Accountability, lack thereof

I have written before about the lamentable fact that those who were wrong seldom get held to account and I used as an example pundits who wrong about everything about Iraq, still are considered pundits and, therefore, worth listening to. My favourite economist, Brad DeLong, has written a couple of excellent articles on this subject. The first is an explanation of why he can't write a review of Thomas Ricks' book, Fiasco, the second, commenting on the sleazy behaviour of the editor of the New Republic, Peter Beinart, along with that of three others (including the aforementioned Tom Ricks).

I encourage you to read both of these articles but here's a synopsis. His beef with Ricks is that Ricks is telling us now how obvious it was then that everything would go (and was going) wrong in Iraq, yet when Brad contrasts this with what Ricks himself was writing at the time... well, it's not quite the same thing. Cheap revisionist history, one might say.

I have been unable to write a review because I keep flipping back and forth between the book Fiasco and the clips--the articles that Tom Ricks wrote for the Washington Post.

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Why, Tom, why? Why in the name of the Holy One couldn't you have told us what you knew was going on back in 2003 or 2004? What did you think you were doing? Why keep your real views of Wolfowitz and Bremer and Odierno and company secret, so that they show up two and a half years late and many, many brave men and women's lives short?

In the second article, he tells us about Beinart who wrote a column admitting to "his own mixed feelings on being a member of the nonserving elite, wondering aloud what he might say when a child of his someday asks, 'What did you do in the terror war, Daddy?'". This column elicited a response from Second Lt. John Renehan who had volunteered to serve and, in Renehan's words: "I wrote a letter to Beinart praising his frankness and noting my own decision to join the military -- one prompted by similar callings of conscience. Then I offered him what I called a 'public-spirited challenge': One of The New Republic's own should serve, and the magazine should write about it." Doubting it would be printed, Renehan was surprised to learn that "they did print it -- with a notable omission. My 'public-spirited challenge' had been excised, leaving only praise for Beinart." DeLong opined thusly:

You know, if I had been sitting in Peter Beinart's chair in June of 2004 and somebody had brought this proposed letter edit to me, I would have said: "We can't do this. This is not moral. This substantially changes the points that the author of the letter was trying to make. We either preserve the author's main points, or we don't print the letter at all." I would have gone to say: "Moreover, this would be stupid. Technology is changing very fast. If I were the author of the letter and if we posted this truncated version, I would be seriously pissed. It's likely that the author's being pissed will end up on the internet someday, in which case crazed persons in bathrobes accessing search engines will then be able to use it to give this magazine a real black eye."

But it appears that Peter Beinart did not say this--that nobody at the New Republic said anything like this. The idea that one can misrepresent what is going on without triggering a "But that's not what I said..." or "But that's not what happened..." is to my mind a strange and wondrous one. We see Peter Beinart doing it to John Renehan here. But as I think about it lots of other examples come to mind.

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Am I wrong in seeing a common thread here? In all four cases there seems, to me at least, to be a particular default assumption: each of the four seems to believe that he can misrepresent stuff in ways he finds convenient because nobody who knows about it--not John Renehan; not Washington Post readers in late 2003; not those who worked for, with, and against Gingrich in early 1995; not those who have even a shadow of a clue about Iraq--will be able to answer him with as big a megaphone as he has.

This is, I think, a false and increasingly hazardous assumption. And one that will change over the next decade.

In short, they do it because they can, because we let them get away with it. This lack of holding people to account has been at the root of most of our woes, whether political, economic, or environmental. There are no lasting consequences for being incompetent, dishonest or corrupt. It seems that there is no more continuity in "real life" now than on The Simpsons -- one episode ends with Homer's house in ruins and the next begins with everything "fine" again. It's just like a cartoon... only it's just not funny.

UPDATE: It's too easy finding examples of this. Here's another from MediaMatters:

Following the lead of Power Line and The Washington Times, Limbaugh cropped remarks by Rep. John Dingell to falsely claim that Dingell "refuses to condemn" Hezbollah. In the portion of Dingell's remarks that Limbaugh omitted, Dingell said "I condemn Hezbollah, as does everybody else, for the violence."