Before I link to a great Michael Barone column, I want to tell a quick story. The best part of doing Pundit Review Radio isn’t the millions of dollars we make:), but the ability to talk with people I have admired and read for years. People like Daniel Henninger, Glenn Reynolds, Ed Morrisey, Michelle Malkin, Hugh Hewitt, Michael Medved, Michael Yon and Matt from Blackfive, and so many others. I was recently trying to explain this to a friend who has no interest in politics, and doesn’t know who any of these people are. This guy is a huge NBA fan, so I said that it would be like him interviewing Allen Iverson, Paul Pierce and Dwayne Wade every weekend. That is really what I feel like, a kid in a candy shop.
On two occassions I have left voice mails for Michael Barone inviting him on Pundit Review Radio. In each instance, he called me back within an hour to apologize because he could not make it (one time he was travelling, one time a family thing). I have to say, it was a thrill just to have him call me back. Not many call back when they can’t come on, they just don’t return messages and assume you will figure it out. Not Michael Barone, he’s a class act.
Vietnam, Watergate and Rove
Left-wing nostalgia dies hard, but can it survive the events of this week?
BY MICHAEL BARONE
Historians may regard it as a curious thing that the left and the press have been so determined to fit current events into templates based on events that occurred 30 to 40 years ago. The people who effectively framed the issues raised by Vietnam and Watergate did something like the opposite; they insisted that Vietnam was not a reprise of World War II or Korea and that Watergate was something different from the operations J. Edgar Hoover conducted for Franklin Roosevelt or John Kennedy. Journalists in the 1940s, ’50s and early ’60s tended to believe they had a duty to buttress Americans’ faith in their leaders and their government. Journalists since Vietnam and Watergate have tended to believe that they have a duty to undermine such faith, especially when the wrong party is in office.
That belief has its perils for journalism, as the Fitzgerald investigation has shown. The peril that the press may find itself in the hot seat, but even more the peril that it will get the story wrong. The visible slavering over the prospect of a Rove indictment is just another item in the list of reasons why the credibility of the “mainstream media” has been plunging. There’s also a peril for the political left. Vietnam and Watergate were arguably triumphs for honest reporting. But they were also defeats for America–and for millions of freedom-loving people in the world. They ushered in an era when the political opposition and much of the press have sought not just to defeat administrations but to delegitimize them. The pursuit of Karl Rove by the left and the press has been just the latest episode in the attempted criminalization of political differences. Is there any hope that it might turn out to be the last?