Today’s column is my last for The Washington Post. And the first thing I want to say is thank you. Thank you to all you readers, e-mailers, commenters, questioners, Facebook friends and Twitterers for spending your time with me and engaging with me over the years. And thank you for the recent outpouring of support. It was extraordinarily uplifting, and I’m deeply grateful. If I ever had any doubt, your words have further inspired me to continue doing accountability journalism. My plan is to take a few weeks off before embarking upon my next endeavor — but when I do, I hope you’ll join me.
It’s hard to summarize the past five and a half years. But I’ll try.
I started my column in January 2004, and one dominant theme quickly emerged: That George W. Bush was truly the proverbial emperor with no clothes. In the days and weeks after the 9/11 terror attacks, the nation, including the media, vested him with abilities he didn’t have and credibility he didn’t deserve. As it happens, it was on the day of my very first column that we also got the first insider look at the Bush White House, via Ron Suskind’s book, The Price of Loyalty. In it, former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill described a disengaged president "like a blind man in a room full of deaf people", encircled by "a Praetorian guard,” intently looking for a way to overthrow Saddam Hussein long before 9/11. The ensuing five years and 1,088 columns really just fleshed out that portrait, describing a president who was oblivious, embubbled and untrustworthy.
When I look back on the Bush years, I think of the lies. There were so many. Lies about the war and lies to cover up the lies about the war. Lies about torture and surveillance. Lies about Valerie Plame. Vice President Dick Cheney’s lies, criminally prosecutable but for his chief of staff Scooter Libby’s lies. I also think about the extraordinary and fundamentally cancerous expansion of executive power that led to violations of our laws and our principles.
And while this wasn’t as readily apparent until President Obama took office, it’s now very clear that the Bush years were all about kicking the can down the road – either ignoring problems or, even worse, creating them and not solving them. This was true of a huge range of issues including the economy, energy, health care, global warming – and of course Iraq and Afghanistan.
How did the media cover it all? Not well. Reading pretty much everything that was written about Bush on a daily basis, as I did, one could certainly see the major themes emerging. But by and large, mainstream-media journalism missed the real Bush story for way too long. The handful of people who did exceptional investigative reporting during this era really deserve our gratitude: People such as Ron Suskind, Seymour Hersh, Jane Mayer, Murray Waas, Michael Massing, Mark Danner, Barton Gellman and Jo Becker, James Risen and Eric Lichtblau (better late than never), Dana Priest, Walter Pincus, Charlie Savage and Philippe Sands; there was also some fine investigative blogging over at Talking Points Memo and by Marcy Wheeler. Notably not on this list: The likes of Bob Woodward and Tim Russert. Hopefully, the next time the nation faces a grave national security crisis, we will listen to the people who were right, not the people who were wrong, and heed those who reported the truth, not those who served as stenographers to liars.
It’s also worth keeping in mind that there is so very much about the Bush era that we still don’t know…
I would just be venting to speculate on the why of the Froomkin firing, so I’ll leave that one alone. But though I’ve never thought it out loud, I’ve sort of developed a "what would Dan say?" approach to the news. It wasn’t just that he was a like-minded person with a public pulpit, he was a keen analyst who quickly found the center of an issue – and made it clear for the rest of us. Early on, he quoted articles from the "normal" media, but soon began to add the comments of the blogger-poets, Digby, emptywheel, Greenwald, and the like. Morning ritual: go to Washington Post site, look on the left to see if it’s a Froomkin Day, then look at the article headlines, then check the blogs. Today was the last time for that, and it’s sad.
I agree with most of the writers Dan mentions who did a good job. Philippe Sands wrote “Torture Team”. But I was beginning to think I was the only one who felt disappointed in Bob Woodward and especially Tim Russert. I read at least 2 of Woodwards books about Bush ( the last 2) and they were good but I always got the impression when he was interviewed about Bush and Cheney during their reign, that he was looking out for himself and thinking about his next piece of writing(his bread and butter). With regards to Tim Russert, I almost always thought of him in his altar boy attire(having been educated in Catholic schools for almost his entire education) ( I am guilty of some of that too). We can’t forget what Cheney’s media person said in cross examination in the Libby case about when Cheney wanted something out there he just had to call MTP and go on Russert’s show to do it. I guess Cheney considered Russert a patsy. Don’t get me wrong when I write that because I still respected the man just not all his reporting. I just think Cheney(the evil one) took advantage of Russert.