Dumb, Dumber and Just Plain Slow
June 29th, 2008
Under the Microscope
by Glynn Wilson
Now that we convinced some key United States Senators to delay the vote on Bush’s spying bill and legal immunity for the telecom giants until after the Fourth of July, Independence Day holiday - keeping the Constitution out of the fire for at least a few more days - it’s normally that time of year when we all take a summer break.
In normal times of peace and prosperity, we could all break out the barbecue grills or head for the boat on the lake and pop off some firecrackers and revel in the inherent beauty of American freedom.
Alas, this is no normal year and these are not normal times.
If I were one to put any mental stock into Biblical prophecy, I would say there is plenty of evidence to say these are “the end times.” Floods, forest fires, droughts, food crises, wars and rumors of wars (will Bush-Cheney bomb-bomb Iran before they leave office?)
This has become something of a joke amongst the so-called Birmingham Gay Photographers Club, so named by me for a group of mostly bachelors who get together and go camping from time to time and specialize in photographing nature. Since most are over 50 and are not married, they also like to make gay jokes about each other. It’s a guy thing. (Sorry ladies, and gay people : )
Because of the serious nature of the times, I promise not to write about what I had for breakfast today or the latest on my Revolutionary Garden.
Instead I feel like a little government and media criticism.
While you all know how I feel about the monopoly, corporate press in Alabama, meaning the Newhouse newspapers in Huntsville, Birmingham and Mobile, I do check in from time to time just to see if they are getting the message over there in corporate-chain medialand.
And ever so subtly, it looks like the pendulum is beginning to swing - if just a tad.
Anyone who knows anything about the culture of newsrooms knows it takes a long time to change anything. We’ve hammered their lousy Web design for so long that I just get burned out on bothering.
The Birmingham News has now turned its Website mostly into a series of blogs - as if readers turn to newspapers for blogs - although the programmers at Advance still don’t understand that what readers need is a news page that quickly tells them what the important news of the day is going to be. Not just yesterday’s news posted at 4 a.m. The news that is happening NOW in Washington, New York, London, or Bagdad - or Clay, Alabama.
“It’s going to be a sunny day today,” is not the lead story, guys and gals. Sorry to break it to you.
And while we still refuse to link to it, if you are so inclined to keep up with what newspapers in Alabama are covering today about what happened yesterday, you can do it easily enough on this page:
If you go there and hit the Birmingham News and then search around for the Editorial Page, which is incredibly hidden to the point where we wonder if they are just ashamed of it, you will find an editorial from Sunday FINALLY acknowledging that the Bush Justice Department’s Inspector General’s office released a report last week saying politics and ideology played a paramount role in everything the department has done during the tenure of President George W. Bush, including the hiring of interns.
The editorial page editor of the paper, Bob Blalock, who everyone says is a “nice guy,” a euphemism for “not so smart,” received an interesting honor recently from the University of Alabama’s College of Communications (my alma mater). In their new public relations brochure to keep alumni up on the goings on of the department, the redesigned Communicator - which you can download and read as a pdf file here - you can read the blurb about him receiving the alumni of the year award for print journalism.
You can also read a puff piece about First Lady Laura Bush’s reading program, which she apparently formed to help out her illiterate husband.
And of course Mr. Blalock was awarded this honor by the new dean, whose picture is all over this issue, who as it happens also served in the Texas Air National Guard at the same time as Bush. You remember the story about how Bush went AWOL from the Texas Air National Guard in 1972 to work on a political campaign in Alabama.
Some coincidence, eh? More of Karl Rove’s handiwork in Alabama?
Nah, that would just be a lefty conspiracy theory, right? Then why did they take that entry on his curriculum vitae off the Website after I asked his secretary about it and pointed it out to the former dean? We just report. You decide…
Meanwhile Blalock’s editorial page, while finally telling its readers about the politicized Bush Justice Department in the Sunday paper, has a simple conclusion to draw from it. It was just “dumb.”
The only thing we can conclude is that if the Bush Justice Department was just “dumb,” then the Birmingham News editorial staff must just be “dumber,” since the most important case in the country of this corrupt, political justice occurred right under their noses.
It is quite interesting and curious that one of the two star reporters here who carried the Bush Justice Department’s water in perpetuating this Republican brand of political justice recently left the paper, as we reported here, even though he told me he was happy here just a few months ago after winning a freaking Pulitzer Prize for his reporting supporting the Bush Justice Department’s view of the world.
And since it took several days for the News to discover, digest and pass on the story about the report, I guess it will take them even longer to get around to passing on the most important story this week out of Washington.
That is, House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers, the Michigan Democrat, issued a subpoena to the Department of Justice this week demanding documents in the ongoing investigation of politics at the department, including the Siegelman case. You can download and read the document here on the committee’s Website.
The DOJ has until July 9 to produce those documents, including e-mails. That deadline falls on the eve of the day when the committee is expecting to hear from former Bush political adviser Karl Rove. This could be the most interesting news in the month of July, unless of course Senator John McCain gets the domestic terrorist attack he needs to win the presidential election.
Rove has been subpoenaed to appear and testify under oath - or face arrest for contempt of Congress. Of course he has so far refused to honor the demand to appear, citing White House executive privilege, even though it is not clear how conversations with the president were involved - unless Bush was fully in the loop in the investigation of Siegelman.
Now if that were the case, it would add another interesting tidbit to the considerable list of reasons why Bush-Cheney should be impeached, even though it is obvious this Democratic Party-controlled Congress has no stomach for impeachment in this historic election year.
Now here’s an interesting morsal to savor as you chow down on Fourth of July barbecue and burn the flag for true Independence from tyranny. The ranking minority member of the House Judiciary Committee, Lamar S. Smith, a Texas Republican, of course, has said that if Conyers subpoenas and arrests Karl Rove, he will try to subpoena and arrest Alabama’s famous GOP whistleblower Jill Simpson to testify at the same time.
Well, we have it on good authority that if he tries to do that there might be a problem. There is a certain sea-going cruise planned in the land of the Czars in the days ahead. Where will Karl Rove be on July 10?
Stay tuned in blogland. You may never find out in mainstream medialand, unless it’s just plain too late…
