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President Bush Hates the Free Press

I wrote earlier this month about how President Bush hates our freedoms:

…the more I think about it, the more I realize that President Bush hates our freedoms. It all kind of makes sense now that I think about it.

Well, we can add a new freedom to the list of those that President Bush hates: the freedom of the press.

The New York Times (and a few other newspapers) recently ran a story describing the Bush administration’s decision to sift through financial records in its hunt for terrorists. Unfortunately, the idea of the Bush administration secretly scouring through private records has become so commonplace that a true debate about the legitimacy of such actions can be hard to find.

Glenn Greenwald has written a post about the widely held reaction throughout the country that appropriate personnel at The New York Times should be tried for treason, or even face bodily harm. Does that sound ridiculous to you? That members of our nation’s free press who air the government’s dirty laundry should be tried for treason and/or face bodily harm? It’s sick. It’s a sickening display of a lack of respect, and even a hatred, for some of the most fundamental liberties this country was designed to protect.

Mr. Greenwald, as usual, does an excellent job dissecting the crazed right-wing hysteria surrounding this story. Here is his summary of the arguments of those who are calling for the heads of reporters and editors at The New York Times:

The clear rationale underlying the arguments of Bush supporters needs to be highlighted. They believe that the Bush administration ought to be allowed to act in complete secrecy, with no oversight of any kind. George Bush is Good and the administration wants nothing other than to stop The Terrorists from killing us. There is no need for oversight over what they are doing because we can trust our political officials to do good on their own. We don’t need any courts or any Congress or any media serving as a “watchdog” over the Bush administration. There is no reason to distrust what they do. We should — and must — let them act in total secrecy for our own good, for our protection. And anyone who prevents them from acting in total secrecy is not merely an enemy of the Bush administration, but of the United States, i.e., is a traitor.

Do you know what one of the problems with getting in such a tizzy about this Times story is? President Bush has already told the world about this very technique (emphasis mine):

Before September the 11th, law enforcement could more easily obtain business and financial records of white-collar criminals than of suspected terrorists. See, part of the way to make sure that we catch terrorists is we chase money trails. And yet it was easier to chase a money trail with a white-collar criminal than it was a terrorist. The Patriot Act ended this double standard and it made it easier for investigators to catch suspected terrorists by following paper trails here in America.

As I wrote last night, many people find it desirable to take the easy way out and dilute or ignore documented fact. This practice is especially popular on the Internet. Why engage in a rational debate about these issues when you can lie and claim that The New York Times is telling the terrorists things that our own president has already made public?

Mr. Greenwald goes on to highlight the Bush administration’s conflation of their own political interests and the country’s national security:

The media is guilty of publishing stories which might harm the political interests of the President, not which could harm the national security of the United States. But Bush supporters recognize no such distinction. Harming the “Commander-in-Chief in a time of war” is, to them, synonymous with treason. Hence, we have calls for the imprisonment of our national media for reporting stories which tell terrorists nothing of significance which they did not already know, but which instead, merely provoke long-overdue democratic debates about whether we want to be a country in which we place blind trust in the administration to act in total secrecy.

Here is one of the principal failings of the Bush administration. Everything is about politics. The administration would rather spend hundreds of billions of additional dollars and thousands more American lives in Iraq over the next three years than discuss measured redeployment so that the president doesn’t have to eat political crow. The administration would rather make permanent economically reckless tax cuts that will perilously burden future generations of Americans with debt than repair their fiscal disaster so that the president can drum up domestic political support. The administration would rather provide a payout to insurance companies than proper health care coverage for Americans so that the president can appease the special interests.

Mr. Greenwald ends his post with a display of how the founding fathers predicted exactly this kind of presidency and tried with all their might to guard against it. The Bush administration is doing all it can to subvert the desires of our country’s founding fathers to better its cause politically. I strongly recommend reading Mr. Greenwald’s post if you fear what’s happening to our freedoms in this country today.