Jason Linkins obliterates Chuck Todd's oh-so-inside-the-beltway dismissive tone about investigating and prosecuting the torturers:
I really have to object with the way Chuck Todd is characterizing the underlying public pressure that's being brought to bear on President Obama and the White House to investigate and potentially prosecute the authors and the agents of the previous administration's torture regime.As Jason notes, in a Gallup Poll, 62% of Americans wanted either a criminal investigation or review by an independent panel when asked about the Bush administration's "possible use of torture in terror investigations."
The whole thing is knit up in political process tropes and infused with the pointless melodrama of the day, when a serious and substantive look at this issue is called for.
Read the whole post. It's brilliant. And, Jason is so right. He totally disabuses Todd's rant that this is somehow the work of the "blogosphere":
I gather that the invocation of the "blogosphere" here is meant as a further means of belittling this issue, but Todd should check himself. Those poll numbers indicate that the blogosphere is but a small part of the broad support for investigations. Furthermore, those bloggers are doing the work on the issue that the traditional press can't seem to be bothered to do. Check out this New York Times article, published over the weekend, that documents the waterboarding of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Abu Zubaydah. All of the enterprise reporting for the article was done by blogger Marcy Wheeler, of Emptywheel. Good thing, too! It's not like the Times, in possession of the same memos, noticed the story.That was very excellent work from the very excellent Marcy Wheeler. Oh, but, she's just a "blogger." Chuck Todd is a "real" reporter who gets paid a lot to regurgitate the conventional wisdom from inside the D.C. bubble.
It's been sad to watch, but Chuck Todd, who I used to really like, is morphing into Mark Halperin.
