It looks like CBS won’t be airing that hatchet job on Reagan after all. I haven’t said much about this, but this is one aspect of the story that I’ve found galling from the beginning:

CBS lawyers had reviewed the miniseries and given it the go-ahead, but Moonves ordered lawyers to give it another look and for CBS to cut out certain portions.

This is most disingenuous. I assume that we are supposed to come away from this statement with the idea that it was fact checked. But in real fact, lawyers have nothing to do with facts–the only reason for a lawyer to look at it would be to determine if airing it would put CBS in legal jeopardy, not to determine whether it was factual or not.

Since Ronald and Nancy Reagan are public figures, there’s almost nothing that CBS could have aired that would have gotten them into hot water, from a libel standpoint. Having lawyers “give it a look,” is meaningless, because said lawyers would do so, and then simply inform the network execs what I just did–that they could air it without fear of a lawsuit, and facts be damned.

Had Moonves been honest, rather than a duplicitous worm, and wanted to reassure people that it was truly fair, he’d not have talked about lawyers. He’d have said, “we’ve had the script reviewed by historians and people who knew the Reagans closely, and they’ve assured us that it is historically accurate.”

But of course he couldn’t say that, because it would have been an outright lie, easily disprovable by talking to people like Lou Cannon. So instead he prevaricated, and hoped that no one noticed. Fortunately, he hoped wrong.

It looks like CBS won’t be airing that hatchet job on Reagan after all. I haven’t said much about this, but this is one aspect of the story that I’ve found galling from the beginning:

CBS lawyers had reviewed the miniseries and given it the go-ahead, but Moonves ordered lawyers to give it another look and for CBS to cut out certain portions.

This is most disingenuous. I assume that we are supposed to come away from this statement with the idea that it was fact checked. But in real fact, lawyers have nothing to do with facts–the only reason for a lawyer to look at it would be to determine if airing it would put CBS in legal jeopardy, not to determine whether it was factual or not.

Since Ronald and Nancy Reagan are public figures, there’s almost nothing that CBS could have aired that would have gotten them into hot water, from a libel standpoint. Having lawyers “give it a look,” is meaningless, because said lawyers would do so, and then simply inform the network execs what I just did–that they could air it without fear of a lawsuit, and facts be damned.

Had Moonves been honest, rather than a duplicitous worm, and wanted to reassure people that it was truly fair, he’d not have talked about lawyers. He’d have said, “we’ve had the script reviewed by historians and people who knew the Reagans closely, and they’ve assured us that it is historically accurate.”

But of course he couldn’t say that, because it would have been an outright lie, easily disprovable by talking to people like Lou Cannon. So instead he prevaricated, and hoped that no one noticed. Fortunately, he hoped wrong.

But if he were, it wouldn’t matter. So writeth Jonathan Rauch.

A worthy response to the nonsensical view that if only the U.S. had signed up for various international treaties, all would be right with the world, and we’d have our “friends” back.

Dick Gephardt says that everything is screwed up in Iraq because President Bush didn’t take his sage advice.

Bush relied too heavily on Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and not enough on moderate voices like Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, Gephardt said, adding that Bush also refused to listen to critics outside of the White House, including Gephardt.

“I told the president four times in the White House that we needed help,” the US representative from Missouri said. “This is going to be difficult. He literally did not answer my questions.

“It’s five months after he landed on that aircraft carrier in his flight suit and we still don’t have the help that we need,” Gephardt said.

What’s missing of course, is any explanation of how having international troops, or even more American troops, would improve the situation, other than increasing the number of targets.

Dick Gephardt says that everything is screwed up in Iraq because President Bush didn’t take his sage advice.

Bush relied too heavily on Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and not enough on moderate voices like Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, Gephardt said, adding that Bush also refused to listen to critics outside of the White House, including Gephardt.

“I told the president four times in the White House that we needed help,” the US representative from Missouri said. “This is going to be difficult. He literally did not answer my questions.

“It’s five months after he landed on that aircraft carrier in his flight suit and we still don’t have the help that we need,” Gephardt said.

What’s missing of course, is any explanation of how having international troops, or even more American troops, would improve the situation, other than increasing the number of targets.

Dick Gephardt says that everything is screwed up in Iraq because President Bush didn’t take his sage advice.

Bush relied too heavily on Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and not enough on moderate voices like Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, Gephardt said, adding that Bush also refused to listen to critics outside of the White House, including Gephardt.

“I told the president four times in the White House that we needed help,” the US representative from Missouri said. “This is going to be difficult. He literally did not answer my questions.

“It’s five months after he landed on that aircraft carrier in his flight suit and we still don’t have the help that we need,” Gephardt said.

What’s missing of course, is any explanation of how having international troops, or even more American troops, would improve the situation, other than increasing the number of targets.

Linda Tripp has won her civil suit against the Pentagon, and will get over half a million dollars in compensation.

As Juan Non-Volokh notes:

Since so much of the blogosphere is outraged by the disclosure of confidential and personally damaging information by government officials in retaliation against political opponents, I assume those obsessed with the Plame affair will not let this story go unmentioned. There was an unquestioned violation of federal law here, leading to a substantial settlement, but the culprit was never identified, let alone punished.

Yes, Ken Bacon was the one who released the information to the public, but we never found out who in the White House gave it to him, and he was never even reprimanded, let alone punished within the law.

But of course, it was OK for the Clinton administration to break the law, because Linda Tripp was “fat,” and “betrayed a friend” (a “friend” who was suborning her perjury and conveying threats against her and her children). So no one pays any price except the taxpayer.

Linda Tripp has won her civil suit against the Pentagon, and will get over half a million dollars in compensation.

As Juan Non-Volokh notes:

Since so much of the blogosphere is outraged by the disclosure of confidential and personally damaging information by government officials in retaliation against political opponents, I assume those obsessed with the Plame affair will not let this story go unmentioned. There was an unquestioned violation of federal law here, leading to a substantial settlement, but the culprit was never identified, let alone punished.

Yes, Ken Bacon was the one who released the information to the public, but we never found out who in the White House gave it to him, and he was never even reprimanded, let alone punished within the law.

But of course, it was OK for the Clinton administration to break the law, because Linda Tripp was “fat,” and “betrayed a friend” (a “friend” who was suborning her perjury and conveying threats against her and her children). So no one pays any price except the taxpayer.

Linda Tripp has won her civil suit against the Pentagon, and will get over half a million dollars in compensation.

As Juan Non-Volokh notes:

Since so much of the blogosphere is outraged by the disclosure of confidential and personally damaging information by government officials in retaliation against political opponents, I assume those obsessed with the Plame affair will not let this story go unmentioned. There was an unquestioned violation of federal law here, leading to a substantial settlement, but the culprit was never identified, let alone punished.

Yes, Ken Bacon was the one who released the information to the public, but we never found out who in the White House gave it to him, and he was never even reprimanded, let alone punished within the law.

But of course, it was OK for the Clinton administration to break the law, because Linda Tripp was “fat,” and “betrayed a friend” (a “friend” who was suborning her perjury and conveying threats against her and her children). So no one pays any price except the taxpayer.

…is just as stupid a policy in warfighting as it is in policing schoolchildren. Cory Dauber has a good post on the obsession that the media has with daily casualty rates.

Given the caveats that every casualty is a tragic loss, what would be less than one loss a day? The return of the zero casualty policy of the Clinton years — which I thought had been discredited both as something which distorted mission planning and which was ultimately unworkable in a war of wills with terrorists still thinking of Lebanon and Somalia as models for American behavior. So it is worth asking again — did September 11th change our way of thinking about the risks we face and the way we will face them, or not?

Yes. The goal is not to have zero casualties–it’s to win the war. Obviously we want to minimize casualties within the constraints of that goal, and don’t want needless ones, but there’s no right answer to how many there should be, and to focus on that is to lose focus on the real objective.

We need some perspective here. We still lost more men in the first hour of the Normandy landing than we’ve lost since we first went into Iraq, and this notion that the fact that we’ve now lost more soldiers since the end of major combat operations than during the the removal of the government has any significance is simply bizarre numerology.

All that means is that we had amazingly low casualties during that phase, not that the current ones are somehow “too high.”