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Sunday, Jul 5, 2009
I had front row seats at the media's Great Slave Rebellion over Karl Rove. No wonder our democracy's in trouble.
Aug 27, 2005 | On July 11, the story of Karl Rove's involvement in the Valerie Plame case broke, and the hounds got loose in the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room at the White House and whomped on the press secretary. It was the Great McClellan Mauling of '05: Thirty-five questions about Karl Rove by a suddenly unified and frothy White House press corps that had quickened into a minor mutiny.
July 11, the Day the Press Corps Attacked, was just the kickoff. I spent the next two weeks in the James S. Brady Briefing Room at the White House, witnessing the molten Rove-a-thon. By the end I felt like I'd spent a couple of weeks on one of those indoor thrill rides where seats are bolted to a moving floor while a film is shown, creating a vague sensation of G-force when nothing actually goes anywhere. Still, the mini-revolt offered hope that despite its previously persistent vegetative state, the press might not be entirely dead yet. For the first time since 9/11, the reporters got nakedly hostile and went for the throat. Pandora's box opened -- just a hairline crack, but enough bats flew out to suggest that it might not close all the way again.
In the last few years, the press has lost all sense of its own mojo. Things bottomed out after the terrorist attacks of 9/11, when any aggressive grilling of the administration branded reporters as unpatriotic, which potentially alienated their audiences. The high emotion surrounding 9/11 and the War on Terror (or the new, improved Global Struggle Against Violent Extremism, which the Beltway kids snarkily refer to as G-SAVE) have made them very useful hostage babies for the administration cowboys to shield themselves with during shootouts with the press. Somehow, aggressive questioning of the White House got spun as a heretical insult to slaughtered American innocents. It was so demoralizing that after a while the press succumbed en masse to what I call the Potomac dinge: passive cooperation in one's own degradation -- the deranged, unconscious complicity that is found in victims of ritual abuse.
"This is the most complacent and complicit media I've ever seen," Helen Thomas, the most senior member of the White House press corps, told me in an interview at her office at Hearst.
The Rove affair, however, and the artless info-block by Scott McClellan that followed, was one twist too many in the press corps' shorts. The long-simmering scandal about the leaking of the identity of CIA agent Valerie Plame, wife of Bush critic Joe Wilson, became a full-on plumbing emergency when it was revealed that the black stuff all over the faucet was the fingerprints of Karl Rove, President Bush's right-hand man, realpolitik guru and pet genius. Despite White House denials of any administrative vendetta, Washington smelled Rove's funk in the air. The stakes were raised by the president's assertion that anyone found to be involved in the Plame leak would be fired. When the humble folk of Press Town got word that Rove was, indeed, involved in the outing of Wilson's wife, they finally got morally indignant enough to go after McClellan and his boss lynch-mob style, with rolling pins and pitchforks.
As Helen Thomas observed, "They're beginning to come out of the coma a little bit."
As fans of Talon News reporter Jim "Jeff" Guckert "Gannon" know, it is surprisingly easy to get into the briefing room -- any no-account hosebag (myself obviously included) can mock up enough credentials to have their questions unanswered by Scott McClellan. (I met a lawyer in one of the back seats who manufactured his own press card at Kinko's.) With a laminated press pass and a little tenacious badgering of the White House Office of Media Affairs, I was cleared to take my seat in the amphitheater and watch lions chew an unlucky Christian.
JULY 13, 2005
The James S. Brady Press Briefing Room is rich with carpet stains, too many aluminum ladders, $2 theater seats and elaborate networks of duct tape all over the floor for the phalanx of TV cameras. The vibe is congenial, casual and sassy, particularly among the cameramen, who have the unkempt, insomniac charm of rock roadies. There is a comfortingly down-on-its-luck utilitarian funk around the blue velvet proscenium, which looks passably gentrified and official on C-SPAN, but is as cramped, low-ceilinged, unclean and half-assedly glue-jobbed as the stage at a Perth Amboy comedy open mic.
Scott McClellan is difficult to hate when you are in the room with him. He's robotic, but somehow also warm and disarming, in the way that TV newscasters can be. He often pronounces "nuclear" correctly (at least until he says "denukularization"); he is astonishingly good at his job and too genuinely nice to be detestable. The people of the corps unequivocally like McClellan personally. It is the usual game of Washington grab-ass that happens in the off hours; the "We're a big special club doing our crazy jobs all together here, in the nation's capital" attitude that is very seductive when you're half-drunk, like everyone is after 6 p.m., except for the pristine Mormons of the CIA. I think, however, that such fraternity between naturally opposing professional roles has given many journalists an ill-placed sense of inclusion and gratitude.
On the 13th of July, the work-a-day friction between the press secretary and the corps was, by all accounts, still a lot more aggressive than usual. The reporters were openly jeering at McClellan over his refusal to discuss anything remotely connected to the Rove/Plame mess, and it was exciting -- there was a palpable sense that abusing McClellan was worth something, and that a constant hail of Refusing to Swallow His Absurd Line of Bilge might earn results, eventually. To me, it had a thrilling college sit-in feel. If we join hands and sing this protest song together, the administration might cave in from the weight of its own moral shame!
Scott walked into the room, preceded by his usual gaggle of young "Gattaca"-style GOP-bots who sit in seats off to the left and handsomely say nothing. There is always a zircon gleam in McClellan's eye, a tight little smile pressed into his face, and a cloisonné flag on his lapel.
McClellan kicked off the day with a batch of statements that were such an absurdly Orwellian valentine to the administration, I thought he was delivering a blatant "up yours" to his bloodthirsty audience. However, I was assured by veteran corps members that this was business as usual; even when the president is being led away in handcuffs, you can count on the press secretary to stand tall, show clean teeth, and deliver good news about how the administration is Doing Great Things for the American People. I was assured that even under more liberal White Houses, press secretary-speak has always been this poufy and unrealistically cheerful.
McCLELLAN: We are well on our way to cut the deficit in half by 2009 ...The president's tax cuts and pro-growth economic policies are fueling growth and job creation ... The economic growth that is fueled by the president's tax cuts are leading to significant increases in revenues...
The president [also talked about] our strategy for prevailing in the war on terrorism and defeating the ideology that the terrorists espouse.
Since this was my first exposure, in real time, to the administration's spin jingo, straight from the larynx of a living person, I was so stunned I emitted an involuntarily, hysterical gasp and one of McClellan's frozen über-blondes tried to turn me into a pillar of salt with a penetrating fish-eye.
