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How Political Dialogue Has Changed

Political dialogue in the United States has changed dramatically in this first decade of the new century. Topics are being debated about which most people assumed we had reached consensus, such as whether our government should torture its enemies and in some cases its own citizens, whether the president can choose to interpret the laws of Congress any way he or she chooses, and whether the government can indefinitely detain people without accusing them of a crime or allowing them to challenge their detention in a court, among other such issues.

I personally assumed all of those debates ended a long time ago, with the result being fairly clear to anyone who values their participation in a free, liberal, representative democracy. President George W. Bush and his administration, however, have challenged all of the above notions. In most cases, the media has not only failed to acknowledge how radical a departure from past norms this administration’s beliefs are; it has been an active cheerleader throughout most of the departure itself.

I try to take note of specific media clippings from this day and age so that in the future I can look back and realize just how different these times are than the times ahead will be. I have a sincere belief that in a decade or so, this country will have returned to its roots, to a place where the president respects the checks and balances that were written into our Constitution by the founding fathers and the government respects all the due process rights (including the separation of church and state) espoused in the Bill of Rights. I sincerely believe the current undue and damaging reaction to an excessively hyped terrorist threat will pass, and history books will examine this first decade of the new century as a period from which important lessons in the art of democracy were learned. This president failed democracy, not vice versa.

Now I’ll move onto the more immediate point. I read Glenn Greenwald’s blog with great regularity. He has chronicled the Bush administration’s continued overstepping of constitutional bounds with a vigor and tenacity that is not often equaled. His background in law provides a particularly effective toolset for making such observations. If I have one complaint about his blog posts, it is that the posts are long and often repetitive. He exhibits great clarity of thought and often makes excellent word choices, but he tends to emphasize his points by rephrasing the same claims and conclusions multiple times throughout the post. Consider the previous comment a disclaimer.

Mr. Greenwald wrote a post today that followed a post from yesterday in which he criticizes the Washington Post Editorial Board’s warm regard for the recently deceased Augusto Pinochet, the former Chilean dictator. In short, General Pinochet took control of Chile in a military coup in 1973 and proceeded to torture 30,000 people suspected of opposing his politics and murder 3,000 more.

Yes, Fred Hiatt, the Washington Post editorial writer, praised General Pinochet for his accomplishments while head of the Chilean government. Mr. Greenwald does a superb job detailing just how radical such praise is, and why this praise relates to the political dialogue that takes place on the editorial pages of many of this nation’s major newspapers. It is one small incident, the passing of a brutal and murderous dictator, but it does say a lot about where the values of some of our nation’s most prominent journalists lie.

Mr. Greenwald explains it best. In his post from today, he compares what Fred Hiatt says about Augusto Pinochet with what the Washington Post Editorial Board said about him twenty years ago, arguably during the height of his politically motivated torture and killing of thousands of Chilean citizens. The Post understandably condemned the general then, noting that the torture and killing “deprives him of any claim on the respect of decent people anywhere.” Mr. Greenwald explains:

The disintegration of our nation’s media — likely the single greatest enabling factor that allowed the President to drag the nation to war in Iraq — is glaring, and is demonstrated by so many events. But few events demonstrate it as profoundly as that Washington Post editorial yesterday, particularly when it is contrasted to what the Post editorial page was only a decade ago.

President Bush has failed democracy, and the media has failed the people. It’s high time we take our country back.