politics

Al Qaeda On the Run From – Bloggers??

Bloggers react to a story about expanded presidential authority, news that al Qaeda has allegedly been defeated in Iraq and Stephen Colbert’s Sunday speech mocking the Washington press corps.

May 1, 2006

In a startling piece of journalism, the Boston Globe reported yesterday that “President Bush has quietly claimed the authority to disobey more than 750 laws enacted since he took office, asserting that he has the power to set aside any statute passed by Congress when it conflicts with his interpretation of the Constitution.”

The piece is well worth reading, and the blogosphere is typically abuzz over the sheer volume of the president’s “signing statements,” which Bush has often used to assert that presidential authority overrides the content of the bill. Jack M. Blakin, Knight Professor of constitutional law and the First Amendment at Yale Law School, and writer of the Blakinazation blog, sums it up thusly: “One effect of this policy … is that the president may be directing his subordinates to refuse to enforce a wide variety of federal laws in secret, with little or no public accountability, and with no effective way for the courts or Congress to hold him to his duties to enforce the law and ‘take care that the laws be faithfully executed’ under the Constitution.” He puts the issue in its historical perspective, noting that while Bush is hardly the first president to employ this strategy, “he has taken it to new extremes, making it a regular part of his relationship to law.”

Glenn Greenwald, a lawyer and author of the recently released How Would a Patriot Act? writes that while other presidents have done this, “what is entirely unprecedented — is that the administration’s theories of its own power arrogate unto itself not just the right to refrain from enforcing such laws, but to act in violation of those laws, to engage in the very conduct which those laws criminalize, and they do so secretly and deceitfully, after signing the law and pretending that they are engaged in the democratic process. That is why the president has never bothered to veto a law — why bother to veto laws when you have the power to violate them at will?”

Stepping away from domestic law and on to Iraq, over at Strategy page, Harold Hutchison outlines how the United States has apparently already defeated al Qaeda in Iraq. (As opposed to defeating, say, the secular, home-grown Iraqi insurgency, which apparently is of secondary importance.) To his mind, it was all the work of Fox News and right-wing bloggers. “Al Qaeda failed to realize just how much the terrain had shifted on the media battlefield … After the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, Fox News began pulling ahead of the other two networks, largely because it was taking a position that was seen as being reasonably supportive of the American efforts.” And then, of course, we have the crack divisions of brave bloggers supporting the war effort with their keyboards. “In 2006, bloggers … were dismissed by al Qaeda, and as a result, while al Qaeda hit its target, the effect was grossly minimized due to the fact that the ‘silent majority’ now had tools by which they could be heard. The media created a false picture after the 1968 Tet Offensive, but was unable to do the same in Iraq.”

James Joyner takes stock of this argument, and while skeptical about whether al Qaeda has actually been defeated, says that “Hutchinson is probably right in his observations about Fox News, bloggers, Bush’s resolve, etc. as far as it goes. The idea that they were major factors in defeating al Qaeda, though, would be dubious enough were al Qaeda actually defeated.”

In a lighter vein, if you haven’t seen Stephen Colbert’s performance at the White House Correspondent’s dinner Saturday, we suggest you check it out. He eviscerated the assembled media (“Over the last five years you people were so good over tax cuts, W.M.D. Intelligence, the effect of global warming. We Americans didn’t want to know, and you had the courtesy not to try to find out. Those were good times, as far as we knew”), and needled the president, who was sitting only a few feet away.

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Pesky Astrophe sees some conspiracy in the “MSM” take on the evening’s entertainment, writing, “if you’re an avid viewer of traditional media, you might not know that Stephen Colbert even gave a presentation at the Correspondents Dinner. I’ve seen rampant reporting on the President George W. Bush impersonator, but nary a word about Colbert. And apparently that’s pretty par for the course — traditional media is intent on presenting our unpopular President as ‘light-hearted, humble, and funny’ and completely ignoring the Colbert unpleasantness. That liberal media!”

Enrevanche, meanwhile, was giving Colbert rave reviews on the morning after. “[H]aving watched his scathing, subversive performance this morning via downloaded BitTorrent video, and seeing the audience’s visibly stunned lack of response, I have to say that Colbert is my nominee for Man of the Year … The politico-journalist-complex hacks in the audience were mostly too stunned to laugh; the reaction shots that C-SPAN cut into the performance are absolutely priceless.”

Paul McLeary is a former CJR staff writer. Since 2008, he has covered the Pentagon for Foreign Policy, Defense News, Breaking Defense, and other outlets. He is currently a defense reporter for Politico.