Again, the press is reduced to treating the "OMG, is this a FLIP FLOP?!" as the big headline coming from today. ABC news tonight started with the headline "SECOND THOUGHTS?" and with Charlie Gibson saying "Obama said he didn't want it to become politicized, but that's EXACTLY WHAT HAPPENED". Yeah, no thanks to you guys. I do wish that Rahm and Gibbs had just deferred to the AG from the beginning to prevent this (they were so evasive that I had the feeling that it might not be the final word, Rahm's answer was so long and rambling that the blogs didn't even pick up on it until Sunday night, and it was the same time that the Newsweek article saying that the door WASN'T closed yet had come out), but that still doesn't excuse the press for deliberately trying to make this seem as partisan as possible.
I'm sure we'll be hearing the "witch hunt" talking point from them in no time.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/04/21/press-reduce-torture-inve_n_189689.htmlPress reduce Torture investigations into Partisan Warfare (Sam Stein)
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In the aftermath of the president's statement, however, the preponderance of attention has been spent on political minutia as opposed to the policy details. The media, in particular, has focused almost exclusively on two specific angles: had Obama cowered to those liberal proponents of prosecuting Bush officials, and had he contradicted his own administration in expressing openness in doing so?
In the process, the issue of launching an investigation -- which would have to be bipartisan in nature for Obama to support it -- was reduced into an overtly partisan and cynical frame. Issues of justice and morality boiled down into "the left's" influence compared to "the right."
The mood was set even before White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs came to the podium to talk about the president's remarks. "There does seem to be a little bit of a reaction to how this was received on the left," said Chuck Todd, White House correspondent for NBC. "Frankly this feels like a political food fight now. Vice President Cheney on one side, President Obama on the other. The hard left, the hard right, fighting over this in the blogosphere. When he talks about - he fears the politicization - that may be too late."
It was continued well into the briefing, where MoveOn.org and two Democratic Senators were trotted out as suspected catalysts for Obama's willingness to investigate.
"What changed over the last 24 hours?" asked CNN's Ed Henry. "Because yesterday you were flat in saying that we're not going there, as Rahm was on Sunday. And in the last 24 hours we've seen groups like MoveOn.org on the left come out and write a petition to the Attorney General saying they want accountability from the Bush administration. Is this an example of this White House giving in to pressure from the left?"
"I don't -- I have not, and I doubt the President has been on moveon.org in the last 24 hours, so, no," responded Gibbs.
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To the fourth estate's credit, Obama did seem to be contradicting members of his own staff. Whereas the president said on Monday that he wanted the Attorney General to make the determination on prosecuting "those who formulated those legal decisions" on torture, his chief of staff insisted on Sunday that, "those who devised the policy... should not be prosecuted..." Moreover, in insisting that it was not the president's purview to weigh into the judicial debates over who may or may not have committed criminal activity during the Bush years, Gibbs did seem to invalidate Obama's prior statements that those officials who were merely following orders didn't do anything criminally wrong.
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