Sometimes– today, for example,– when I read Dan Froomkin’s online digest of the day’s major US news coverage, I think, “Oh my G-d, why did I spend two hours this morning pulling together my own pathetic and very limited version of that?”
Froomkin does a fabulous job of what he calls “accountability journalism.” I’m imagining he has two or three news aides, helping him read through six or seven huge newspapers and a bunch of transcripts and other materials there, and pulling out all those great quotes and links…
But he maintained that same, generally excellent standard even back when many of the “bigwigs” of the WaPo’s dead-tree edition were all still on the pro-war, bamboozled-by-Bush bandwagon.
Today, he offers us a particularly rich feast. Read especially the section sub-titled “Eyes on Iran.”
The one problem? He doesn’t get his offerings up onto Wapo.com until sometime after 12:30 p.m. or 1:00 p.m. each day. Which usually doesn’t work for my schedule. (Any chance you could start working a night-shift?)
Anyway, today is the third anniversary of his online-only column there. Huge thanks, Dan, and carry on for many more years with your great work!
3 thoughts on “Happy anniversary, Dan Froomkin!”
Comments are closed.
From Froomkin’s piece: “CNN reports: “Sen. Joseph Biden, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, warned Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice that Bush did not have the authority to send U.S. troops on cross-border raids.
“‘I believe the present authorization granted the president to use force in Iraq does not cover that, and he does need congressional authority to do that,’ Biden, D-Delaware, said during a Thursday hearing on Iraq. ‘I just want to set that marker.’ . . .”
Does this mean Bush can be impeached when he attacks Iran? Presumably he will avoid this by provoking Iran into some military response, which he can then claim justifies him exercising his powers to respond to such attacks pending formal authority. Then he can roll the dice again.
The Iranians are in the position the Soviets were in during 1941 – forced to tolerate all kinds of intrusions by a neighbouring rogue state (Hitler’s Germany then, Bush’s US today) out of fear of a response to provocation giving a pretext for a war, which they know is desperately wanted by the said rogue state’s ruler.
On the Iraq problem, it seems to me you need a small amendment to your constitution, as follows. Instead of:
“The Congress shall have power to….. declare War,…”
it should say:
“The Congress shall have power to….. declare War, to make peace thereafter,…”
Then when faced with a rogue administration, Congress merely needs to vote to declare peace, and then impeach the President promptly if he does not go along with it. No need to face the unpalatable prospect of denying the military their financial backing while they are on the front lines of a hot war.
Froomkin is good, but look what rich material Bush gives him to work with!!
Helena,
In a WaPo piece the other day (called “Is That All There Is?”) Dan Froomkin spotted exactly that double-bind schizophrenia that I noted in another reponse to you below: namely, that America can’t threaten to leave IraqNam “as leverage” over its recalcitrant IraqNamese puppet, because America has stupidly invested itself (again) in the self-fulfilling “bloodbath” scenario that it claims will unfold inexorably if it leaves — and the bad IraqNamese puppet knows this. On the Huffington Post web site your Senator Jim Webb blogged a piece about “leaving responsibly” to which I replied:
To Senator Webb from a victim/veteran of the Nixon-Kissinger Fig Leaf Contingent (Vietnam 1970-1972):
Thank you for views, but please understand — so that you will not carelessly reinforce — the horrible flaw in America’s central mantra about its continuing occupation of Iraq: namely, the intentionally horrifying, self-serving, self-fulfilling prophecy known as the “bloodbath” prognostication. As you know, we heard that canard for too many long years in Southeast Asia and too many of our friends and high-school classmates perished because of it. Just consider this fundamental contradiction:
You and others in our government say we cannot leave Iraq “precipitously” (after four years) because something bad will happen if we do. Yet the longer we stay in Iraq — starting with illegally invading that country in the first place — the more bad things happen. President George W. Bush has publicly (and cluelessly, as usual) said that his supposed “new” (after four years) “plan” (i.e., hallucination) for escalating our troop commitment there will cause even more bad things to happen “before they get better.” So, if the United States willingly proposes to ACCEPT things getting “worse before they get better” as a justification for STAYING in Iraq, then why do you REJECT things “getting worse before they get better” as an acceptable result of LEAVING Iraq. Do you NOT see your double-thinking conundrum here?
Things MIGHT (or MIGHT NOT) get “worse” in Iraq FOR AWHILE if we leave, but then they will get better as they did after we left Vietnam. We do know, however, AS AN EMPIRICAL FACT, that if we stay longer things will indeed get worse AND NOT better.”
I urge you to (1) understand and resolve this fatal contradiction in our government’s “thinking,” (2) educate yourself and our people to its debilitating absurdity, and (3) withdraw our forces from their illegal, wasteful, pointless, and self-destructive occupation of a country that never attacked us and which in no conceivable way deserves the awful destruction we have visited upon it and its people — to our own ruination as well — increasingly over the past sixteen years.