Oh, how the pundits were abuzz with the tense session between Wolf and Shotgun Dick. It was as if CNN had stepped off of the deep end. Imagine, CNN’s main man Wolf Blitzer putting the hard questions to our Vice President. Asking about the obvious (the plummeting polls), and about his lesbian daughter’s child rearing plans.
Talk about balls of tin.
Asking about his daughter was fair game. The RNC and the Bush administration has made no secret of their demonization of gay people for political gain. Cheney can’t have it both ways (unless he’s bi). But Blitzer, a seasoned journalist, looked like he expected to get shot in the face. He could hardly express enough love for Cheney’s family as he fumbled through a question that everyone should have expected to be asked of a gay-hating administration member in his position. Seriously.
And asking about the unpopularity of the idiotic escalation of the war in Iraq? (Oh, sorry, I mean the surge.) This is a no-brainer, not a tiptoe question.
Compared to the treatment that this administration usually gets from CNN – ass-licking acceptance and repetition of every insane utterance – I suppose it was a jolt. I guess.
But the whole exchange left me feeling sad and empty. And I judged it far less than worthy of a Daily Show send-up. I still want the real questions. The obvious ones.
Wolf, while you were at it, why didn’t you ask Cheney about the endemic corruption among the contractors in Iraq? Or ask him if he was sweating now that Democrats in Congress were planning on holding hearings on the corruption and waste.
And why not press him about his ties to Haliburton, a company that has profited mightily from this war? Ask if he’s getting a cut.
How about his roll in the outing of a CIA agent for political gain, now that his former Igor “Scooter” is on trial?
How about asking why he lied so many times about the war? So many times, with so many deaths as a result? And, how he feels about that having shirked his own service? (Five deferments during the Vietnam War.) Would he reject that premise?
Why not put the journalistic wood to that lying piece of shit of a veep? Why? Because you are a pussy! You, and your bosses. You are so worried about falling out of step with your rival FOX, so worried about the sensibilities of large corporate owners, and so concerned with loss of access to the White House that asking about a lesbian is the best you could do with the dirtiest, most hated man in American politics.
Wolf, you could have bitch-slapped Cheney, painted his ass red, and shot him out of a cannon, and faced no repercussions but the assault charges. The viewing public would have loved it, the sponsors been thrilled; hell…even the Prez might have given you a “heck of a job, Wolfie!” You would have been a fucking YouTube hero.
Instead, you are journalism’s equivelent of pudding salesman: two flavors, vanilla and chocolate (but the chocolate is kind of extreme, you know, so we’ve cut it with plenty of the vanilla, and we’ll apologize if the chocolate offends you in any way!). Pathetic! The ghosts of Tom Paine and Tom Jefferson are puking in the boardroom of CNN right now.
Free press in our country, guaranteed in the Constitution, was inspired by the trial of Peter Zenger, a publisher who criticized the corrupt British governor of New York in the early 1700s. Even though he broke the letter of the law at the time, by criticizing the King’s representative, American jurists refused to convict him because he did not lie about what he reported. Even before there was a United States, Americans wanted to know when their government was up to no good.
The upshot of that case was (and I am grossly paraphrasing here): it is okay to criticize the government if what you say is not a lie. It is okay to put the tough questions to those in power, even if it makes them uncomfortable. The founders thought this so important, they made it one of our Five Freedoms in the First Amendment.
Wolf, you have the right, and you have the access; I would even go so far as to say you have the duty to press Darth Cheney or any government official to the wall of your studio to get answers to the legitimate questions of the day. To not press is to flush your press freedom down the toilet, and to fail in your watchdog role. To not call the veep on his lies, to let him reject your premise without challlenge, you cheat the American public out of accountability for the administration’s use of the bully pulpit. You totally chickened out, and that makes you a pussy.
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