Media Criticism

Not Quite Forgotten

I didn’t mention last night that Brit Hume did cover the Sandy Scissorhands story, both in an interview with Michael Isakoff, and as one of the segments with the “Fox All Stars” panel, so at least someone is tryng to keep it alive. Unusually, the panel was weighed liberal last night, with Bill Sammon vs Jeff Birnbaum and Mara Liasson. Mara said that Berger “…had a distinguished career.” Really?

What distinguished it more than this incident? I can’t think of a single thing that he accomplished. I suspect that she means that he had a long career, and served in the Clinton administration. Unfortunately, there are so many people who meet these criteria that the linguistic currency of the word becomes extremely devalued, even if one ignores that many Clinton appointees and employees distinguished themselves mostly with scandal and prevarication (something that Berger at least managed to avoid until recently).

Bill Sammon was incredulous (though you’d think he’d be used to it by now) at the limitless capacity of his co-panelists to extend the benefit of the doubt to his actions, and their unwillingness to consider the possibility of anything nefarious about it.

But at least Brit attempted to keep the topic alive.

The real problem, of course, is that the Justice Department seems to be brain dead (as, unaccountably, it almost always seems to be when it comes to investigating wrongdoing on the part of its predecessor administration). It’s going to be very difficult to get the media to follow up on this, when the message from the Justice Department itself seems to be “…move along folks, nothing to see here.” Even though the notion that he was just preparing for testimony by destroying documents is laughable, no one in the press is going to challenge it, because it’s just what they want to hear, at least when the beneficiary is a Clinton Dem.

If the blogosphere is to keep this alive and find out what really happened, perhaps that’s where the pressure should be placed–to get Gonzales’ people to be more forthcoming.

[Update a few minutes later]

I should add, in light of the comment below, that I was still confused even after the discussion. The story now seems to be that the Justice Department claims that only “copies” of the documents were taken, and that the originals were untouched. But what does this mean? Do they mean that no information was lost, including handwritten notes in the margins, or do they just mean that the five that Sandy Scissorhands purloined were all copies of a single document, of which the original still exists. If the latter, then as suggested in comments, and other places, what he was clearly destroying was the only copy of unique notes of individuals, and if he did, we now will never know the nature of what he destroyed, or his purpose in doing so, by definition, because he destroyed the evidence (which was obviously the intent, to anyone not in love with Democrats in general, and Clintonistas in particular).

Of course, evidence destruction, from Vince Foster on, was apparently a daily, almost recreational activity with these folks for eight years…

[Update at noon EDT]

The Washington Times thinks it knows the answer:

What was Mr. Berger doing with the documents? And why did he destroy only three? The likeliest answer is that he sought to conceal comments he or other Clinton administration officials wrote on them when they were circulating in January 2000. He couldn’t have been trying to erase the document itself from the record, since copies besides the five exist elsewhere. What’s likelier is that jottings in the margins of the three copies he destroyed bore telling indications of the Clinton administration’s approach to terrorism. Mr. Clarke’s document reportedly criticizes the Clinton administration’s handling of the millennial plots and mostly attributes the apprehension of a would-be bomber headed for Los Angeles International Airport to luck and an alert official.

If that turns out to be the case, Mr. Berger erased part of the historical record on terrorism. The Clinton administration’s cavalier attitude toward terrorism is by now well-established; it’s likely to be evident in the archival records and will crop up in official communications. An after-action report like Mr. Clarke’s, written nearly two years before the September 11 terrorist attacks, is as good a candidate as any for the telling aside in the margin.

Still waiting for an answer that makes more sense, and the “I destroyed the documents so that I could prepare for testimony” line doesn’t qualify. Of course, the biggest mystery remains why the Justice Department is playing dumb here, and they don’t have an answer for that one:

We can only speculate as to why the Department of Justice would agree to such lenient terms for the offense. Perhaps career employees or holdovers with ties to Democrats are responsible. Perhaps the Bush administration went soft. Whatever the reason, we can be reasonably sure it wasn’t done for reasons of national security, justice or truth.

Yup. I wonder what the New York Times thinks?

[crickets chirping]

Administrative

Light Posting

For the next three days or so. I’m off to Huntsville for a workshop on VSE, but also, I burned the fingers on my right hand on a hot dish tonight, so typing is problematic…

I’m hoping they’ll feel better on the morrow.

[Tuesday morning update]

I was being a baby. Just the middle finger has a little patch of blister on it, and not where I contact the keys–the others are fine. But I’ll still be busy.

I’ve found it useful whenever suffering a minor injury like that (and it really was trivial, though it hurt like hell for an hour or two) to think of the vastly more horrendous, almost unimaginable things that happen every day to people in regimes like Iran (and no longer, for the most part, in Iraq), in order to stop feeling sorry for myself.

Space

Wither Voyager?

The spelling is deliberate. Mark Krikorian is upset that we’re going to shut it down, and thinks that it’s penny wise and pound foolish, given the low costs of continuing to listen to it. But I wonder how low the cost really is, and how high the value.

I haven’t paid much attention to it, because I’m not that big on space science, but I’ll bet that the costs cited to keep it going don’t include time on the DSN. Does anyone know how DSN time is allocated, and what the opportunity costs would be for Goldstone, Canberra et al to have to point at Voyager to listen to the tiny trickle of data that’s coming in at this point? I’d think that if they want to stop listening, that would be the reason, but I don’t know if there is any procedure or pricing policy set up for actually buying time on the big dishes, even if a non-profit foundation were set up to take it over. Anyone out there knowledgeable about this?

Space

Slow-Motion Train Wreck

There is at least one, and possibly two ignored elephants sitting in NASA’s living room, that they’re going to have to start to deal with soon, as a result of the president’s new space policy. They’re called Space Shuttle and International Space Station–the two fundamental components of what currently passes for the nation’s civil government-funded space program.

As Keith Cowing reports, they’re only starting to come to grips with the associated issues, but if the answers aren’t forthcoming yet, it’s partly because everyone knows them, but don’t really want to say them out loud. We have a policy that we’re going to shut down the Shuttle when station is completed, but what if we have problems along the way, and the station still has some way to go at the point we’ve a priori decided to shut down the Shuttle? And how do we transition personnel from the Shuttle to other programs, when it’s not clear that the current skill set is what is needed for future activities? Dwayne Day examines these questions, and as already noted, the answers may not be very pretty.

More fundamentally, since the Shuttle phaseout plans are now being driven entirely by ISS considerations, to what degree does continuing to do ISS make any sense? In my opinion, of course, to the degree that NASA’s space station plans ever made much sense (i.e., very little), that degree went to zero in 1993 when it became almost purely an instrument of foreign policy having almost nothing to do with the advancement of useful goals in space activities. Taylor Dinerman discusses some of the issues facing the international partnership (as does Jim Oberg), particularly in light of the politics with Russia and Iran.

I think that in announcing a 2010 end of the Shuttle program, the administration was just kicking the can down the road, but I don’t think they can do it much longer, because hard decisions have to be made as to how much more Shuttle hardware must be procured (a decision complicated by the fact that some, including the incoming administrator, want to build a Shuttle-derived heavy-lift vehicle for the lunar and Mars program). It’s probably not (yet) politically tenable to do so, but I think it’s almost inevitable that once we really confront the realities of the mess that the past thirty years of space policy have wreaked, a decision will have to be made to just hand off ISS to the Europeans, Japanese and Russians, to do with as they will, allowing us to shut down Shuttle as well. Simply giving them the facility outright could obviate some of the diplomatic damage of withdrawing from our agreements, while allowing us to end the farce that is the current US manned space program and get on with something worthwhile.

Some will complain, of course, about writing off the many billions invested in station to date, but there’s an old sayng in investment circles about throwing good money after bad. Unfortunately, Americans (and particularly the American government) aren’t always good investors.

[Update a few minutes later]

Here’s just one example of how absurd it is to continue operating the Shuttle, at least with the current risk-averse mindset:

NASA has from May 15 to June 3 to launch Discovery. Otherwise, it must wait until mid-July for the proper daylight conditions needed to photograph the entire ascent. The Columbia accident investigators insisted on multiple camera views at liftoff in order to check for debris or damage.

That constitutes a six-week period during which this vehicle cannot be flown, for the sole reason that they can’t take good pictures of it during launch.

Political Commentary

Routing Around It

In the context of the perhaps-imminent fall of the Canadian government, and the laughable chicanery of the San Francisco city government, Wretchard has an interesting post about how, once again, attempts to impose censorship are futile in the age of the Internet. Dean Esmay once wrote, with regard to the Swift Boat Vet story, that:

The Internet has detected the mainstream media as a form of censorship and simply routed around them.

It seems to be applying to real censorship as well.

Of course, while Colby Cosh was careful (it will be interesting to see if anyone from Ottawa goes after him), there’s an interesting question as to whether Winds of Change is a Canadian blog, because it’s run by Joe Katzman. Where is it hosted? Is Joe sticking his neck out legally, by posting to it from Toronto? Could other Canadians get into trouble by discussing it on Free Republic?

The absurdity abounds.

Biting Commentary about Infinity…and Beyond!