As superb and skillful as this demolition was, and as heinous as people like Richard Cohen are, I'm more impressed when relentlessly adversarial interviews like this are targeted at people who are genuinely powerful and well-regarded by our political establishment (as Rachel has done before).  When it's obscure, stigmatized nobodies who are subjected to this treatment -- easy targets -- I'm less moved.  After all, even Beltway power-worshiping sycophants like Chris Matthews have shown a willingness in the past to expose a guest's ignorance with relentless questioning to the point of humiliation -- as long as the guest was some obscure, fringe figure who had no real standing in the power circles Matthews reveres.  When numerous Democrats were heaping praise on Matthews for his destruction of one such right-wing guest during last year's election, Digby wrote:

Let's just say that I'd be a lot more impressed with Matthews' pitbull routine if he used it, just once, on somebody with some real clout instead of low level nobodies who don't appear on TV regularly. Bullying people without power just doesn't impress me much, especially when you have people on the show every day who actually have some and you kiss their asses with gusto. Sorry, not impressed.

If you watch a typical establishment television reporter conduct an interview with someone who is already marginalized and despised by All Decent People, you'll often see them suddenly become very aggressive and scrutinizing in a way that they would never dare do if they were interviewing a top political official or respected Washington Wise Man.

This isn't remotely a criticism of Rachel; she's an exception to this rule, as I've seen her conduct equally relentless interviews with people like Tom Ridge, and she frequently extends invitations to even powerful people whom she criticizes (they typically decline).  Moreover, people like Richard Cohen are truly pernicious and urgently need to be exposed with the treatment to which Rachel subjected him; he actually deserves worse.  The point in which I'm interested here is how rare it is for interviews like this to be conducted by establishment journalists with people who have real power.  Could one even imagine, for instance, Tim Russert's having questioned Dick Cheney this way prior to the Iraq war, or any of the standard array of pompous, blowhard Senators being treated to an interview like this by any standard Sunday morning TV host?  

One can watch what Rachel did in last night's interview -- what made it so effective -- to see why this virtually never happens on, say, Sunday shows when politically powerful people who interviewed:

(1) Rachel had obviously done a substantial amount of work prior to the interview, having even read the guest's books and being able to refer to various parts of them quickly; doing real work and real reading is far too burdensome for most of our coddled, vapid media stars.

(2) Rachel, despite being unfailingly civil and polite, was obviously indifferent to whether the guest liked her.  She bombarded him with questions that made him extremely uncomfortable and which conclusively proved that he was simply lying.  Media stars who host political interview programs would never subject powerful people to treatment like that for fear of losing access and/or their standing in the Beltway world.

(3) Rather than treat the guest and his claims as entitled to respect and deference, Rachel explicitly pointed out when he was lying, and even more important, demanded that he accept responsibility for his conduct (she told him he has "blood on his hands" for the role he is playing in enabling Uganda's oppression, and possibly execution, of gay people).  It's simply impossible to imagine a Sunday morning media star telling, say, an advocate of the Iraq War that they have "blood on their hands," or explaining that those who advocated torture are "war criminals."  Words like that are disrespectful and thus strictly prohibited when journalists deal with our elites.  Sunday-morning media star journalists are there to obfuscate and elevate elite crimes, not expose them and certainly not describe them as such.

(4) Rachel's guest last night was modestly smart, coy and well-prepared, and pinning him down this way was not an easy task.  Rachel was able to demolish his statements only because she is extremely smart, intellectually quick and dexterous, and able to think critically on the spot.  To put it as politely as possible, people like David Gregory or, say, Brian Williams and John King  don't exactly have those instruments at their disposal.  That deprivation is a major reason why they're selected for those positions.

Just imagine how much better things could be if our political leaders were routinely subjected to the kind of surgically probing, lie-exposing interrogation which Rachel imposed on her homosexual-converter guest.  But the reasons they almost never are speak volumes about our media stars and their true function.

An Iraqi taxi driver may have been the source of the discredited claim that Saddam Hussein could unleash weapons of mass destruction within 45 minutes, a Tory MP claimed today.

Adam Holloway, a defence specialist, said MI6 obtained information indirectly from a taxi driver who had overheard two Iraqi military commanders talking about Saddam's weapons.

The 45-minute claim was a key feature of the dossier about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction that was released by Tony Blair in September 2002. Blair published the information to bolster public support for war.

Other disclosures reveal that Blair was making claims that his own intelligence services were vehemently rejecting.  For all the discussion about what happened in the run-up to that war, we still have not, in my view, come close to appreciating the historic magnitude of the evil of this crime -- and, of course, there have been no consequences for anyone responsible.  It's always worthwhile -- and still startling -- to look back and see how blatantly false claims such as Blair's taxi-derived "45-minute" assertion were pervasively and uncritically exploited to justify this war:

NPR's Scott Simon and John Chipman of the IISS, March 22, 2003:

SIMON: And what's your feeling for whether or not he can get any of these weapons off?

Mr. CHIPMAN: Well, all the intelligence reports before the conflict were that he would be able within 45 minutes of a command to launch a chemical munition from artillery shells and that he has the devices to spray biological agents should the command be given and followed.

Mort Zuckerman, publisher U.S. News & World Report, December 23, 2002:

The British know this. In a chilling report released just recently, they described Iraq's large, effective system for concealing proscribed materials, including dual-use facilities and hiding spots that are located close to roads and telecommunications so that illicit items can be moved on short notice. Indeed, the British reported that Iraq can get WMD ready for use within 45 minutes of Saddam's orders. President Bush has been consistent in asserting that further deceptions by Saddam will not be tolerated. If the administration failed to act now, it would not only let Saddam off the hook but allow him to accumulate funds from oil sales to buy or build a still-greater WMD arsenal. And, it would ruin American credibility in the Muslim world. . .

USA Today Editorial, December 9, 2002:

Not only does the sheer size of the submission promote suspicions, the Bush administration last week said that it has a "solid basis" for asserting Iraq still has forbidden weapons. A chilling British government report in September detailed suspected continuing chemical and biological weapons programs, plans to activate them within 45 minutes and possible efforts to build nuclear weapons.

CNN's David Ensor, December 7, 2002:

British and U.S. intelligence officials believe Saddam Hussein has continued to produce a variety of chemical and biological agents with at least some of those weapons capable of being deployed in as little as 45 minutes.

Ryan Lizza, The New Republic, October 7, 2002:

Most remarkably, hours after Blair argued that Iraq could deploy chemical or biological weapons within 45 minutes of an order to use them, French President Jacques Chirac questioned whether Iraq had any proscribed weapons at all. . . . Even worse, unmovic is bound by two "memoranda of understanding" (MOU) negotiated between Baghdad and the U.N. that would serve Saddam well if inspectors return. . . . And it's not just unmovic's rules that worry some Bushies, especially the hawks. It's Blix himself. "Blix is awful," says a top State Department official.

One can go on and on with that.  One of the worst retroactive, self-justifying lies told about this time period by those who did these things is that they had no reasons to question the false claims they were disseminating because "everyone" believed them and nobody disputed them.  To see how false that is, consider the March 17, 2003 Der Spiegel Editorial warning that "for months now, Bush and Blair have been busy blowing up, exaggerating and deliberately over-interpreting intelligence information and rumours to justify war on Iraq."  It specifically mocked the 45-minute claim. Or see the September 30, 2002 McClatchy article by Strobel, Landsay and Hutchinson -- headlined:  "War talk fogged by lingering questions; Threat Hussein poses is unclear to experts" -- which warned:  "those reports appear to be far from confirmed."  Or see the various statements by Scott Ritter ("The truth of the matter is that Iraq has not been shown to possess weapons of mass destruction, either in terms of having retained prohibited capability from the past, or by seeking to re-acquire such capability today") or Howard Dean ("Secretary Powell's recent presentation at the UN showed the extent to which we have Iraq under an audio and visual microscope. Given that, I was impressed not by the vastness of evidence presented by the Secretary, but rather by its sketchiness").

The people who mindlessly passed on claims like Tony Blair's "45-minute" hysteria did it without regard to whether it was true.  At best, they didn't care.  They wanted the invasion and were willing to say anything to justify it.  The ones who were most unquestioning were "journalists" whose only ostensible function is to question -- see but a small sampling of examples above.  What's most remarkable about all of it is that virutally none has even acknowledged wrongdoing and none has suffered any consequences of any kind.  This British investigation is underscoring just how extreme all of this was.

UPDATE:  The indispensable Jonathan Schwarz posts these images, from headlines appearing in Rupert Murdoch's Sun in September, 2002 (h/t bilejones):

Schwarz provides some added background on how this claim was manufactured.  Atrios sums up the real point here:  "A conservative estimate is that 100,000 people have died as a result of the invasion of Iraq.  Do any of our elite media people feel any remorse at all?"  I believe "no" could be classified as a "simple answer to a simple question."

Thank goodness people are starting to leave the left. Their abandonment of Obama is as unconscionable as the right's refusal to work with him. . . . This is about decency and working together to solve problems. . . . Obama is almost solitary in his desire and ability to tackle problems of epic proportion while realizing that we live in a very heterogeneous society. . . . The loud-mouths on the Left are becoming nearly as hysterical and vicious as those on the right. . . . I marvel (unhappily) on a daily basis on how myopic and stubborn many of those on the left have become in regards to President Obama. I wonder if any of these people have ever truly had to make hard decisions in their lives. Have they not ever had to weigh all consequences?. . . . These are real choices people, not a schoolyard fantasy, in which our guy, king of the geeks, is finally captain of the kickball team, and now he can pick us fellow geeks and play us all in sweet revenge against the jocks. He is not playing. He is leading. Not even one year in, I am willing to continue to trust his instinct, his grace, his patience and his measured hand. . . .These are the reasons I voted for him. Hope for a leader, not hope for "everything to be completely different from the previous guy regardless of the consequences", which is what I think many immature democrats are upset about. What a bunch of selfish babies. . . . The stuff coming out of "progressive" mouths is all too often on a par with Glenn Beck's abusive rants--both sides (right and left wingers) playing thousand-pound national football with the President as the ball--meaning, kick kick kick, until you bust his dick.  This truly makes me sick.

These outbursts include everything other than arguments addressed to the only question that matters:  are the criticisms that have been voiced about Obama valid?  Has he appointed financial officials who have largely served the agenda of the Wall Street and industry interests that funded his campaign?  Has he embraced many of the Bush/Cheney executive power and secrecy abuses which Democrats once railed against -- from state secrets to indefinite detention to renditions and military commissions?  Has he actively sought to protect from accountability and disclosure a whole slew of Bush crimes?  Did he secretly a negotiate a deal with the pharmaceutical industry after promising repeatedly that all negotiations over health care would take place out in the open, even on C-SPAN?  Are the criticisms of his escalation of the war in Afghanistan valid, and are his arguments in its favor redolent of the ones George Bush made to "surge" in Iraq or Lyndon Johnson made to escalate in Vietnam?   Is Bob Herbert right when he condemned Obama's detention policies as un-American and tyrannical, and warned:  "Policies that were wrong under George W. Bush are no less wrong because Barack Obama is in the White House"?

Who knows?  Who cares?  According to these defenders, it's just wrong -- morally, ethically and psychologically -- to criticize the President.  Thus, in lieu of any substantive engagement of these critiques are a slew of moronic Broderian cliches ("If Obama catches heat from the left and right but maintains the middle, he is doing what I hoped he would do (and what he said he would do) when I voted for him"), cringe-inducing proclamations of faith in his greatness ("I am willing to continue to trust his instinct, his grace, his patience and his measured hand"), and emotional contempt for his critics more extreme than one would expect from his own family members.  In other words, the Leave-Obama-Alone protestations posted by Sullivan are fairly representative of the genre.  How far we've fallen from the declaration of Thomas Jefferson:  "In questions of power, then, let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution."

With regard to many of the above-referenced criticisms -- as well as ones I haven't included -- there are reasonable disputes over the validity of the critiques, and many Obama defenders voice those on substantive grounds.  Obama admirers like the ones featured above are a minority, albeit a vocal one.  But far too many have an emotional attachment to him and investment in him that is deeply unhealthy, particularly when it translates into intolerance for the very act of objecting to his decisions and policies, as one sees on vivid display in the responses Sullivan posted.

I recently watched this video -- posted below -- containing interviews with numerous individuals who attended a Sarah Palin book event in Ohio.  Most of them profess their deep respect and admiration for Palin even though they're barely able to defend a single substantive position she holds.  The video is clearly intended to depict Palin supporters as some sort of uniquely ignorant and vacuous fan club devotees more appropriate for a movie star than a politician. 

Indeed, at first, I was mesmerized by the video.  After all, these were not just random, politically apathetic people selected off the street.  They are politically interested and engaged enough to spend hours waiting to see Sarah Palin.  They have deep convictions about politics and overwhelming faith in her judgment and abilities.  And yet they have virtually no ability to justify any of her specific views on issues.  They don't really care about those.  What they know is that she's a culturally familiar and admirable person.  They share her values and know she's a good person, and thus trust that she will "do the right thing" on specific issues regardless of whether they agree or even understand what she's doing.  They have a personal connection with her that makes them place their faith in her.

After watching slack-jawed for a few minutes, I quickly realized that there was nothing unusual at all about their reaction to Palin.  This was exactly what led so many Bush followers to defend him no matter what he did -- as he tortured and invaded without cause and chronically broke the law.  He was, like most of them, a "good Christian" who had a nice family and meant well, and thus, while he might err, he was not capable of any truly bad or evil acts.  Anyone who criticized him too harshly or too viciously was, by definition, revealing something flawed about themselves.  None of the specific arguments mattered.  None of it had to do with reason.  Like Palin's admirers, Bush's were convinced of the core goodness of his character, and they thus loved him and hated those who suggested that there was something deeply wrong in what he was doing.

The similarity between that mentality and the one driving the Obama defenses posted by Sullivan is too self-evident to require any elaboration.  Those who venerated Bush because he was a morally upright and strong evangelical-warrior-family man and revere Palin as a common-sense Christian hockey mom are similar in kind to those whose reaction to Obama is dominated by their view of him as an inspiring, kind, sophisticated, soothing and mature intellectual.  These are personality types bolstered with sophisticated marketing techniques, not policies, governing approaches or ideologies.  But for those looking for some emotional attachment to a leader, rather than policies they believe are right, personality attachments are far more important.  They're also far more potent.  Loyalty grounded in admiration for character will inspire support regardless of policy, and will produce and sustain the fantasy that this is not a mere politician, but a person of deep importance to one's life who -- like a loved one or close friend or religious leader -- must be protected and defended at all costs.

UPDATE:  There is an important parallel between those who believe all criticism of Obama to be illegitimate and those on the Right who despise him without pause.  The latter is every bit as personality-driven as the former:  they despise Obama not for any specific policy decisions (often, those are aligned with their ostensible views), but because of personality caricatures they've adopted:  he's a narcissistic, vacant, Socialist Muslim and therefore nothing he does is right.  That is simply the opposite side of the same coin as those who revere his personality and thus believe that nothing he does merits real criticism. 

That's unsurprising, given that many of the most vehement Obama-haters were the same ones who most loved Bush and now love Palin:  this is all about cultural identification and personality admiration and has nothing to do with the factors that ought to be used to judge political leaders.

UPDATE II:  Referencing this post, Talk Left's Armando writes:  "sometimes I support the President, sometimes I criticize him. Depends on whether he adopts policies I agree with or not."  What's most amazing is that that even needs to be said at all, that it's controversial, that it applies to a subset of the citizenry rather than . . . everyone.   From experience, I know that making a statement like that often provokes the borderline-creepy demand that evidence of one's praise for (or defenses of) Obama be offered, and no matter how much evidence is provided (see here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here -- just to cite a sampling), it's frequently met with the definitely creepy objection that the praise is impure because it was mixed with some critical commentary or, more commonly, that it's simply not enough.

One other note:  those who complain about Obama critics often point out that he's not a dictator and can only do what Congress permits.  That's true enough as far as it goes, but it does not go very far.  For instance, I've never criticized Obama for failing to meet his one-year deadline for closing Guantanamo because Congress imposed serious impediments that the White House opposed but could not stop, so that's hardly Obama's fault.  But virtually all of the policies for which I have criticized him are ones which, for better or worse, are within the discretion of the President to make, and nothing Congress has done has compelled Obama to embrace those policies.  That's true, for instance, of his reliance on state secrets, indefinite detention, military commission, renditions, escalation in Afghanistan, Wall-St.-subservient actions, and a whole slew of other policies on which Obama critics typically focus.

Questions immediately arose about how it could be possible that three detainees kept in isolation and under constant and intense monitoring could have coordinated and then carried out group suicide without detection, particularly since the military claimed their bodies were not found for over two hours after their deaths.  But from the beginning, there was a clear attempt on the part of Guantanamo officials to prevent any outside investigation of this incident.  To allay the questions that quickly emerged, the military announced it would conduct a sweeping investigation and publicly release its finding, but it did not do so until more than two years later when -- in August, 2008 -- it released a heavily redacted reported purporting to confirm suicide by hanging as the cause.  Two of the three dead detainees were Saudis and one was Yemeni; they had been detained for years without charges; one of them was 17 years old at the time he was detained and 22 when he died; and they had participated in several of the hunger strikes at the camp to protest the brutality, torture and abuse to which they were routinely subjected.  Perversely, one of the three victims had been cleared for release earlier that month.

A major new report from Seton Hall University School of Law released this morning raises serious doubts about both the military's version of events and the reliability of its investigation.  The Report details that the three men "died under questionable circumstances"; that "the investigation into their deaths resulted in more questions than answers"; and that "without a proper investigation, it is impossible to determine the circumstances of the three detainees' deaths."  The 54-page, heavily-documented Report raises numerous troubling questions, as illustrated by these (click images to enlarge):

There is one way that a meaningful investigation could be conducted into what happened to these three detainees:  a lawsuit filed in federal court by the parents of two of the detainees against various Bush officials for the torture and deaths of their sons -- who had never been charged with, let alone convicted of, any wrongdoing (indeed, one had been cleared for release).  By itself, discovery in that lawsuit would shed critical light on what was done to these detainees and what caused their deaths.

The problem, however, is that the Obama DOJ has been using every Bush tactic -- and inventing whole new ones -- to block the lawsuit from proceeding.  As The Washington Independent's Daphne Eviatar detailed in October, "the Obama administration has surprisingly endorsed the same legal positions as its predecessor, insisting that there is no constitutional right to humane treatment by U.S. authorities outside the United States, and that victims of torture and abuse and their survivors have no right to compensation or even an acknowledgment of what occurred."  As Eviatar wrote about the Obama position, which -- among other things -- invokes the Military Commissions Act to argue that Congress stripped federal courts of jurisdiction to hear even Constitutional claims from Gitmo detainees:

The Obama administration is insisting, however, that Congress had the power to eliminate judicial review of these claims. It also argues that the Defense Department officials are immune from suit, because, as the Bush Justice Department argued in previous cases, it wasn’t clear at the time that detainees had a right not to be tortured by U.S. officials at Guantanamo. They therefore have "qualified immunity" from suit.

But the Justice Department goes further than that. Under President Obama, the government is arguing not only that it wasn’t clear what rights detainees were entitled to back in 2006, but that even today the prisoners have no right to such basic constitutional protections as due process of law or the right to be free from cruel and unusual punishment. The "Fifth and Eighth Amendments do not extend to Guantánamo Bay detainees," writes the Justice Department in its brief.

And, the government argues, the courts should not imply a right to sue under the Constitution, in part because that could lead to "embarrassment of our government abroad."

Ultimately, the Obama administration is arguing, victims of torture at a U.S.-run detention center abroad have no right to redress from the federal government. Only the military can take action in such cases, by disciplining military officers for abuse of prisoners.

In fact, the Brief filed by the Obama DOJ demanding dismissal of the case explicitly argues -- in classic Bush/Cheney fashion -- that merely allowing discovery in this case to determine what was done to these detainees would help the Terrorists kill us all:

All of this is depressingly consistent with multiple other cases in which the Obama DOJ is attempting aggressively to shield even the most illegal and allegedly discontinued Bush programs from judicial review.  Time and again, the most radical Bush claims of executive power, immunity and secrecy (ones Democrats and even Obama frequently condemned) are invoked to insist that federal courts have no right to adjudicate claims that the Government violated the Constitution and the law.  As Harper's Scott Horton documented over the weekend, a new filing by the Obama DOJ in defense of John Yoo is "seeking to make absolute the immunity granted Justice Department lawyers who counsel torture, disappearings, and other crimes against humanity."  In other words, as we lecture the world about the need for them to apply the rule of law and hold war criminals accountable, we simultaneously proclaim about ourselves:

We can kidnap your sons from anywhere in the world, far away from any "battlefield," ship them thousands of miles away to an island-prison, abuse and torture them mercilessly, and when we either drive them to suicide or kill them, you have no right to any legal remedy or even any recourse to find out what happened.  

As Horton writes, the claim that government officials enjoy a virtually impenetrable shield of immunity even in the commission of war crimes "has emerged as a sort of ignoble mantra for the Justice Department, uniting both the Bush and Obama administrations."   Indeed, that is the common strain of virtually every act undertaken by the Obama DOJ with regard to our government's war crimes and other felonies, from torture to renditions to illegal eavesdropping.

With revelations of serious, recent abuse at an ongoing "black site" prison in Afghanistan, serious questions have been raised about the extent to which detainee abuse has actually been curbed under Obama.  But there's no question that the single greatest impediment to disclosure and accountability for past abuses is the Obama Justice Department, which has repeatedly gone far beyond the call of duty in its attempt to protect Bush war crimes and other illegal acts.  This new Seton Hall Report regarding these three detainees deaths illustrates not only how perverse and unjust, but also how futile, such efforts are.  War crimes never stay hidden, and the only question from the start was whether the Obama DOJ would be complicit in the attempt to shield them from disclosure.  That question has now been answered rather decisively.

UPDATE:  Scott Horton has an interview with Law Professor Mark Denbeaux, the primary author of the report, in which he elaborates on why the military's claims and "investigation" are so suspect.

President Barack Obama's administration said that a July 2011 target date to begin withdrawing US troops from Afghanistan was not set in stone. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Defense Secretary Robert Gates, and the top uniformed US military officer, Admiral Michael Mullen, sought to sell the new approach under fire from Obama's hawkish Republican foes.

During hours of questioning by two key committees, they made clear that his target date of starting a US troop withdrawal in 19 months' time -- a step some anti-escalation lawmakers, especially Democrats, had cheered -- could slip.

"I do not believe we have locked ourselves into leaving," said Clinton, who added the goal was "to signal very clearly to all audiences that the United States is not interested in occupying Afghanistan."

Gates said the extra troops Obama had ordered to Afghanistan would be in place in July 2010, that a December 2010 review of the war effort would shape the pace of the withdrawal, and that the target date could change.

CBS News, Wednesday:

I asked White House spokesman Robert Gibbs if senators were incorrect calling the date a "target."

After the briefing, Gibbs went to the president for clarification. Gibbs then called me to his office to relate what the president said. The president told him it IS locked in -- there is no flexibility. Troops WILL start coming home in July 2011. Period. It's etched in stone. Gibbs said he even had the chisel.

What could possibly explain a contradiction this extreme with regard to a question so central to the policy Obama just announced?  How can you have the Defense Secretary and the Secretary of State testifying in front of the Senate that the July, 2011 date is "not set in stone," that they "have not locked oursleves into leaving," and that "the target date could change," while the President is saying exactly the opposite:  that "it IS locked in – there is no flexibility" and "it's etched in stone"?  

Is it remotely possible that the months of extremely careful, cerebral, thoughtful deliberations produced complete ambiguity on this central point, or is it that Obama's plan is designed to be sufficiently ambiguous so that nobody knows what it actually entails and everyone can therefore be told that it means what they want it to mean?  And which is worse?

* * * * *

I'll be on MSNBC this morning at 10:15 a.m EST, debating Afghanistan with Christopher Hitchens.

UPDATE: Here is the MSNBC segment I did this morning: