Complicit Enablers, indeed!

You really should read regularly the incomparably and consistently excellent Glenn Greenwald. His signature principled and articulate outrage is directed at the hypocritical "complicit enablers" in the media who greeted with silence the Senate report documenting BushCo's lying the country into starting a war. These people, who swooned and howled when Clinton lied about a blow job, are unblinkingly "calm and quiet" when confronted with evidence that the administration is made of up war criminals.

Greenwald:

No matter how many times one sees it, it will never cease to amaze that the exact same media mavens who righteously strutted around demanding that Bill Clinton be impeached or forced to resign because the "honor" of our political system demanded that, continue casually to dismiss every crime of the last seven years as nothing more than a garden-variety, good faith "policy dispute" which only shrill rabble want to see "turned into a criminal or impeachable affair." So the Senate issues a report documenting that the President and Vice President repeatedly made false statements to induce the citizenry to support a war against another country that has left hundreds of thousands of people dead for no reason -- added on to the piles of outright lawbreaking under this administration -- and to David Broder, those are just mere "policy disputes" which (unlike Bill Clinton's grave crimes) merit no punishment.

The only news made by that Senate report is that, in our country, a report like this -- documenting that the Government lied us into a war -- is no longer news at all. Extraordinary conduct of that type has been converted by the David Broders of the world into commonplace "policy disputes." As a result, our press corps -- which literally spent hours and hours on the air Thursday night pitifully staking out Hillary Clinton's house and breathlessly reporting on the movement of every SUV and have spent days (with no end in sight) sharing with each other their moronic fantasies about what Clinton and Obama might have said to one another -- have ignored almost completely the issuance of that Senate report, as well as the fact that John McCain now says he embraces the extremist theories of presidential power that have led to the panoply of these abuses.

It's not difficult to understand why our media stars are so dismissive of the crimes committed by the Bush administration. It's because, with very few exceptions, they've endorsed and defended those crimes.

[...]

The same stars of the Liberal Media who paralyzed the country for two years with their fixation on Bill Clinton's sex scandal -- and who relentlessly insisted that he be forced from office -- have spent the last seven years calmly telling us that there is no reason to get all excited or upset by what the administration has been doing. As the administration repeatedly broke multiple laws and degraded every last realm of our political culture, most of our Broder-led media class remained nice and "calm and quiet." Of course they don't believe there should be any consequences for the crimes that have been committed by this administration because, as complicit enablers in all of it, those crimes are also their own.

These people are war criminals and need to brought to justice and their media enablers need to be thoroughly discredited as journalists. Otherwise, it will just keep happening. As Digby wrote yesterday:

This is another edition of "when you let Republicans get away with murder, they will do it again." In this case, it's literally true. The worst decision Bill Clinton ever made was letting Iran-Contra slide in the name of healing and "getting things done." He got impeached for his trouble and these people came back and perpetrated the Greatest Strategic Blunder In Modern Memory.

The SSCI waited until nearly the end of Bush's term to bring this up in order that it be relegated to the "healing" file and nobody ever pays the price. It's how the establishment protects itself. (See: Libby, Scooter.) Maybe somebody thinks we can just wait for Michael Ledeen to die. But there is a whole new generation weaned on conservative movement tactics and they will keep the zombie alive until they get their next chance unless it's stopped once and for all.