You have to love it when reporters play dumb. The case for the NSA program, approved by the American people in nearly all polls (sometimes by as much as a 2-1 margin) understand, fund and support the program.
The Grey Lady, maybe because of the onset of hearing loss due to its old age, still isn’t on board with the American people or the administration.
“President Bush offered new information on Thursday about what he said was a foiled plot by Al Qaeda in 2002 to fly a hijacked airplane into the tallest building west of the Mississippi, the U.S. Bank Tower in Los Angeles, as he sought to make the case for his record on national security.”
Actually, esteemed journalistic colleagues, he made the case on September 11, 2001. Apparently, some of you have chosen to return to the pre 9-11-01 slumber rather than to acknowledge that things in the United States and in the world have changed since 1969. The classified and secret facts presented by the administration to you (at your request) lay out the case just fine.
The real fly in the ointment here is that the NYT (as MSM press leader) is having trouble grasping the fact that their “NSA/Bush = Big Brother=Impeachment” story has lost its legs and is hobbling into the junk pile of other failed memes: Plamegate, the failed attempt to stall the Alito nomination, the Downing Street Nothing (memo), Bush’s alleged control of the hurricanes, the imagined and hypothetical Gitmo abuses, Non-Fitzmas, non-stop denial of Democrat involvement with the Abramoff scandal, and a host of others that are too numerous and frankly moronic to waste more space and time mentioning here.
The NYT continues to imply that nothing the President says is to be taken as fact or is to be trusted:
“Mr. Bush and White House officials gave no reason for releasing details of a plot that they first disclosed last October. But Mr. Bush's speech came at a time when Republicans are intent on establishing their record on national security as the pre-eminent issue in the 2006 midterm elections, and when the president is facing questions from members of both parties about a secret eavesdropping program that he describes as pivotal to the war on terrorism.”
A troubled journalist would obviously have questions. Why would the President reveal these details? What is he trying to say? What are the politics behind this decision (because that’s all that matters, after all)? Forget that we demanded it – why is he laying out these facts now?
I’m sure vaunted and intelligent journalists can think up a reason or two as to why he is revealing these details. To the average well-read American, however, the administration has more or less bequeathed a factual smack down on the NYT's insinuations that the program is nefarious, overbroad and dangerous to Americans – quite the contrary. Providing declassified details of a foiled terror plot (which the NYT had nothing to do with thwarting) seems sufficient to take the wind out of the sails of the dishonest and rather paranoid journalists that insist on foisting their political agendas and inconsequential views on a continually shrinking audience.
