Today's Meet the Press provided yet another vivid reminder of how the "even-handedness" of the American media--electronic and print--plays into the hands of the Bush administration, indeed into ideologues of nearly every stripe. Tim Russert presented a colloquium on how the US should best proceed in Iraq with four carefully balanced voices: Tom Andrews, ex-Congressman from Maine and National Director of anti-war coalition Win Without War; newly-elected PA Dem. Congressman (and Retired Vice-Admiral) Joe Sestak; noted Neocon Richard Perle, who now hangs his hat at (where else?) the American Enterprise Institute; and--wait for it--Tom DeLay. (Scott Fitzgerald's famous line about American lives lacking second acts clearly predated television.)
I promise not to bore anyone with a précis of their views, as anyone who didn't catch today's show can easily divine their positions. My question is this: Does being spectacularly wrong ever disqualify one from the ranks of "expert"? We know there's no such thing as accountability under President Bush, but what about old-fashioned shame? Does Richard Perle feel he ought to preface his restatements of how we must give war in Iraq still more of a chance with even the teeniest of mea culpas for being a primary architect of this disaster? To end the suspense, no. Does Tom DeLay's long-term lack of demonstrated interest in any aspect of foreign policy that doesn't directly impact precinct politics keep him from offering the same stale shibboleths about The War on Terrorism, Saddam Hussein, 9/11, blah, blah, blah? Not a chance.
Let's look at the two representatives of the Let's at Least Try Something Else in Iraq school of thought. Joe Sestak, during his 30+ years in the US Navy, served six sea tours with units of the Atlantic and Pacific Fleets, making seven deployments to Europe, the Persian Gulf and the western and South Pacific, rising to three-star rank. Now military service, even as distinguished as his, doesn't guarantee strategic brilliance or geo-political wisdom--cf. Gen. Curtis LeMay. (Has anyone else noticed that one of the signal achievements of the Bush administration is to make the possibility of a military coup d'etat sound almost appealing?)
But such credentials make it hard for the draft-dodging DeLay and the military service-avoiding Mr. Perle to try the usual right-wing ploy of suggesting lack of backbone--or wristbone--on the part of their critics. (See Huffington Post blogger Chris Kelly's excellent summary two days ago of the military service credentials of many of the Iraq War's leading cheerleaders.) But I waited today in vain for Tim Russert to remind the audience of Perle's past prognostications, to ask them to mull those thoughts over while hearing his latest nostrums. Nor did he feel in any way required to point out that DeLay is pursuing his latest career as author after multiple criminal indictments and the loss of his carefully constructed rotten borough in Texas to the hated Democrats.
This presentation of these diametrically opposing viewpoints gave no hint to the viewers that one talking head had concocted much of the intellectual underpinnings of the policies that have brought American foreign policy--and as a direct consequence, its fiscal policy--to ruin. The other pro-War teammate? He merely accomplished the nigh-impossible task of bringing the US Congress into even deeper disrepute. But, hey, it was good television.
As for former Rep. Andrews--who is tipped by some to be the Democrat who gets to replace Susan Collins in the US Senate next year--does he possess a history of offering wise counsel on the subject of our Iraqi adventure? Maybe this quote suggests the answer to that question:
But it would be a mistake to confuse the current mood in Iraq with enthusiasm for the foreign occupation now being imposed, or to ignore the abundant indications that Iraq is descending into a pit of lawlessness, sectarian fighting, and on-going humanitarian crises. Just as it would be a mistake to conclude that the apparent ease with which the US and Britain blasted its way through Iraq strengthened the case for this unnecessary war or obviated its disastrous implications for US and world security.
I think the date of that statement is, as the lawyers would put it, dispositive: April 15, 2003.
Yet Meet the Press and its journalistic brethren continue to offer "both sides" of critical questions, and the expositors of those opinions with wildly different bona fides, as if they were of equal worth. I would hope that Mr. Russert is familiar with a quotation that I committed to (imperfect) memory when I read it years ago in an interview with noted paleontologist and best-selling atheist Richard Dawkins: "When two people hold diametrically opposite points of view, the truth does not necessarily lie somewhere in between. It is possible that one of them is simply wrong."
A good friend, when I called her to express my amazement that the wonderful folks who brought us this ghastly war had seemingly no shame, thought me utterly daft. Did I really expect people such as Richard Perle ever to confess being in error? I said that, perhaps naively, I did. In point of fact, I had a very instructive conversation with the selfsame Mr. Perle back in 1993--at a lovely dinner party at the Santa Barbara salon of a splendid hostess, namely Arianna Huffington. (I don't think I had been invited to add liberal balance, but rather--as a bachelor back then--more to balance the table from a male/female standpoint.)
He was basking in the glow of the recent thorough defeat of the Soviet Union and its hated system when I, a few seats away, said I had a confession to make. I told him and the table that I had long been convinced that the Soviet empire could never be humiliatingly brought down, only slowly and modestly modified. I even confessed to having contributed money to the Nuclear Freeze Campaign. I then said, "Mr. Perle our side was wrong and yours proved right." (Discretion and the obligations of a good guest kept me from adding, "Of course, no one could have planned on the lucky accident of Mikhail Gorbachev.")
Here was Perle's somewhat ungenerous response: "You are the first liberal I have ever heard make such a confession." Well, one of the curses of being a "liberal" is that you can--and indeed do--acknowledge the odd error. I guess being a failed right-wing intellectual--or a failed right-wing pol--means never having to say you're sorry.