Tom Watson

Strict Construction

Two guys from the self-styled National Clergy Council stood behind a spare podium in front of the United States Supreme Court in the warm October sun, shouting epithets at Democrats across the plaza in the Senate. "If they want Armageddon, they will get Armageddon!" snarled one of the men, a pastor by the look of the vestment he wore. A sparse group of bored looking reporters recorded the "press conference" and some cableheads pulled the pastor aside for taped Q&A.

I walked up the steps and sat in the shade on a stone bench by one of the twin fountains, and looked across at the Capitol where the body of Rosa Parks lay in state until this morning. On my way to an appointment in a Congressional office building today, my cab had passed the cortege, heading awy from Capitol Hill toward the Metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal Church.

As the pastors packed their portable lectern away and got on a bus, I thought about Rosa Parks and the struggle for civil rights and Brown v. Board of Education - and the lie - the damnable lie that is "strict constructionism."

It is a myth, supported by those who use it as an argument for the judicial activism they admire - judicial activism that supports religious control over public life, the rolling back of government, the reduction of rights. The Constitution was not strictly constructed in the seconds after its adoption and as this country change, it has never been strictly constructed at any part of our history; it has always been interpreted. Any American justice who believes the job of serving on the Supreme Court means attempting an "originalist" archeaology has simply spit the bit, and refused to come to the mark; any justice who takes that line is, in fact, an intellectual coward, a non-entity, a small and narrow intellect.

All laws in a republic are interpreted by the judiciary; this is a simple fact. To say that "this is not what Madison and Hamilton had in mind in the late 18th century" simply because you do not agree with a legislature is the definition of an activist judiciary run amok - a delusional, inbred form of justice, not worthy of the highest bench. JM McKay got it right in a recent post on MyDD:

Deferring to the intent of a handful of long-dead men from a different century doesn't seem a great deal more "democratic" than deferring to a group of judges on the bench today.  Is legislating from the grave really better than legislating from the bench?

No, it clearly is not. Strict constructionists and originalists - your lazy-minded  types - would not have handed down Brown v. Board of Education; indeed, Antonin Scalia would probably have punted on Marbury v. Madison. Stasis in judicial thought is not what this nation needs, or what our children deserve. In the long run, it is in no one's best interest: liberal, conservative, or the more-frequent mixture of both. We are at heart a progressive nation.

Then again, most of those supporting strict constructionists decry judicial activism; strange then that the justice most likely to vote to strike down the actions of a legislative body among current the current Supremes (with a whopping 65.6% overturn record) is Clarence Thomas.

It was a strange day in Washington - warm for a Halloween, a great American lying in the Rotunda, the Roberts Court getting its first official portrait snapped, and a new face nominated to the mix. Two rows behind me on the shuttle this morning sat Ambassador Joe Wilson, whose family was attacked by the Vice President of the U.S. and his staff during an episode that has become a grim national security scandal. He had done the morning shows in New York and was headed for a lunch-time speech at the National Press Club. You feel, instincitvely, that the Fitzgerald probe is not over; and certainly that's the whisper on Capitol Hill.

On the way back to National, my driver asked about the microphones in front of the Court. Bush picked his new nominee, I told him - guy named Sam Alito from New Jersey, reputation as a strict constructionist. Bush wants a fight, said the cabbie, he needs a fight. Buck up his side.

Probably so.

UPDATE: Steve Cobble gets at what I'm saying this morning in the HuffPo:

By recognizing the power and dignity of Rosa Parks and her movement, Bush & Frist & Alito put the lie to their whole "strict constructionist" rap. Why?

Because if FDR had not broken the back of the strict constructionists with the Warren Court, the movement that owes so much to Rosa Parks would have been stymied.

The U.S. Constitution and the strict constructionists gave us Plessy v. Ferguson, and "separate but equal." It was the Warren Court, those justices who believed in justice over ideology, who believed in a living Constitution rather than a false "strict construction" -- these so-called "activist judges" broke the back of segregation with Brown v. Board of Education. Dr. King, Rosa Parks, SCLC & SNCC built from there, and changed the world.

By going for a photo-op with Rosa Parks, Bush & Frist & Alito impugn the legacy of strict constructionism without saying so, and inadvertently validate the history of the Warren Court.

Down on Liberty Street

They're still finding bone fragments from the dead on the tops of New York skyscrapers, and still the shrapnel of September 11th finds its way through the soft body of American life. Today it ripped the guts from the long public career of Lewis "Scooter" Libby, one of the highest officials in the Bush Administration, as a grand jury charged him in a cover-up involving the deliberate leak of a covert American operative's name in a callous act of political retribution.

But as Republicans cry of the politics of prosecution and the techicalities of perjury, the shadows of 9-11 hang all over this case - and all over the cases Patrick Fitzgerald may yet bring against the powerful. Thoses shadows remain because of group of Americans led by the Vice-President of the United States saw 9-11 not so much as a human tragedy, but as a political opportunity.

The heart of the case against Scooter Libby and Fitzgerald's ongoing investigation is the still beating heart of September 11, 2001 - a heart beat of sacrifice and liberty defended to so many Americans, perverted - utterly perverted - by a group of zealots and pretenders. Make no mistake: the killing machine of 9-11 is still stirring; the jet fuel is still burning, taking the mostly young lives of 2,000 Americans in Iraq - men and women who died because of a sleight of hand engineered by Richard Cheney and the White House Iraq Group.

This is an administration that has made its reputation on the reaction to terror, on defense, on security - yet it did not hesitate to destroy the career of a veteran CIA operative, nor an entire front company for a network of American spies. This is cowardice and treachery.

Led by Mr. Cheney, this Administration used the attack on New York and the Pentagon to launch an unecessary war against Iraq - an immoral adventure that seems to have no end and no purpose. Iraq has no connection to 9-11. No connection. It never has.

The chain looks like this: Cheney and his neo-con gang saw 9-11 as a means to an end; they acted. The United States acted. We told the world an untruth about WMD. And now we're in a sickening quagmire, bogged down by clotted blood and gore and lies. The Valerie Wilson case was about attacking a critic of the war, a critic of the lies; it's about the excuses - the cover-up was about protecting Mr. Cheney and the WHIG, a cover-up the entangled The New York Times - a former liberal bastion - in the web of deceit.

Still, the wind whistles along the valleys of lower Manhattan, the old buildings and the much older streets, laid down by the Dutch. On days like these, the dead speak in the autumn breeze.

Ten small pieces of bone were found down on Liberty Street, on the roof of the condemned Deustche Bank building - ten small remains of human beings, ten reminders of the hatred men bear toward one another. The fragments ranged in size from half an inch to two inches, some perhaps from a rib cage, and they were turned over to the medical examiner's office. Those fragments are linked to the grenade and IED fragments that have killed so many soldiers. They are linked to fragments of Scooter Libby's life and reputation.

And they are linked to the moral fragments of the Bush Administration - an administration that was perverted by 9-11, a perversion that gives victory to the haters who would see Americans dead, in flames, amidst the rubble.

Four years later. Down on Liberty Street.

The GOP's Non Official Cover

Just as Valerie Wilson was an analyst for the legal services company Brewster Jennings & Associates, the Republican Party held support for American security as its manifesto.

In the end, both stories were mere covers.

Valerie Wilson was an active CIA operative, a person the United States invested more than a decade in training, provided with non official cover (in the parlance of spooks) to protect and serve our country. And as we now know, the leaders of the Republican Party - led by the office of the Vice-President of the United States - tossed her over in an act of political retribution to help cover up the falsehoods that party used to justify a disastrous military adventure in the east.

Over the last few days, FBI agents working for special prosectur Patrick Fitzgerald have been combing Valerie Wilson's neighborhood, where she lived with her husband Joe Wilson, who criticized the Bush Administration's reliance of bad intelligence and brought the hatchet men down on his wife. They're knocking on doors, according to the LA Times, and they are working to provide evidence that the GOP's main defense in the case is yet another lie: that "everyone knew" that Valerie Wilson was a CIA "employee," that she wasn't covert, wasn't undercover, and faced no danger.

If Valerie Wilson wasn't in any way valuable as a NOC agent of the CIA, why did the nation's spy apparatus set up the fictional Brewster Jennings & Associates, provide that firm with offices and staff, create and elaborate background story for the firm (including listings in many business journals), and use it to deploy other CIA operatives?

And why, if the Republican leadership that doesn't blink at sending 2,000 Americans to their deaths on a dollar and a dream really believes in security and intelligence - in understanding the bad guys - did they take down such a cover apparatus? Why do they excuse the leakers, who attacked our intelligence services? Why do they argue that perjury in a case about national defense is a mere technicality? Why do they attempt to defend the power-brokers by attacking Valerie Wilson, who by dint of her status and training was the moral equivalent of an American soldier in the field - every day of her undercover life, 365 days a year, every year?

It is because they do not care about American security, about American honor, about Americans in service to their country, at risk from the its enemies. They care only about power.

Pre-Indictment Thinking

The little snippet below - in a post attacking CIA leak prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald - sums up the inbred, nativist freak-out currently loosening infirm bowels among hard-core conservatives from coast to coast on this, the weekend before the storm for the failed Republican revolution; it quite fairly represents a wide swath of extreme conservative opinion about this country, as expressed by the activists who void themselves daily on FreeRepublic.com, the home of the far right - and the proud repository of American hate speech:

can't we out left the left and maybe see their Leninism and raise em alittle Stalinism. 4 years of death camps for the left and then back to a Norman Rockwell America for the rest of us, be rid of these leach maggots once and for all.

The Far Side of the World

Stone-age attitudes toward women exist on this worthy planet thousands of years after either evolution or intelligent design - or both - banished the age of cave-dwellers to the study of misty and ancient paleology. Men continue to employ humilition and physical domination in organized fashion to subjugate women; to compel by force what they are incapable of compelling by logic or humanity, in and around the darker corners of our shared human habitation. One of these dark corners is rural Pakistan, so recently the focus of world pity for the ravages of a massive earthquake. Many thousands dead. And few roads, fewer conveyances, few routes to bring the wealth of allies like the United States to bear in aid of the broken and starving victims.

That same lack of roadways - the stark absence of modernity so shocking to Americans - has provided a impenetrable haven, as we all know too well, for our nation's greatest sworn enemy - the killer Osama bin Laden. That lamentable dearth also helped to create the setting of one of the most heroic stories of our age: the triumph of Mukhtaran Bibi over the forces of sexual terror.

And even as we strive to relieve those rural provinces, the very incursion of aid will push modernity on the same village elders who sentenced Mukhtar Mai to be gang-raped as the penalty for a family dispute. Expected to take her own life by ignorant men, she chose instead not to yield but to fight - not with weapons or force, but through non-violence, through words, through legal recourse, through the very force of will in her small body. Against the village elders, against the ancient code of the provinces, against the very misogynist actions of her country's strongman President, the anti-woman General Pervez Musharraf, she stood like a rock - loyal to her country, loyal to her people, and most palpably, loyal to her ideals.

After the regime in power relented and returned her rights of transit, Mukhtar Mai is on her way to finally visit the United States to accept an award from Glamour magazine as its Woman of the Year for 2005. The $20,000 prize will no doubt assist greatly in the education of the children in the two schools (one for girls, the other for boys) that Mukhtaran Bibi established in her village to banish ignorance. As well, she will use the trip to ask for contributions to help victims in the earthquake.

No honor was ever more richly deserved.

UPDATE: Mukhtar Mai is in the United States and will accept Glamour's award next week at Lincoln Center. Details on her trip here.

Interring the Lead at the NYT

Apparently Judith Miller isn't the only reporter at The New York Times who knows how to bury the lead on a major story: Mike McIntire does a pretty good job of it as well. On today's Metro section front, a huge headline screams "Institute Once Led by Ferrer Forms Base of His Support" and the lead essentially claims that Freddy Ferrer used the Drum Major Institute for Public Policy as a political launching pad for his current mayoral run. This, of course, is the line of the opposition and McIntire lapped it up entirely - at least on the first page. For those who turned to the jump [insert shocking Poynter Institute stats on readers who actually follow jumps here], the reporter did do a decent job of describing the incredible work that DMI does on a relatively small budget as a terrier of a progressive think tank. But c'mon Mike - you basically lead with a single-source accusation from political hitmen before telling the full story in the back; that, indeed, DMI completes a mass of policy work and helps to lead the discussion of the future of America policy. As a board member of DMI, I think the work of our think tank deserved better. As a Times subscriber, I think the readers did as well.

Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam

May none but honest and wise men ever rule under this roof, said John Adams upon investiture as the first tenant of the people in the Executive Mansion, as the White House was known upon its completion. That Adams prayed in vain was demonstrated rather quickly in his own disastrous administration (though it was not without distinction entirely), and then down through the years by - if historians be honest - a clear super-majority of the men who have inhabited the manse.

In today's White House, as Marines in dress blues snap to attention and men in black with shoulder-borne guided missiles walk the roof and eaves, Adams' words continue to ring as this lowest of failed Administrations continues its downward slide toward ignominy and almost universally-perceived failure. The dark clouds descend ever closer as a special prosectur nears indictments over the outing of a secret operative during a time of war as a method of political payback. That the equation now focuses on the Vice President of the United States and his men brings the corruption of this Administration - indeed, this false cause of war and conservatism (fiscally a mutually exclusive bargain) - to the highest levels of political power in the world.

You cannot blame Don Imus therefore for his consistent slip of the tongue this morning as he queried the usual assortment of Washington insiders about the growing scandal: Liddy and Hunt, he said. Liddy and Hunt, er I mean, Liddy and Rove, uh, Libby and Rove. And suddenly the mind focused on the delicate and superb scenes of All the President's Men, a masterwork of film noir and a damned fine period piece that captures journalism as it once was practiced. So dark, so based almost entirely on dialogue and storytelling. Pervarding ATPM is the massive but hidden presence of secret government, of deadly secrets and hard men, and danger.

That, and reporting. Paging through phone books (ah, the quaint old newspaper library!) and knocking on doors. Working the telephone endlessly. Honing the copy, submitting it for radical surgery and vicious editorial comment shouted across a wax-tinged newsroom floor, and then the byline - and the same thing the next day, the next week. No Google, no Lexis-Nexis, no bloggers on your ass ex post facto, no TV time on Chris Matthews. Just gathering information and writing; long hours for short pay. The good old days, when reporters didn't prance from the grand jury on Arthur Sulzberger's arm after running their own freelance units with security clearances inside the nation's great newspapers.

Yet, a big part of Watergate is defined by reporting by newspapers, by the news media. Fairly or not, they came out as heroes and role models, who inspired a new generation of the scribbling class (including this one) to pick up the pen, to start kicking the tires on the entrenched powers. I think I may be on safe ground in predicting that Miller and Cooper will not have the inspirational verve of Woodward and Bernstein; not will they achieve verite status within the cinema - at best, they may hit the small screen as buffoonish extras on the Simpsons.

No, the center of character in this drama - the counterweight to the Nixonian magnet of dishonesty that is Dick Cheney - is the young, Catholic prosecutor from our little town.

Son of a doorman, Patrick Fitzgerald of Brooklyn attended Regis High School, the elite high school hall of the Society of Jesus in New York, a school that admits and graduates purely on merit, without regard to an ability to pay. And although his education at Amherst, and Harvard Law, and the prosecutorial offices of the Southern District of New York was certainly critical to his formation, there can be no doubt that his sense of social justice is a product of the Jesuits. As one opponent in the defense bar said of him: "Pat is driven by iron-tight integrity and a tireless work ethic." And another emphasized that Fitzgerald "is impervious to political pressure. ... I've seen no evidence that he has anything but the purest motives."

This is very bad news to a gang that lives entirely on the currency of political pressure - and one that has misused that currency in matter of grave national security. There is no pressure they can bring to bear. Oh sure, they used their skills to bring this country into war, to bully Congress, to corrupt the national press, the take lies to the United Nations and the American people. But they can't move Fitz; nothing there, no pressure points.

And no wife who happens to be a CIA operative with a cover story built over more than a decade at considerable expense to the U.S. taxpayers. Fitzgerald is single, and single-minded. And the Administration fairly trembles.

The Cheney Bombshell

Not shockingly, Judith Miller buried the lead in her breathless Letter from a Virginia Jail in tomorrow's Times (on the Website tonite) - she wastes a few hundred words on her own plight, her talks with editors and lawyers, and her frustration in stir. Sadly, even at this late date, she still lacks an editor at The Times willing to rewrite her me-first reporting. Because there is a bombshell in the middle of her story, way, way down - and the bombshell is this:

Before the grand jury, Mr. Fitzgerald asked me questions about Mr. Cheney. He asked, for example, if Mr. Libby ever indicated whether Mr. Cheney had approved of his interviews with me or was aware of them. The answer was no.

Forget about the "no" answer; despite her 85 days in jail, Miller will generally be a supporting witness in the upcoming trials, above a footnote but not the crux of any case. By her own admission, Miller's memory is bad and her notes wouldn't be a credit to a reporter on a college newspaper. No, what's astounding is the revelation that prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald is going after the Vice President of the United States.

I think the story, in the end, is a simple one - and brilliantly captured by Don Imus during his Friday show. You know what it was, said Imus to his audience: "when we're mad at someone we all go back in the office - Bernie, Chuck, Lou and me - and we figure out a way to get the bastard, what we have on him. That's what these guys did." I think that's right, and I think Fitzgerald is convinced that the Imus figure in the bastard-getting was Dick Cheney. This could be quite a week.

UPDATE: Sharp-eyed AP reporter Pete Yost sees beyond the "whither NYT" knicker-twist, and nails the real lead of the Miller stories tonight. And it's about national security and the VP's office. Reuters scrawler Adam Entous also finds the right lead amidst the self-serving Miller mess.

UPDATE II: Rove and Libby are prepared to resign, via PoliticalWire. Best day's round-up of opinion belongs to Joe Gandelman

UPDATE III: There's an interesting timeline analysis coming out of Miller's diary that places the NYT diva in Jackson Hole at the same time as Cheney and Libby (indeed she met with Libby face to face there) - offering some fascinating possibilities. Get the scoop from Akou here.

Katrina Era Ends

Are poverty's 15 minutes over?

Remember the days immediately after Katrina ripped a bleeding, jagged wound into the southern coast, when we all discovered that there were - gasp! - poor people living in squalid conditions in one of America's great cities? Yes, that brief time when every TV talking head raced to cover the suddenly popular poverty beat, when the Great Society was briefly recalled, when even Republicans battled to see how just much government could spend - and how quickly? It was a heady time in America, though understandably brief. Unemployment, sub-standard housing, failing schools, urban blight, disease and desparation .... welll ... they're just not as nifty as a new iPod or a Supreme Court nominee.

During the recent Katrina Era - when poverty briefly supplanted the mythical (and vote-popular) "security" as an issue of the major parties - it fell to First Mutha (er, Mom/Lady) Barbara Bush to put the capstone quote on the fading epoch:

"And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this--this (she chuckles slightly) is working very well for them."

[Note: This is cross-posted from the brand new DMIBlog, where I'm guest-blogging all week - the full post is there - lots more! - and I invite your comments in that venue...that includes you Tom K. and you Bruce.]

Embracing Old Media

You gotta love Jeff Jarvis. No one - and I do mean no one - has imbibed more of the blogger's Kool-Aid than the man with the scraggly beard, the relentlessly centrist, every-waking-though-a-post media maven who has become a one-man XML empire unto himself.

Empire indeed. Because seemingly, and surprisingly, Jeff Jarvis has recently embraced the old media rules - the "I write, you read, and you'd better like it" rules of the old media world he pretends to despise. Just look at the site, folks. BuzzMachine has become the online equivalent of what Ed Koch used to say about middle class neighborhoods in New York resisting development: it's last one in, shut the door.

In a matter of months, the Jarvis site has morphed from a sloppy, loose, dog-eared, open-sourced mess of a brilliant conversation into a neat, tidy and heavily-guarded little money-maker.

Exhibit one: trackbacks are gone. Jeff got his; the hell with the thousands of bloggers just getting started who might want the lone click-through a trackback provides.

Exhibit two: the blogrolls are gone. See exhibit one.

Exhibit three: the MSNBC screen capture. Yup, citizen's media spoken here.

Exhibit four: the tagroll. It's obsessive, and it represents only one man's organization of the information on the site. Jeff's.

Now, I'm not one to call out another blogger just for the hell of it. But Jarvis is more than your average blogger: he's one of a handful of leaders of what purports to be a movement, a reformation of the "failed" world of mainstream American media, particularly journalism. Hell, Jeff's obsession and example helped get many of us into blogging. So why is Jeff Jarvis essentially closing up shop?

By the standards of the average Joe's blog, everything about BuzzMachine is just peachy - it's a fine blog, well-written, and certainly a must-read for media types (I'm on the feed every day).

What grates, however, is rampant blog triumphalism competing with entrenched blog triumphalist. Jeff's site used to be a great community; now it's just Jeff's great site.

I wonder if he just got sick of Kool-Aid?

UPDATE: Well, Jeff is royally pissed. Took it personally. I'm sorry for that (and for claiming incorrectly that BuzzMachine had removed trackbacks; didn't have 'em - but should). Though I do cop to the charge of snarkiness, this was not a personal attack - just a criticism of, well, a major media critic.

My tone may have been better, however: I may have focused on some little, stupid site details rather than the big picture. That is to say: I buried the lead. It's the blog triumphalism I resent, as I've said before; it's the idea of a very few media insiders that everything we do or say or invent is rife with "revolutionary" repercussions for society. The "we" vs. "them" - old media, new media - faux divide is grating in the extreme.

Luckily, Chervokas stepped up and actually made the argument I only hinted at with snark (seems we've worked this tag-team before) so I'll quote him here from comments, 'cos it's good stuff.

Does "citizen media," what we used to call, back in the day, "user generated content," represent a substantial challenge to the business structure of major media companies? Yes and no. A decade ago, when Tom and I launched @NY and began preaching that user generated content would change media forever, we (I don't me just Tom and I but the whole industry) believed that super narrow niche media and communities of interest would result in a new paradigm in advertising that would involve super premium pricing for highly targeted ad delivery, thereby changing media as an industry from a mass medium to a medium of the masses (I believe it was Tom who first coined that latter phrase). The medium of the masses has come to pass. The new financial paradigm has not. Instead the companies that make money from advertising on blogs and homemade websites, companies like Google, do so by aggregating mass audiences and charging the least premium kind of prices to be found in the ad business--direct marketing style prices based on response rates. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

Jeff (snarkily) dismissed Jason with a regal wave of his commenting hand, but Chervokas came back with more:

I really do think there's a self-perpetuating hype avalanche that occurs when media focuses on media; and the net result is the overstatement of the importance of stuff like blogs--the stuff we media pros are surrounded by but which the broader public experiences very differently. And I think Tom's criticism that you've fallen pray to the momentum of that avalanche is something you might at least consider, however snarkily he might have expressed it.

It's like the Howard Dean effect. Young political reporters fell in love w/ Dean because the webcentric Meetup-driven nature of his campaign seemed novel and cool. As a result Dean got a lot of unskeptical feel-good press which gave the impression that he was the next big thing. But, as it turned out, when election time came, no one was there to pull a lever for him. The surging Dean campaign was a figment of the imagination of an unskeptical press dazzled by Internet cool.

Maybe I'm a curmudgeon, maybe I'm a contrarian, but the more people tell me that something is cool, the more skeptical I am of the whole enterprise. That skepticism might have cost me money as an entrepreneur, but it always stood me in good stead as a journalist.

Read the full exchange in comments here; I hope Jeff posts a thoughtful response. He's a thoughtful guy. But my favorite comment in this little contretemps came from MediaCurmudgeon over at BM:

Jeff–You’re too sensitive and defensive. Don’t dignify the dope with a mention.

Who you calling "dope," curmudgeon?