Subordinating the truth

As I was watching President Bush’s latest news conference, I was struck by the thought of how different the news climate and public mood would be if the mainstream media (MSM) were truly as unbiased as they pretend to be.

Were the MSM objective and animated by an investigative impulse and a nonpartisan, government-watchdog instinct, they might thoroughly cover and inquire into:

• Why Joe Wilson appears to have lied when he denied his wife, Valerie Plame, recommended him to the CIA to investigate the claim Saddam Hussein sought uranium yellowcake from Niger. They might also examine Mr. Wilson’s bragging about debunking certain forged documents on his trip — documents not even discovered until eight months later.

• Illlinois Democratic Sen. Richard Durbin’s unconscionable likening of America’s treatment of terrorist detainees to the treatment of prisoners by Pol Pot, the Nazi regime and the Soviet Gulags.

• Why one of its own standardbearers, the vaunted New York Times, sat on the surveillance “scandal” story until the week Congress debated reauthorizing the Patriot Act.

• Where Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada gets off demanding an independent investigation about this NSA surveillance — a practice that essentially began under President Clinton and about which Mr. Reid and his colleagues were privy to in a dozen briefings.

• How Democratic leaders have continually accused President Bush of lying to get us into war when they had access to the same weapons of mass destruction intelligence as Mr. Bush and voted to authorize him to attack Iraq.

• Why only a few Democratic senators availed themselves of their access to certain detailed reports on Iraqi WMD.

• Why Democratic leaders claim their plainly unconditional authorization to attack Iraq was based on further conditions.

• Upon what evidence the Democrats base their slanderous allegation the Bush administration, as a matter of policy, engages in systematic torture of terrorist detainees.

• How Democratic leaders could justify their irresponsible call for a specific withdrawal timetable for Iraq without playing into the terrorists’ hands.

• Why most of those Democrats, when Republicans called their bluff, were afraid to back up their destructive rhetoric with their votes.

• The Democrats’ conspicuous inability or unwillingness to offer a single alternative plan for Iraq, though they ceaselessly condemn Mr. Bush’s policies on it.

• Why senators who voted for the Patriot Act now refuse to reauthorize it despite lack of a credible case the administration has abused its authority or compromised civil liberties.

• How Democratic senators can complain about the government’s failure to connect the dots concerning the terrorists’ September 11, 2001, plot and yet take action that will virtually guarantee our inability to connect future dots.

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