush has left himself open to this by his abject failure to – as I’ve said in the past – sell the war, reach across the aisle and realize that this is an effort that will continue long after he’s out of office, and that the Democrats need to be brought along as well.

But in the context of Pelosi’s threat to push Jane Harman off of the Intelligence Committee, the only conclusion I can draw is that to be a good Democrat these days, it’s all for the good of the party.

I’ve been swamped this last week and over the weekend, so have been remiss in a couple areas here – one of them replying to Rev Sensing (sorry, I owe you a response…), and in mentioning that Mark Tapscott approached me last week and asked if I’d contribute occasional pieces to the Examiner chain as a member of their ‘Blogger Board’. The group includes Jeralyn Merritt – with whom I’ve had some serious disagreements, but who stepped up and wrote a great response to the whole Deb Frisch embarrassment. Others include Dan Gillmor, Ed from Captain’s Quarters, Betsy Newmark and others I don’t have the time to look up just now (I’ve got a package to mail to Iraq).

So I dashed off a piece to see if I could get some feedback on whether it was the kind of thing they were looking for, and darn if they didn’t go and publish it…

…it’s on Joe Lieberman and the ‘marching off the cliff’ wing of the Democratic Party, who think they will win by beating him in the primary and forcing him to run – and likely win – as an Independent. If I’d had more time, I’d have added the image that was really in the back of my mind when I wrote it – the Black Knight from ‘Holy Grail.

It’s less polished than I wish, and I promise to do better next time. Check it out and let me know how.

Rev. Sensing, in his post below, sets out the difficulty in replacing oil as a means of providing and distributing energy.

I’ll agree – that replacing oil in one swell foop is somewhere between unlikely and impossible.

But I don’t think that matters; I think he’s asking the wrong question. Let’s step back for a second and talk about what problem we’re really trying to solve.

Let me do a fast gloss on my position on global warming (something I haven’t blogged on before because it kept coming out as a PhD dissertation by someone who didn’t know the subject).

It’s happening.

It’s not clear how much is anthropogenic (although the answer is probably a lot), and it’s not clear what the impact on climate would be if we just stopped producing CO2 tomorrow.

It is clear that it doesn’t matter, because we’re not going to. Neither, to agree with Friedman here, are we going to take on the pain of cutting our carbon emissions enough or fast enough to impact climate in the next decade. And if we did, the ensuing economic collapse would probably kill more people than climate change will.

That may or may not matter so some deep greens; but since the odds of it happening are about where the odds of asteroid collision in the next decade are, I think we can shelve that concept.

The fact that we can’t do enough doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do something. Even if you’re a die-hard skeptic, wondering why there is global warming on Mars if there are no SUV’s (there is, by the way), it makes sense to look hard at our energy economy.

From my point of view, there are three reasons energy is worth some serious investment:

1. Slow the rate of carbon emissions, in the off chance that they will have an impact on global warming.

2. Slow the rate of investment in jihad by the oil-rich Arab states, who have been the principal financiers of the spread of the core religious ideology that – when combined with alienation and anomie – leads to recruits who blow themselves and others up.

3. Shelter our domestic energy infrastructure from disruption – whether through embargo, terrorism, or system disruption caused by error or chance.

The goal is to have cheap, low-impact, sustainable, and local supplies of energy. Cheap to maximize the benfit to our economy and the disruption to the Saudi economy; low-impact because if it involves massive changes in infrastructure or behavior it won;t happen; sustainable because we’re not looking for a one-time hit, but for an energy economy that can keep going indefinitely; and local because when all other things are equal, local energy supplies are more efficient (less transmission loss) and harder to disrupt.

The cheapest, lowest impact, most sustainable, and most local form of energy production is what the utilities call ‘negawatts’ – energy we are currently using that can readily be saved though investment or changes in behavior.

Before everyone starts painting pictures of unheated Stalinist apartment blocks, filled with people wearing dingy clothes (no hat water to wash in) walking down ten flights to catch the smoky diesel tram to work – or the positive vision of the same image, which is hemp-clad families hopping onto their bicycles to commute the five miles to their office above the day care center – feature this:

(I’ve told this story before, so forgive me) Six years ago, I needed a new car to replace the minivan I gave my ex- in the divorce. I had three sons, we camp and ski, and so the mandate was three rows of seats (so I don’t have to Tase them too often on long trips) with space in back to put the plastic Tupperware boxes of gear that we travel with.

There were only three cars (plus several 12-passenger vans) that fit the requirement. Ford Excursion, Chevy or GMC Suburban, and a Honda Odyssey minivan.

The Excursion was Right Out. It came down to the Suburban or the Odyssey.

I chose the Odyssey, and never looked back. It has been fun to drive, reliable as a brick, easy to park, and worked in every kind of environment I’ve tossed at it, from taking TG and me to the opera or taking three heavily armed men to the dire road leading to Gunsite for a class.

And – I saved about 42% of the gas I would have used. The Suburban, with the base engine, gets 14.7mpg EPA; over the 110,000 miles I’ve driven, I’d have used 7,483 gallons. In the Honda – using the EPA figure of 25mpg, I used 4,395. And I sacrificed – what, exactly? Self-image? Not terribly much.

It’s a small thing, but the error I think that Sensing (and others) are making is that they are looking for One Big solution when in reality there are a hundred small ones. This idea – substituting minivans for SUV’s is a small idea, but there are probably hundreds of them – ideas big enough to have an impact but small enough to be doable without changing the whole world.

So, over the last six years, we’ve sold about 40 million SUV’s (figure roughly 50% of new car sales of 14 million units/ year – not a figure I’ve checked, but it’s close to correct).

So 21 million SUV’s (half the number sold) times six years (duration) times 3,000 gallons – we would have saved 58 BILLION gallons of gasoline if everyone who had bought a SUV bought a minivan instead. Yes, the numbers are approximate and skewed because not all SUV’s are as thirsty as a Suburban…but not all minivans are as thirsty as an Odyssey.

To put that into some kind of reference, the annual gasoline consumption in the US for 2005 (US DOE Energy Information Agency) was about 3.33 billion barrels, or 140 billion gallons (42 ga to a barrel). We would have saved about 10 billion gallons/year (total savings/6) or 7% of our gasoline budget with that one change.

That’s about 3% of our national energy budget. Just from driving minivans.

Are there ten changes like that which we could make?

Here’s one more vehicle-related one.

Back when I was a young violator of the California Vehicle Code, I had a hopped-up BMW 2002. It was a quick car for the day, and it did 0-60 in about 10 seconds. A 1969 Porsche 911 did it in about 8.5 or 9.

My Odyssey does it in 10.3. A Subaru Legacy does it in about 7.5 seconds, and a Legacy GT does it in about 5.5.

We’re consuming all the great engineering that has been done in the last 30 years in a mix of higher performance, lower emissions and better fuel economy.

What would happen if we simply cranked the dial back to the performance levels of the 70’s or 80’s? How much better would the fuel economy of these modern engines be? Another 3%?

At what cost?

Look this is a long post, but it’s meant to do one thing – to cast some doubt on Rev. Sensing’s certainty.

I don’t think we need a Big Bang energy solution – yet.

I do think there are a lot of little ones we could do – while still leading our suburban lifestyles – that would get us a lot of the way there.

Where would you find 3% in our energy budget?
–

So both motorcycles are down this week – one needs a battery (will fix it today) and one needs new tires (on order), so I commuted to work in the car yesterday.

My current project is in Hollywood, about 30 miles from home, and there is, flatly, no good way to get there by car. So on the way home last night, I was highly interested in the traffic news, which took me to AM radio in search of traffic information and left me gobsmacked by my first exposure to major talk radio.

I haven’t sat and listened to Rush Limbaugh, or even Hugh Hewitt (who seems like a nice guy in person) before. And what I caught was the opening of the Michael Savage Show.

What a f**king poltroon. Every time I get irritated at something stupid a blogger says, I now have to remind myself that “at least Blogger X is smarter and saner than Michael Savage.”He made four points while I was listening:

1. He’s really smart and successful (and, I presume, good in bed).

2. Condi Rice is the worst Secretary of State in the modern era, and we should have brought in an Arabic-speaking male Middle East expert instead.

3. We should have launched a conventional strike on all the North Korean missile facilities before they launched this week. (Actually, his comment was “Why do we have all these great aircraft carriers if we’re not going to use them…”)

4. He’s got some minor health issues caused by the stress of his show, and he thought about quitting, but once he thought about the F-18 pilots on the carrier he just visited, he realized that they sacrifice, and so he has to sacrifice as well.

Here are my quick comments:

1. No, he’s not (smart). I can’t speak to his success, but he’s not as successful as Paris Hilton…and as to his prowess in bed, his tone reminded me of nothing so much as this.

2. I’ll skip over the notion that all the Arabic-speaking diplomats are typically Arabists – and thus have the pro-Arab biases typical of the class – and I’ll point out that Rice has actually done a brilliant job of dealing with reassembling the Western Alliance. And that as a conservative who is opposed to Islamism, he ought to be thrilled at the frisson of discomfort the Arab males must face when they sit across from a black woman who has the power to give or deny what they want.

3. He’s out of his fucking mind. We’d have handed the Chinese a huge diplomatic victory, accomplished very little – given the state of the Nork missile program, put Seoul at risk, and handed the Arab countries a great talking point on how unilateral and trigger-happy we are.

Wimps pick fights. Strong, smart people choose them. There’s no reason to go military with North Korea today, except to relieve the humanitarian crisis that the Gulag Nation represents. It will collapse sooner or later – and our goal should be to see that it collapses sooner.

And I love the “we own them, why not use them?” We own a bunch of ICBM’s too…and I don’t see why that wouldn’t apply as well, if your brain is as small as his is.

4. This is perfectly in keeping with the rampant ego we see in #1 – of course he’s sacrificing as much as the troops by collecting his half a million while fighting the brutal case of hemorrhoids or shingles or whatever brutal stress-induced disease he’s battling. I can’t imagine a more arrogant, thoughtless, brainless position to take. That’s like me saying that the cut in pay I took to work with Spirit of America was the moral equivalent of serving in Iraq. Hint: no it wasn’t and no, his suffering isn’t either.

Writing this, I just recalled who it is that he really reminded me of:

It’s a useful image to keep in mind for dealing with arrogant fools.

Sorry for the silence; it’s been a long road trip and we’re home to massive housework and work-type work.

Into Northern California, where I got to live a dream and officiate at a wedding. Why a dream, you ask?

Because when I was standing in front of the bride and groom and their assembled family and friends, the first word out of my mouth was “Maawwiage…”

A great time was had by all (lots more later), and then off to Sacramento and a visit with some more dear friends up there. Lots of political chat, mixed with awful puns, rafting, massive eating and somehow I got roped into gardening. Digging holes, anyway.

…somehow very reminiscent of blogging, I’m not sure why. Watch this space, we’ll have more soon.

Today, the editors of the New York Times and Los Angeles Times jointly published a statement on their publication on and exposure of the SWIFT monitoring program.

It’s available both on the NY Times’ and LA Times’ sites. Go read it, and come back when you’re done.

The statement makes three basic points, I think.

First, as editors they think really hard about publishing classified information, and they give the government the opportunity to talk them out of it.

Then, we listen. No article on a classified program gets published until the responsible officials have been given a fair opportunity to comment. And if they want to argue that publication represents a danger to national security, we put things on hold and give them a respectful hearing. Often, we agree to participate in off-the-record conversations with officials so they can make their case without fear of spilling more secrets onto our front pages.

Finally, we weigh the merits of publishing against the risks of publishing. There is no magic formula, no neat metric for either the public’s interest or the dangers of publishing sensitive information. We make our best judgment.

Second, that they have a stake in the fight against terrorism as well, because they live in the cities attacked, because their reporters are at risk in the war zones, and because the freedom the terrorists want to destroy is what offers them (the free press) room to operate.

Make no mistake, journalists have a large and personal stake in the country’s security. We live and work in cities that have been tragically marked as terrorist targets. Reporters and photographers from both of our papers braved the collapsing towers of the World Trade Center to convey the horror to the world. We have correspondents today alongside troops on the front lines in Iraq and Afghanistan. Others risk their lives in a quest to understand the terrorist threat; Daniel Pearl of the Wall Street Journal was murdered on such a mission. We, and the people who work for us, are not neutral in the struggle against terrorism.

But the virulent hatred espoused by terrorists, judging by their literature, is directed not just against our people and our buildings. It is also aimed at our values, at our freedoms and at our faith in the self-government of an informed electorate. If freedom of the press makes some Americans uneasy, it is anathema to the ideologists of terror.

Third, they point out that the government always wants to keep secrets, and that they are the bulwark against the government abusing those powers.

Thirty-five years ago Friday, in the Supreme Court ruling that stopped the government from suppressing the secret Vietnam War history called the Pentagon Papers, Justice Hugo Black wrote: “The government’s power to censor the press was abolished so that the press would remain forever free to censure the government. The press was protected so that it could bare the secrets of the government and inform the people.”

As that sliver of judicial history reminds us, the conflict between the government’s passion for secrecy and the press’ drive to reveal is not of recent origin. This did not begin with the Bush administration, although the polarization of the electorate and the daunting challenge of terrorism have made the tension between press and government as clamorous as at any time since Justice Black wrote.

Our job, especially in times like these, is to bring our readers information that will enable them to judge how well their elected leaders are fighting on their behalf, and at what price.

These are all honorable arguments, made by honorable men. But there is, in my mind, a gaping hole in them, and the absence signified by that hole is truly significant.

And yes, I do think that the free press can and must serve as a check on governmental power.

And yes, they’re not neutral in the struggle against terrorism, but if they saw themselves first and foremost as citizens – as Ernie Pyle did in his war reporting, as Joe Galloway did in his – would the question even come up?

Let me restate one of their central points in terms I wish they had used. (Changes have been bolded).

Make no mistake, journalists have a large and personal stake in our country’s security. We are citizens of this Republic, and live and work in cities that have been tragically marked as terrorist targets. Reporters and photographers from both of our papers braved the collapsing towers of the World Trade Center to convey the horror to the world. We have correspondents today alongside troops on the front lines in Iraq and Afghanistan. Others risk their lives in a quest to understand the terrorist threat; Daniel Pearl of the Wall Street Journal was murdered on such a mission. We, and the people who work for us, are not neutral in the struggle against terrorism, we are citizens and supporters of the United States.

It’s a minor shift in tone, but a telling one. And the sad joke is that I can’t imagine Keller or Boquet making that shift in tone, which is why I’m so upset at this, and I imagine so many others are as well.

Look, let me put it another way.

I have a younger brother. As brothers do, we have said and done harsh things to each other; out of good intentions and bad, out of the full range of what brothers and families do to each other. Some of the things said and done would be unforgivable, if done by someone else.

Why the double standard?

Because I know my brother loves me, and he knows I love him. Our loyalty to each other has not ever been in question.

Similarly, if journalists did not see themselves as having no higher loyalty than to the story – remember, here’s Mike Wallace:

“No,” Wallace said flatly and immediately. “You don’t have a higher duty. No. No. You’re a reporter!”

…their protests might not ring as hollow.

There’s a much larger issue here in terms of the assumption that the kind of unchecked legal freedom in our country can work without the soft restraints of social and political obligation.

Previous thoughts here and here.

I can’t believe I missed the news that Rob Smith, better known as Acidman Mars on his blog ‘Gut Rumbles‘ died.

Rob and I had some ding-dong blog discussions back when I was a sprout. Here’s something I said about him then:

You want ballsy honesty, you want the truth?? Yeah, you can handle the truth, and here it is.

There are more Acidmans in the world than we recognize. Not nearly as many as I wish there were…

Somehow, I’m picturing Acidman and Denise Denton sitting at a bar, drinking Bourbon and Scotch…I’d pay-per-view that discussion, for sure.

I’m off for the weekend, headed north for a wedding. I may or may not have time to do any blogging; if I’m off the air this weekend please remember not to kill each other or blow anything major up while I’m away.

I want to take a few minutes and expand on my thinking about why the NY Times and LA Times were so wrong to publish the story about the SWIFT monitoring program.

I don’t think that the newspapers are treasonous, or doing this solely in an effort to thwart President Bush (i.e. I don’t think that a Democratic president would be getting a free ride right now). That doesn’t mean that the impacts of what they are doing doesn’t damage the country, put lives at risk, or negatively impact President Bush’s effectiveness.

I think, in simple terms, that they have forgotten that they are citizens, and that they have an obligation to the polity that goes beyond writing the good story. I don’t think they are alone; I think that many people and institutions in the country today have forgotten they are citizens, whether they are poor residents of New Orleans defrauding FEMA or corporate chieftains who are maximizing their bonuses at the expense of a healthy economy.

But that’s another blog post.

I wrote about journalism and citizenship back in February, and one of the examples I cited was James Fallows’ story about a conference in 1987 held at Montclair State College as a part of a PBS series called “Ethics in America”.This conference was about the ethical issues involved in being in the military, and one of the discussions involved media superstars Mike Wallace and Peter Jennings. Here’s Fallows:

Then Ogletree turned to the two most famous members of the evening’s panel, better known than William Westmoreland himself. These were two star TV journalists: Peter Jennings of World News Tonight and ABC, and Mike Wallace of 6o Minutes and CBS. Ogletree brought them into the same hypothetical war. He asked Jennings to imagine that he worked for a network that had been in contact with the enemy North Kosanese government. After much pleading, the North Kosanese had agreed to let Jennings and his news crew into their country, to film behind the lines and even travel with military units. Would Jennings be willing to go? Of course, Jennings replied. Any reporter would-and in real wars reporters from his network often had. But while Jennings and his crew are traveling with a North Kosanese unit, to visit the site of an alleged atrocity by American and South Kosanese troops, they unexpectedly cross the trail of a small group of American and South Kosanese soldiers. With Jennings in their midst, the northern soldiers set up a perfect ambush, which will let them gun down the Americans and Southerners, every one. What does Jennings do? Ogletree asks. Would he tell his cameramen to “Roll tape!” as the North Kosanese opened fire? What would go through his mind as he watched the North Kosanese prepare to ambush the Americans? Jennings sat silent for about fifteen seconds after Ogletree asked this question. “Well, I guess I wouldn’t,” he finally said. “I am going to tell you now what I am feeling, rather than the hypothesis I drew for myself. If I were with a North Kosanese unit that came upon Americans, I think that I personally would do what I could to warn the Americans.” Even if it means losing the story? Ogletree asked.

Even though it would almost certainly mean losing my life, Jennings replied. “But I do not think that I could bring myself to participate in that act. That’s purely personal, and other reporters might have a different reaction.” Immediately Mike Wallace spoke up. “I think some other reporters would have a different reaction,” he said, obviously referring to himself. “They would regard it simply as a story they were there to cover.” “I am astonished, really,” at Jennings’s answer, Wallace said a moment later. He turned toward Jennings and began to lecture him: “You’re a reporter. Granted you’re an American”-at least for purposes of the fictional example; Jennings has actually retained Canadian citizenship. “I’m a little bit at a loss to understand why, because you’re an American, you would not have covered that story.” Ogletree pushed Wallace. Didn’t Jennings have some higher duty, either patriotic or human, to do something other than just roll film as soldiers from his own country were being shot? “No,” Wallace said flatly and immediately. “You don’t have a higher duty. No. No. You’re a reporter!” Jennings backtracked fast. Wallace was right, he said. “I chickened out.” Jennings said that he had gotten so wrapped up in the hypothetical questions that he had lost sight of his journalistic duty to remain detached. As Jennings said he agreed with Wallace, everyone else in the room seemed to regard the two of them with horror. Retired Air Force general Brent Scowcroft, who had been Gerald Ford’s national security advisor and would soon serve in the same job for George Bush, said it was simply wrong to stand and watch as your side was slaughtered. “What’s it worth?” he asked Wallace bitterly. “It’s worth thirty seconds on the evening news, as opposed to saving a platoon.” Ogletree turned to Wallace. What about that? Shouldn’t the reporter have said something? Wallace gave his most disarming grin, shrugged his shoulders and spread his palms wide in a “Don’t ask me!” gesture, and said, “I don’t know.” He was mugging to the crowd in such a way that he got a big laugh-the first such moment of the discussion. Wallace paused to enjoy the crowd’s reaction. Jennings, however, was all business, and was still concerned about the first answer he had given. “I wish I had made another decision,” Jennings said, as if asking permission to live the last five minutes over again. “I would like to have made his decision”-that is, Wallace’s decision to keep on filming. A few minutes later Ogletree turned to George M. Connell, a Marine colonel in full uniform, jaw muscles flexing in anger, with stress on each word, Connell looked at the TV stars and said, “I feel utter . . . contempt. ” Two days after this hypothetical episode, Connell Jennings or Wallace might be back with the American forces–and could be wounded by stray fire, as combat journalists often had been before. The instant that happened he said, they wouldn’t be “just journalists” any more. Then they would drag them back, rather than leaving them to bleed to death on the battlefield. “We’ll do it!” Connell said. “And that is what makes me so contemptuous of them. Marines will die going to get … a couple of journalists.” The last few words dripped with disgust. Not even Ogletree knew what to say. There was dead silence for several seconds. Then a square-jawed man with neat gray hair and aviator glasses spoke up. It was Newt Gingrich, looking a generation younger and trimmer than when he became Speaker of the House in I995. One thing was clear from this exercise, he said: “The military has done a vastly better ‘job of systematically thinking through the ethics of behavior in a violent environment than the journalists have.” That was about the mildest way to put it. Peter Jennings and Mike Wallace are just two individuals, but their reactions spoke volumes about the values of their craft. Jennings was made to feel embarrassed about his natural, decent human impulse. Wallace was completely unembarrassed about feeling no connection to the soldiers in his country’s army considering their deaths before his eyes as “simply a story.” In other important occupations people sometimes need to do the horrible. Frederick Downs [an earlier speaker who had discussed the ethics of torture and battlefield interrogation], after all, was willing to torture a man and hear him scream. But had thought through all the consequences and alternatives, and he knew he would live with the horror for the rest of his days. When Mike Wallace said he would do something horrible, he didn’t bother to argue a rationale. He did not try to explain the reasons a reporter might feel obliged to remain silent as the attack began–for instance, that in combat reporters must be beyond country, or that they have a duty to bear impartial witness to deaths on either side, or that Jennings had implicitly made a promise not to betray the North Kosanese when he agreed to accompany them on the hypothetical patrol. The soldiers might or might not have found such arguments convincing, but Wallace didn’t even make them. He relied on charm and star power to win acceptance from the crowd. Mike Wallace on patrol with the North Kosanese, cameras rolling while his countrymen are gunned down, recognizing no “higher duty” to interfere in any way and offering no rationale beyond “I’m with the press”–this is a nice symbol for what Americans hate about their media establishment in our age.

That’s a long quote, so let me pull out two key quotes from it that, to me sum up the nub of the issue.

Mike Wallace:

“I am astonished, really,” at Jennings’s answer, Wallace said a moment later. He turned toward Jennings and began to lecture him: “You’re a reporter. Granted you’re an American”-at least for purposes of the fictional example; Jennings has actually retained Canadian citizenship. “I’m a little bit at a loss to understand why, because you’re an American, you would not have covered that story.” Ogletree pushed Wallace. Didn’t Jennings have some higher duty, either patriotic or human, to do something other than just roll film as soldiers from his own country were being shot? “No,” Wallace said flatly and immediately. “You don’t have a higher duty. No. No. You’re a reporter!“

[emphasis added]

Col. George M. Connell:

“I feel utter . . . contempt. ” Two days after this hypothetical episode, Connell Jennings or Wallace might be back with the American forces–and could be wounded by stray fire, as combat journalists often had been before. The instant that happened he said, they wouldn’t be “just journalists” any more. Then they would drag them back, rather than leaving them to bleed to death on the battlefield. “We’ll do it!” Connell said. “And that is what makes me so contemptuous of them. Marines will die going to get … a couple of journalists.” The last few words dripped with disgust.

The problem is, simply, that journalists are part of a larger society. Journalism as Mike Wallace practices it could not be practiced in ‘North Kosistan’ (funny name, now that I think about it) or in Al-Zarquawi’s fantasy of Iraq.

Earlier journalists, as I show in my Feb. post, got that. I do not believe that the editors of the NY Times and LA Times do.

Dean Baquet (who got a copy of my email canceling my subscription) has a letter justifying their decision in today’s paper (no, I don’t get the paper, it was in the roundup email that I still get from the Times, and yes, as Kevin Drum pointed out at lunch Sunday, I know I’m ‘cheating’ by reading the online edition)

Here’re some highlights from Baquet, with some comments from me interspersed:

MANY READERS have been sharply critical of our decision to publish an article Friday on the U.S. Treasury Department’s program to secretly monitor worldwide money transfers in an effort to track terrorist financing.

They have sent me sincere and powerful expressions of their disappointment in our newspaper, and they deserve an equally thoughtful and honest response.

The decision to publish this article was not one we took lightly. We considered very seriously the government’s assertion that these disclosures could cause difficulties for counterterrorism programs. And we weighed that assertion against the fact that there is an intense and ongoing public debate about whether surveillance programs like these pose a serious threat to civil liberties.

I do think there’s a legitimate set of debates to have about the limits of the surveillance state (see what England is doing these days). But by the standard Baquet holds up here, any and all surveillance programs are up for disclosure, no matter how legal or effective – simply because the controversy exists. I guess I’d like to know where Baquet draws the line.

We sometimes withhold information when we believe that reporting it would threaten a life. In this case, we believed, based on our talks with many people in the government and on our own reporting, that the information on the Treasury Department’s program did not pose that threat. Nor did the government give us any strong evidence that the information would thwart true terrorism inquiries. In fact, a close read of the article shows that some in the government believe that the program is ineffective in fighting terrorism.

And now we know. If it’s so operational that someone might die, then it’s off bounds. Anything else is fair game – secrets to be kept, if the government can do so.

And let’s also go to the point that patterico makes: the program had had significant successes, but the Times reporters weren’t good enough to have unearthed them.

In the end, we felt that the legitimate public interest in this program outweighed the potential cost to counterterrorism efforts.

Well, the public is interested in all kinds of things, including autopsy pictures. I’m slightly worried that Baquet feel that he and his lawyers are the arbiter of which of those interests is ‘legitimate’.

Some readers have seen our decision to publish this story as an attack on the Bush administration and an attempt to undermine the war on terror.

We are not out to get the president. This newspaper has done much hard-hitting reporting on terrorism, from around the world, often at substantial risk to our reporters. We have exposed terrorist cells and led the way in exposing the work of terrorists. We devoted a reporter to covering Al Qaeda’s role in world terrorism in the months before 9/11. I know, because I made the assignment.

But we also have an obligation to cover the government, with its tremendous power, and to offer information about its activities so citizens can make their own decisions. That’s the role of the press in our democracy.

I don’t actually disagree with this. But the perspective that you cover the government from – the way you decide what and when to report – does matter.

And the problem is that I keep seeing Mike Wallace sitting and rolling tape with the North Kosanese, and he’s saying exactly the same things.

I think that what Bill Keller and Dean Baquet went too far in this case. I don’t know if they are feeling pressure yet (after all, my subscription might have paid his coffee bill for a day or two) or genuinely wondering what the reaction is all about.

Patterico is all over this, and points out some of the slippery thinking and changing stories coming from the Times.

I’m at the Catalina Terminal, waiting for Littlest Guy to show up so we can send him away to camp for two weeks.

And I’m watching the kids and parents, and the steps – fast, slow, scared and confident that the children are taking toward adulthood, and I’m realizing how short our time as parents really is, and how little time we get to prepare them for the world they want so very much.

[Update #2: See my earlier post on ‘News And Citizenship‘ to understand my take on the broader issues.]

Subject: Cancel Subscription

From: Marc Danziger

Date: 9:54 am

To: subscriptions@latimes.com

cc: dean.baquet@latimes.com, readers.rep@latimes.com

I’ve been a subscriber to the Los Angeles Times continuously since I moved back to Los Angeles in 1980.

With this email, I’m asking that you cancel my subscription, effective Monday, June 26, 2006.

Subscription details are:

[deleted]

I’m canceling my subscription because I am appalled that you would publish the details of a legal, effective government program – the financial transaction monitoring program.

The Times and its staff are not above the obligations of citizenship. Those obligations absolutely do extend to vigorously questioning the government about its actions and inactions and continuously challenging it to get better.

But it seems to me that there is a bright line between challenging government policies with an aim to ensuring that it is doing its job, and openly disclosing the mechanics of a program designed to identify those who murder innocent civilians and who have openly declared war on our nation, its people, and on the values that make us who we are.

I’m disappointed in the Times for doing this, and I cannot support you by funding you. I’ll miss the paper.

Marc Danziger

Patterico did it, too.

If I subscribed to the Wall Street Journal or the NY Times, I’d cancel those, too.

[Update: Listen to Patt Morrison and Doyle McManus (Washington bureau chief for the LAT) discuss the decision to go to press here (look for ‘To Publish Or Not?’)