Memo to GOP: Don’t Pretend You Care

[Hissyspit]

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/05/17/memo-to-gop-don-t-pretend-you-care.html

Memo to GOP: Don’t Pretend You Care

by Kirsten PowersMay 17, 2013 4:45 am EDT

Republicans blasting Obama over the AP snooping scandal seem to have selective-memory disorder. They’ve been trying to nail journalists and leakers for years, writes Kirsten Powers.

Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus demanded Eric Holder's resignation Tuesday, saying the attorney general had "trampled on the First Amendment." This is rich. But there is more.

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A sense of shame does not seem to be a factor here. In what has become as predictable as the sunrise, Holder was up on the Hill this week, being lectured by Republican members of Congress who have wanted him fired since the day he was sworn in. GOP Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner of Wisconsin grilled Holder over the AP debacle, saying he wanted to "pin down" who authorized the subpoenas that yielded the AP records. When Holder explained he was recused from discussing the matter for legal reasons, Sensenbrenner nonsensically suggested that Holder go to the Truman Museum and "take a picture of the thing on his desk that said 'the buck stops here.'"

Sadly, no recent occupant of the White House has been more aggressive in persecuting whistleblowers than President Transparency. Nonetheless, prior to their newfound concern for a free press, the GOP was just last year attacking President Obama for an imagined lack of zeal in pursuing leaks. John McCain even wanted a special counsel outside the Justice Department appointed to investigate national-security leaks about Obama’s “kill list,” a story about which ended up in The New York Times. The “kill list” strangely wasn’t the problem for the GOP. The leaks were.

At a 2012 hearing in which the GOP tried to ascertain whether it could prosecute reporters, Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-SC) suggested that the U.S. attorneys subpoena journalists and demand they reveal sources that provided classified information. Gowdy said: "Put (reporters) in front of the grand jury. You either answer the question or you're going to be held in contempt and go to jail, which is what I thought all reporters aspire to do anyway. I thought that was the crown jewel of the reporter's résumé to actually go to jail protecting a source." When your baseline belief is that reporters like to go to jail, let’s just dispense with the fiction that you care about a free media.

When The Washington Post’s Dana Priest revealed in 2005 that the Bush administration had secret prisons, conservatives went nuts. Then-speaker J. Dennis Hastert and then–Senate majority leader Bill Frist sent the chairmen of the intelligence committees a request to launch a joint investigation to find the whistleblowers. It was the leaks, not the existence of secret prisons and “black sites,” that so offended their delicate sensibilities.

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