If Loving Bush Was Wrong, Marc Ambinder Doesn’t Want To Be Right
Journalist Marc Ambinder reacts to the news that Tom Ridge admitted to politicizing terror alerts by giving the DFHs (the people who were right about Bush) another kick.
The news this morning that former Department of Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge believed that President Bush and his top advisers manipulated the terror threat alert system for their political gain is really — and it ought to be — a major story. Ridge was in a position to know, for certain, whether this was the case. And though he’s hinted at it before, he now says, in his soon-to-be-released book, that he was pressured into raising the alert level before the 2004 election. Let’s see what Ridge actually writes before making too many conclusions. Let’s talk to other Bush officials and try to figure out whether we need to exercise caution about Ridge’s own perspective. For one thing, Ridge didn’t immediately resign. He resigned after the election. If he believed at the time that manipulating the terror alert system was damaging to the country, and he said nothing, and when he did resign, he said nothing, then he doesn’t come off as a particularly sympathetic figure. Ridge left the White House in 2005. He’s joined several corporate boards, has made a lot of money consulting on homeland security, and has been mostly silent. He’s probably been saving it for the book.
Journalists, including myself, were very skeptical when anti-Bush liberals insisted that what Ridge now says is true, was true. We were wrong. Our skepticism about the activists’ conclusions was warranted because these folks
based their assumption on gut hatred forPresident Bush, and not on any evaluation of the raw intelligence. [Addition: That’s a hasty generalization. Many of the loudest voices were reflexively anti-Bush, but I can’t accurately describe the motivations of everyone, much less a majority, of those who were skeptical. There were plenty of non-liberals who believed that the terror threats were exaggerated.] But journalists should have been even more skeptical about the administration’s pronouncements. And yet — we, too, weren’t privy to the intelligence. Information asymmetry is always going to exist, and, living as we do in a Democratic system, most journalists are going to give the government the benefit of some doubt, even having learned lessons about giving the government that benefit.
The addition of bold is mine, but the strikethrough and addition in brackets is from Ambinder. This occurred after a lot of people objected to what he said. I think Krugman says it best here:
But I’d like to return to one point: even after retracting his statement about people who correctly surmised that terror warnings were political being motivated by “gut hatred” of Bush, he left in the bit about being “reflexively anti-Bush”. I continue to find it really sad that people still say things like this.
Bear in mind that by the time the terror alert controversy arose in 2004, we had already seen two tax cuts sold on massively, easily documented false pretenses; a war launched with constant innuendo about a Saddam-Osama link that was clearly false, and with claims about WMDs that were clearly shaky from the beginning and had proved to be entirely without foundation. We’d also seen vast, well-documented dishonesty and politicization on environmental policy. Oh, and Abu Ghraib was already public knowledge.
Given all that, it made complete sense to distrust anything the Bush administration said. That wasn’t reflexive, it was rational.
Reasons why others thought the threat level should be raised:
On March 11, 2004, Islamic terrorists set off the infamous ‘Madrid train bombings’, just before the Spanish elections.
Just four days before the US election, Osama Bin Laden had issued a videotape threatening new attacks on the United States.
Krugman details my own response to Ambinder’s story — when you are confronted with a group of people who routinely lie to you, when do you back them up and ask for more data? Information asymmetry is a given, but you’d think that the journalist’s goal would be to reduce that gap, not to just accept it while you wait around for another round of the he say/she say. If you continue to accept at face value info from people who lie as a matter of policy (and because they know the pres will catch them way too late), you have accepted the asymmetry.
I think that Keith Olbermann had someone on (or he did it himself) that matched up terror alerts with their associated local political events. He (or whoever he had on) was asking what the rest of us were — are you ramping up the fear just to get an agenda passed?
Cass and UI, Paul Krugman is an economist, and not a very good one at that (the stimulus will fail because we’re not injecting enough fake money into the economy). You want to take his advice on national security?
Do you mean Nobel Laureate Economist Paul Krugman? Of course, this is just another example of Krugman being right – he said Bush was lying to us and whaddaya know Bush was lying to us.
Krugman was pointing out that the national security being offered by Ridge and BushCo in manipulating the terror alerts for their own purposes. The national security advice that he would likely offer would be that terror alerts ought to be tethered to real risk. Which they weren’t.
But there are people who are just delighted to live in fear, so I get why you’d be interested in defending this BS.
you mean Paul The Shill for Enron Krugman?
Thanks for your Fox News talking point anoni.
Anoni is the Betsy McCaughey of Delaware Liberal.
Obama Approves New Team to Question Terror Suspects (CIA cut out: WH to supervise)
Washington comPost ^ | 8/24/2009 | Anne E. Kornblut
President Obama has approved the creation of an elite team of interrogators to question key terrorism suspects, part of a broader effort to revamp U.S. policy on detention and interrogation, senior administration officials said Sunday.
Obama signed off late last week on the unit, named the High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group, or HIG. Made up of experts from several intelligence and law enforcement agencies, the interrogation unit will be housed at the FBI but will be overseen by the National Security Council — shifting the center of gravity away from the CIA and giving the White House direct oversight.
http://i43.tinypic.com/ipa4ie.jpg
While I am almost sure that Ridge’s motives for revealing the information are to gain personally, the implications of this type of manipulation by the government have serious consequences for the public trust at home and American credibility abroad. I agree with Krugman and John Dean, who makes a great point about the legal similarities to Watergate when it comes to manipulating a government agency in this video.
http://www.newsy.com/videos/whistleblower_or_bestseller
Are there documents to corroborate this accusation? further, there was at least once that the threat level was raised and when asked why, the Bush Cartel couldn’t say exactly why, a sort of gut feeling.
thanks
Tom Ridge’s book makes this allegation Ted.