(updated below – Update II – Update III)

There are several important facts to note about the President’s vow at this afternoon’s Press Conference to resist attempts to compel Karl Rove and Harriet Miers to testify to Congress, under oath, with regard to the firing of the U.S. attorneys. The President intends to invoke “executive privilege,” the same doctrine used by Presidents Nixon and Clinton in their respective (unsuccessful) attempts to resist subpoenas:

First, the President began his Press Conference by admitting that the administration’s explanations as to what happened here have been — to use his own words — “confusing” and “incomplete.” Why, then, would Congress possibly trust Bush officials to provide more explanations in an off-the-record, no-transcript setting where there are no legal consequences from failing to tell the truth?

Once a party demonstrates a propensity to issue false explanations and refuses to tell the truth voluntarily, no rational person would trust that party to make voluntary disclosures. One could trust (if at all) only on-the-record testimony, under oath, where there are criminal penalties for lying (if they have questions about that motivational dynamic, they can ask Lewis Libby).

Second, it is crystal clear (just as it was when Bill Clinton sought to invoke “executive privilege” to resist Grand Jury subpoenas to his aides — Sidney Blumenthal and Bruce Lindsey and Hillary — in the Lewinsky investigation) that the narrowly construed doctrine of executive privilege does not entitle the President to shield the communications here from compelled disclosure. When the U.S. Supreme Court in U.S. v. Nixon (1974) rejected Nixon’s invocation of that privilege to resist a Grand Jury Subpoena for the Watergate tapes, this is how the Court defined its scope (emphasis added):

The President’s need for complete candor and objectivity from advisers calls for great deference from the court. However, when the privilege depends solely on the broad, undifferentiated claim of public interest in the confidentiality of such conversations, a confrontation with other values arises. Absent a claim of need to protect military, diplomatic, or sensitive national security secrets, we find it difficult to accept the argument that even the very important interest in confidentiality of Presidential communications is significantly diminished by production of such material for in camera inspection with all the protection that a district court will be obliged to provide.

Similar reasoning was invoked by District Court Judge Norma Holloway Johnson in her decision denying Clinton’s attempt to rely on this privilege to resist Ken Starr’s subpoenas.

Finally, Bush followers are gearing up to solemnly lecture us all on how profoundly vital “executive privilege” is and how terrible it is that Democrats are trying to invade it by demanding that political advisor Karl Rove and Harriet Miers testify under oath. But that, of course, is not what they were saying — at all — when Clinton attempted to use that doctrine to prevent the compelled testimony of his aides.

As a side note, I previously thought that the worst and most anger-inducing period of time to research was the late 2002/early 2003 “debate” over whether to invade Iraq, but the trashy filth which spewed forward on a virtually nightly basis during the Lewinskly “scandal” is actually far worse. As but one example, here is how David Shuster led off Tony Snow’s Fox program on March 15, 1998:

SHUSTER: Once a reluctant witness, former White House aide Kathleen Willey described to Kenneth Starr’s grand jury, and earlier to attorneys for Paula Jones, a 1993 meeting with President Clinton. Willey wanted to discuss a personal crisis with the president. But the encounter, she says, soon became sexual.

“The hug just continued longer than I expected.”

Jones attorney Donovan Campbell — “Was there any kissing involved during that hug?”

“There was an attempt.”

“Please describe that as fully as you can.”

“He attempted to kiss me.”

“Mr. Clinton did?”

“Yes.”

“On the lips?”

“Yes.”

“Did Mr. Clinton ever seek to take either of your hands and place it on his body any place?”

“Yes.”

“Please describe that.”

“He put his hands — he put my hands on his genitals. I recall him saying he had wanted to do that for a long time.”

The total collapse of our political discourse was complete during that period [and, on a related note, I agree entirely with the point Bob Somerby makes here -- even though I don't point it out every single time I mention right-wing deceit -- that the real problem are not the right-wing noise machine and their commentators on Fox per se, but rather, the fact that our national media has been trained to echo their sentiments and follow their lead. Oliver Willis' recording of The Politico's Mike Allen (recently of Time) falling all over himself to please Matt Drudge is an excellent illustration (h/t Atrios)].

In any event, here are some thoughts about “executive privilege” and its heinous truth-suppressing attributes, expressed in 1998 by people who will undoubtedly be defending its grave importance over the next several days:

Tony Snow – Op-Ed – St. Louis Post-Dispatch, March 29, 1998 :

(HEADLINE: “Executive Privilege is a Dodge”)

Evidently, Mr. Clinton wants to shield virtually any communications that take place within the White House compound on the theory that all such talk contributes in some way, shape or form to the continuing success and harmony of an administration. Taken to its logical extreme, that position would make it impossible for citizens to hold a chief executive accountable for anything. He would have a constitutional right to cover up.

Chances are that the courts will hurl such a claim out, but it will take time.

One gets the impression that Team Clinton values its survival more than most people want justice and thus will delay without qualm. But as the clock ticks, the public’s faith in Mr. Clinton will ebb away for a simple reason: Most of us want no part of a president who is cynical enough to use the majesty of his office to evade the one thing he is sworn to uphold — the rule of law.

Tony Snow, Fox News, March 18, 1998:

In our latest Fox News Opinion Dynamics poll, we asked a series of questions about executive privilege. Most believe it’s an attempt to stonewall Ken Starr’s investigation. There’s an even split on whether the White House has something to hide. And a majority thinks conversations with the first lady should not be covered.

Did the president invoke executive privilege to preserve the presidency or hold Ken Starr at bay?

Paul Gigot, Fox News, March 8, 1998:

GIGOT: Senator Torricelli, the president has from the very beginning pledged to cooperate with the investigation, said he wants to get the truth out sooner rather than later.

Would you define claims of executive privilege as cooperation? . . . But aren’t claims of executive privilege usually reserved for national security matters — in particular, matters of state secrets and foreign affairs?

Kate O’Beirne – Capital Gang – May 2, 1998:

O’BEIRNE: Let me say, Mark, I think Newt Gingrich delivered a really good speech. He gave voice to that which millions of people know to be true. I don’t think it’s good news for the Democrats. The Republicans have had trouble finding their voice on this and they’re scared off by being told it just has to do with the president’s personal, private behavior. And Newt Gingrich, I think, has given voice to them in a way that’s not helpful to Democrats.

He says there are two principles involved, the public’s right to know, because secrecy has so benefited Bill Clinton, and second, no one is above the law. Now, if the public increasingly sees this scandal about their right to know, so much for executive privilege and Secret Service privilege, and no one is above the law, Bill Clinton’s in a lot of trouble.

Tony Snow’s Show – Fox News – May 10, 1998

SNOW: Mr. Burton, back to your committee — if you cannot immunize those witnesses, that’s the kiss of death. You’re not going to have any more hearings. . . . .

BRIT HUME: And have you been assured, sir, that you will remain as chairman of that committee through the coming months.

GOP COMMITTE CHAIR REP. DAN BURTON: Yes. I have no problem with that, and I don’t think the speaker does either.

We’re going to continue on it until we get the truth for the American people, or at least do our dead-level best to get the truth for them.

You know, the president could solve a lot of this problem if he wouldn’t hide behind executive privilege, if he’d just come out and tell the American people the truth.

In 1998, when Bill Clinton invoked it, “executive privilege” was a cynical and corrupt tool to prevent Americans from learning the truth about scandal and keep the President above the law. In 2007, now that George Bush has invoked it (and it’s hardly the first time, but this time it will likely be tested), it will be a doctrine of the gravest importance and steeped in our most cherished democratic traditions and it must be defended at all costs in order to preserve the Power and Honor of the Presidency.

UPDATE: From William Safire, writing in The New York Times, June 4, 1998 (h/t Invictus):

The Supremes will not have to decide President Clinton’s claim of executive privilege to shield his P.R. aide Sidney Blumenthal because when Starr went eyeball-to-eyeball with the White House on this, Clinton blinked. I think the President knew this claim on a matter unrelated to national security was a loser all along, but made it in lower court to run down the clock. Smart; it bought him four months.

For better or worse, not only the right-wing noise machine, but also our nation’s media elite, decreed long ago that when “executive privilege” is invoked for anything other than safeguarding national security or other state secrets, it is a corrupt tool designed to stifle The Truth. Here, it is being invoked by Bush to prevent his political advisor and White House counsel — with no relationship to national security matters — from testifying as to the reasons why the administration fired 8 U.S. attorneys and then lied about what they did repeatedly.

UPDATE II: Over at Kos, Kagro X has some informed and likely accurate speculation about what is truly motivating the White House in refusing in advance to comply with Congressional Subpoenas (which ought to be imminently forthcoming). Clearly, the U.S. attorneys probe is not the only investigation the White House fears — and almost certainly is not the one they fear the most.

For that reason, it is important to them to establish principles which will prevent (or at least substantially delay) any meaningful investigations by Congress into the White House’s conduct over the last six years, and creating a privileged buffer around key administration officials and White House documents serves that purpose quite well. For that exact reason, it is absolutely imperative that Congress not acquiesce here, because genuine investigations — that which the country urgently needs — will, at some point, require this confrontation.

UPDATE III: Jack Balkin highlights a distinction between the Nixon and Clinton cases and the current case that I probably ought to have included in this discussion — namely, that the Subpoenas which Nixon and Clinton sought to resist were issued as part of a criminal investigation, whereas the forthcoming Subpoenas here are not (but instead are merely Congressional demands for information). Arguably (though far from definitely), the privilege would be given less weight in the context of a criminal proceeding. Countering that, however, is the fact that by voluntarily offering Rove and Miers for “interviews,” Bush (as Balkin notes) has likely weakened his own claim of privilege in a way that Nixon and Clinton never did.

Additionally, as Balkin notes, “if Congress were to pressure the President to appoint a special prosecutor (as in the Plame case) to look into allegations of obstruction of justice in the firings, that prosecutor could probably compel testimony before a grand jury.” It is the case that there are distinctions between Nixon v. U.S. and this case which the administration will almost certainly cite. Whether those distinctions are meaningful remains to be seen.

The documents disclosed by the DOJ shed very interesting light not only on the process by which the U.S. attorneys were fired, but also on the related conduct of federal law enforcement agencies. One of the claims made by the DOJ as to why it fired Arizona U.S. Attorney Paul Charlton is that Charlton wanted to institute a policy of requiring law enforcement agents to tape record or videotape interrogations and confessions of criminal suspects — a request which the DOJ refused and, shortly thereafter, fired him.

(updated below – updated again)

Following up on this post from the other day, The Washington Post‘s Howard Kurtz this morning wrote about the regular commenters at Little Green Footballs who expressed support for Al Qaeda’s plot to assassinate former President Jimmy Carter. Here is the passage from Kurtz’s article in its entirety:

In other news . . . more disgusting chatter from the political fringe, this time on the right.

I was appalled when some crazies posting comments at the Huffington Post expressed disappointment that the suicide bombing in Afghanistan missed Dick Cheney. Now some wackos posting at the conservative site Little Green Footballs are bummed that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed didn’t succeed in killing Jimmy Carter (a plot that was included in his laundry list of confessions).

To wit:

“Can we furlough him–just so he can realize the Carter plot? Please?”

“Even this schmuck had some good ideas.”

“Can we trade Carter to get the WTC and its occupants back?”

I don’t hold either Web site responsible for this garbage, and it’s not representative of anything other than the politics of hatred as practiced by a tiny minority. But how despicable: Whatever his shortcomings as president, Carter is 82 years old. Have some irrational people hated him so intensely for three decades that they still want him assassinated? Pathetic.

Salon’s Glenn Greenwald reprints some of the posts and beats up on Little Green Football’s founder:

“Let us first recall that LGF’s Charles Johnson was one of the leaders of the Outrage Brigade driving the big ‘story’ — that made it into virtually every national media outlet — of how anonymous HuffPost commenters expressed sorrow that the bombing in Afghanistan did not result in Dick Cheney’s death.”

Charles Johnson responds that the comments on his site “reflect only the opinions of the individuals who posted them. There’s serious doubt whether any of the ones you quoted rise to the level of hatred that showed up in Arianna’s readers’ Cheney-related comments. I don’t think they do, and I think most honest readers would agree.”

One could, if one were so inclined, voice several criticisms of Kurtz’s conduct here — namely, the fact that he devoted virtually his entire column to the HuffPost incident (promoted by the Post’s front page) versus burying this item deep in his column, the failure to take note of how common such commentary is at LGF, and his refusal to condemn (or even notice) Johnson’s defense of these pro-assassination sentiments from his regular users (Johnson claimed that the LGF pro-assassination comments somehow don’t “rise to the level of hatred that showed up in Arianna’s readers’ Cheney-related comments”).

Most notably of all, there is the complete disingenuousness of Kurtz’s claim that he never for a minute meant to suggest that the HuffPost comments were “representative of anything other than the politics of hatred as practiced by a tiny minority.” Why, then, would he devote a front-page article to those comments — echoing the very prominent coverage given to them by his colleagues, Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh — unless the intent were to indict “the Left” or” liberals” or Democrats generally with the familiar stereotype, rooted in the trite and fabled images of the 1960s hippie-protestors, of being so driven by deranged and America-hating anger that they actually cheer on the attempts by The Terrorists to kill the Vice President?

But at least Kurtz wrote about the LGF commenters and, in doing so, was forced to acknowledge what the HuffPost “story” that he pumped meant, and more importantly, what it did not mean. And that is a good development, even if it is the case — as it certainly was — that the swarms of emails he received from readers here and elsewhere forced the issue into his column.

This whole episode raises two broader issues that I think are worth highlighting:

(1) Writing about extremist right-wing blogs can be tedious at times, but the point in writing about them is never the blogs themselves (let alone their commenters), but rather, how the national media depicts political movements and the assumptions embedded in how they referee our country’s political discourse. That is always the point. It isn’t news that LGF and other large right-wing blogs are the venues for sociopathic and violence-inciting rhetoric on a daily basis. Standing alone, there is limited value in writing or thinking about that topic.

The point here — as always — is to try to force the media to write about the stories it covers in a more critical and factual manner, to compel them to abandon the cheap and lazy cliches that otherwise frame everything they write. That is one of the most critical functions of blogs, and it is one of the goals that is realistically attainable by bloggers and their readers working together.

That, for instance, is the function that Talking Points Memo has performed with the U.S. attorneys story. They didn’t do so much original reporting or uncovering of new facts. The real work they did was in critically examining the available facts, making the connections that were being missed, and then insisting that the media treat the story as it deserved to be treated by highlighting and documenting what it revealed. With some exceptions (such as FDL’s original reporting on the Libby trial), that is really one of the core functions bloggers perform — to battle against the cliched narratives and reflexive mindset the media has relied upon for two decades now in determining which stories they select to cover and what they say about those stories.

(2) One of the reasons why I wrote about that HuffPost story when it was still nothing more than infected bile bubbling up in the right-wing blog sewers was because it was glaringly clear that it was going to worm its way through the standard channels and become a major media story. And the reason that was clear is because the tactic embodied by that “story” — namely, finding isolated, obscure, stray, unrepresentative individuals or comments and obsessively focusing on them in order to imply that they are representative of “liberals” or “the Left” generally — is a deceitful tactic that is one of the most commonly used by the right-wing noise machine, and the national media has been trained to ingest that tactic and disseminate it.

The Ward Churchill whirlwind is one of the classic examples of this rotted genre. “Stories” of that type — which are, as I’ve noted before, perfect examples of the logical fallacy of “argument by anecdote” — are naturally attractive to lazy journalists because they enable broad political points to be made simply by focusing on single anecdotes in isolation. Very little analytical or journalistic work needs to be done in order to covert those anecdotes and cliches into a sensationalistic, attention-generating story.

This is why Michelle Malkin blog’s (and LGF), for instance, constantly hypes photographs of the single most “offensive” sign at every protest march, or why Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh single out some obscure comment by some unknown or inconsequential “leftist” and lead their shows with it regularly. It is a manipulative and slothful — though highly effective — means of assigning attributes to a large political movement based on nothing other than cherry-picked and highly unrepresentative examples. And that is why Malkin’s screaming about the HuffPost comments she found was so clearly going straight to the national press. That tactic almost never fails.

There is a column today by U.S. News and World Report‘s Michael Barone — predictably celebrated by the most intellectually dishonest right-wing followers — which is a classic example of this technique. The article is entitled “The-Blame-America-First-Crowd” and this is its only point:

“They always blame America first.” That was Jeane Kirkpatrick, describing the “San Francisco Democrats” in 1984. But it could be said about a lot of Americans, especially highly educated Americans, today.

In their assessment of what is going on in the world, they seem to start off with a default assumption that we are in the wrong. The “we” can take different forms: the United States government, the vast mass of middle-class Americans, white people, affluent people, churchgoing people or the advanced English-speaking countries. Such people are seen as privileged and selfish, greedy and bigoted, rash and violent. If something bad happens, the default assumption is that it’s their fault. They always blame America — or the parts of America they don’t like — first.

As is true for all of Barone’s columns, the whole thing is composed of the emptiest 1990s political platitudes — America’s college campuses are filled with America-hating radicals and thus “students are bombarded with denunciations of dead white males and urged to engage in the deconstruction of all past learning and scholarship,” etc. etc.

But what is most notable about the column is that — while repeatedly attacking what “they” think — he never once identifies a single person who believes any of the things he is condemning. Supposedly, America is being threatened by this huge swath of people who fit the cartoon that is floating around in Barone’s slothful and uncritical mind — the “they” — yet Barone cannot find a single example to identify. Nonetheless, the largest right-wing bloggers excitedly point to it as some profound illumination of what “they” think.

There is a reason for that rather glaring omission. The technique used by Barone is fundamentally dishonest, as it’s intended to do nothing other than manufacture some warped and repellent idea and then impute it to “the left” or “liberals” or “Democrats” — through nothing more than innuendo and the transparently fallacious and primitive technique of “argument by anecdote.” That is, far and away, the tactic used most commonly by right-wing deceivers, and the national press reflexively echoes it.

Generally speaking, there are two ways to combat an intellectually dishonest standard — (1) argue in the abstract against its validity, or (2) apply it to those who wield it. To engage in method (2) is not to abandon method (1). Quite the contrary: the only genuinely effective method for illustrating just how rancid techniques of this type are is to subject those who use them to those same techniques and demand that the media apply those techniques consistently.

UPDATE: Anonymous Liberal points out that there actually is someone who meets Barone’s cartoon strawman of those who “always blame America — or the parts of America they don’t like — first.” It’s Barone himself, along with his political comrades, who ceaselessly ascribe blame for everything — from the failures in Iraq to the loss of trust by Americans in their government — on those treasonous, subversive Americans who oppose The Great Leader and his wars, which now happens to include the majority of the country.

Like good little authoritarians, people like Barone conflate allegiance to their Leader with allegiance to the country, and therefore equate “blaming Bush” with “blaming America.” That is the great irony which A.L. documents — that the people whom Barone and his allies blame for America’s failures are the majority of Americans themselves. If any faction can be said to “Blame America first,” it is the faction of Bush followers represented by Barone, who argue on a daily basis that the blame for the failures of their Leader rests not with the Leader but with those Americans who fail to support him with sufficient loyalty and fervor.

UPDATE II: Within hours of this being posted, we are graciously provided with a perfectly illustrative example of this cheap, manipulative tactic.

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