News Coverage

At the end of today's column, Tony Norman writes about John Yoo, the author of the two "torture memos" and their collective effects on what's left of American moral integrity. He ends the column with this:

Last week, in response to a Freedom of Information Act request by the American Civil Liberties Union, Mr. Yoo's memo was declassified.

The reaction in much of the mainstream media alternated between "just the facts ma'am"-level reporting and total indifference.

Still, it's hard to criticize news media for the dearth of serious coverage about a torture memo with so many weighty matters like a "pregnant man" on "Oprah" and Sen. Barack Obama's lousy performance at an Altoona bowling alley as distractions.

Someday, if we're lucky, we'll look back on the bread and circuses of this era with something approaching the cleansing power of retroactive shame.

He was probably unaware of the Nexis search Glenn Greenwald did:

In the past two weeks, the following events transpired. A Department of Justice memo, authored by John Yoo, was released which authorized torture and presidential lawbreaking. It was revealed that the Bush administration declared the Fourth Amendment of the Bill of Rights to be inapplicable to "domestic military operations" within the U.S. The U.S. Attorney General appears to have fabricated a key event leading to the 9/11 attacks and made patently false statements about surveillance laws and related lawsuits. Barack Obama went bowling in Pennsylvania and had a low score.

Here are the number of times, according to NEXIS, that various topics have been mentioned in the media over the past thirty days:

• "Yoo and torture" - 102
• "Mukasey and 9/11" -- 73
• "Yoo and Fourth Amendment" -- 16
• "Obama and bowling" -- 1,043
• "Obama and Wright" -- More than 3,000 (too many to be counted)
• "Obama and patriotism" - 1,607
• "Clinton and Lewinsky" -- 1,079

So, in Tony's words:

Mr. Yoo's memo explicitly removed Mr. Bush -- and the CIA -- from the indignity of submitting to the authority of the Geneva Conventions and other quaint international treaties that opposed the president's prerogative to torture when he sees fit during wartime.

The morality of the memo pivoted on a novel interpretation of torture that scaled new heights of sophistry: as long as it wasn't the interrogator's "intent" to torture the captive, then it wasn't torture.

And even if it was torture by some narrow and unenlightened definition that didn't embrace the American understanding of the term, well, it still wasn't a violation of international law because the law doesn't apply to American presidents and their surrogates.

Generated about one tenth the media notice as Senator Obama's bowling score.

Yea, we got a liberal media - one that's protecting the liberal agenda while doing all it can to tear down our great and glorious president. That's exactly right.