the smedley log - suburban scrawl

Fretting over the hen in the foxhouse

Today’s golden quote is actually a couple days old. It comes from Mark Bowden, writing for the Philadelphia Inquirer, in Sunday’s paper:

How you feel about the trade-off between press freedom and national security is partly a matter of perception. The staunchest defenders of government power tend to see our leaders as honest, capable and benevolent. Skeptics are more inclined to believe them avaricious, bumbling and concerned primarily with keeping and expanding their own power.

There is truth in both views. Revealing the secret moves of our government sometimes costs us, but it also protects us. When the choice meant more, our Founding Fathers accepted the risks.

It’s part of a longer column (all of it worth reading) concerning the balance between an unfettered press and national security, spurred in part by the New York Times’ reporting of financial surveillance methods in use by our government – reporting seen as either treasonous or dutiful, depending on your perspective.

Bowden’s mention of the Founding Fathers in the excerpt is by way of comparison to the situation in our own fledgling democracy a couple centuries ago, and the way our founders allowed the press its freedom at a time when the nation was far from secure in its own identity. Somehow they managed to trust in that ideal way back then. How is it that we question it so easily now?

I won’t keep you here with a long, winding thesis that’s already covered by what others have written on the matter. But I will suggest that the point of a free press is to protect against governmental abuse. And if the government isn’t guilty of any infringement, it should be able to explain itself better than it has to this point. Click here to read the Mark Bowden article in its entirety.

(via Blinq, where more illuminating thoughts on the subject can be found)

http://www.cnn.com/2006/POLITICS/06/27/bush.signingstatement.ap/index.html

Did you see the above? I saw it earlier today and it hit me like a ton of bricks. With the commentary you’re referring to, checks and balances are becoming a thing of a past, period.

What’s sad is I’m sure there’d be plenty of people for whom the concept of an executive branch only government would be fine.

You look at all the smart things our FF’s did, really brings the Newton “standing on the shoulders of giants quote” seem very significant. And all this dismantling of these basics, instead of vision to expand or even settling for maintaining, is just so jarring when it sinks in past the shell of numbness we sink ourselves into so that we aren’t walking nerve endings.

Signing statements have been a troublesome subject, mostly because of the current administration’s liberal use of them.

One heartening aspect of it is that Arlen Specter has added this to his laundry list of things that might be abuses of executive power.

I don’t necessarily expect the judiciary committee to fix everything, especially not in a Republican Senate, but the mere fact that they’re willing to shed some light on the practice of signing statements (among other things) at least means more people will be aware of it. Up until recent news of Specter’s complaints, I’d only seen signing statements pop up as a fringe issue.

Of course, there’s also a lot argument over whether the signing statements are in any way binding, especially given the vague nature of the ones Bush has been using.

But getting back to the orginal point of this post, it is interesting to note (as the Daily News editorial board did in Tuesday’s paper) that people like Peter King didn’t bother to lambast the Wall Street Journal in the same manner he did the Times – no matter that they broke the same basic story. A little favoritism perhaps?

I don’t think I realized that WSJ broke the story too. Am cynical enough to buy that PK may just be trying to pick his battles and doesn’t think he can win one that includes WSJ under that particular umbrella.

I apologize, wasn’t trying to divert specifically to signing statements, just to the trend of this administration to nullify checks and balances everywhere – not just free press as a check against the presidency, but checks and balances against the legislative and judiciary. Not always very clear.