Short Stories, Long Odds

The concept of a liberal media, at large and destroying anything that gets in its way with welfare reform, is ridiculous. It doesn’t exist, except in one concentrated place - Air America.

Liberals, while being painted as the most terrible, dangerous element of American life by Right Wingers, have become the champions of American institutions and guaranteed rights, which is the place to be, as far as I’m concerned. Now that we have a corner on things like protecting the Bill of Rights, we can do business. Normally we by and large do the right thing.

Along those lines, I wasn’t surprised at all when the whole journalist / protected source debacle came out and Air America was all over the courts for daring to force a journalist to reveal an anonymous source. The very concept of the identity of an anonymous source being subpoenaed is terrible; the news business is a hard enough dollar as it is. The free press is an institution, etc and so on. I wrote a short post about how the whole thing made me feel here, in a piece entitled “What The Bitch?”

See, when it all started, the hard truth was that Valerie Plame’s name had been run in a column by Bob Novak, a usual recipient of my spite. The Chicago Sun Times was also on my list of “people I hope go to jail” even though the Chicago Sun Times is not a person. I understand there is a desk where the buck stops for fact checking and making sure your stories don’t reveal the identity of a secret CIA operative.

However, in the last week, things have changed. In the last week, it has turned out that the anonymous source that our two industrious reporters were protecting, along with their Constitutional Press Rights, was Karl Rove.

The second the story dropped that Karl was the leak and as such the protected source, our intrepid reporters became villified by liberals nationwide. Now, instead of defending them for standing up for their right to anonymous sources, we hated them for not giving up Karl’s name at the first opportunity.

Seriously, what is wrong with you people? Once the chance to bag the big game comes up, you all turn in to jungle beasts, blood-blind and ravaged by hunger, a starvation brought on by the inability to forage in an organized fashion. As a former newsman, I’m once againt disgusted by the public’s inability to understand how their own damned country works. And I’m certainly blown away by Air America’s boneheaded talking points.

Even Marc Maron got in on the act, and that makes me the most sad. Garofolo is usually unreasonable and Springer doesn’t usually touch this stuff. I have no idea what Al Franken has been saying, but I’m willing to bet it would make me mad. Maron is usually funny and not a bad radio newsman, as Thursday’s attacks were covered on his show.

We’re the party of RIGHTS, you retards. We are the party of things like “freedom of the press.” I know Karl is a big fish, I know that. But you all have to prepare yourselves for the very real and likely possibility that you’re not going to get him. He might as well be Christ, or an intangible spirit. Nothing will stick to him, and even if it does, Bush has a couple years yet to pardon him. So instead of continuing what I thought was a worthwhile defense of the rights of the press, we are actively throwing them all away in our eager, salivating wait time between now and that point somewhere about Never where we get to send Karl Rove to jail.

Karl Rove deserves a lot of things for what he’s done, and jail is most likely one of them. I want to get him too. I want to get them all. But you can’t put aside the Bill of Rights in order to get him. That kind of scorched earth hurts US, not them.

So I’ll say it: So what if the anonymous source is Karl Rove? His race is run. He’ll go off to the pasture like all the old heavyweights now that his title fight has come and gone. So what if it was him? Now we can’t have anonymous, background sources anymore, and you get to look at Karl’s lawyer every once in a while.

I wouldn’t be entirely surprised if he didn’t think of this whole chain of events himself, to stifle newsrooms.