FW: Mass Seizure of Reporters' Phone Records . . . Over a Grudge about Story-Release Timing?

. . . Over a Grudge about Story-Release Timing?

 

Morning Jolt . . . with Jim Geraghty May 17, 2013 Mass Seizure of Reporters' Phone Records . . . Over a Grudge about Story-Release Timing? The Washington Post reports that the administration's explanation for the AP phone-record snooping may not be accurate: For five days, reporters at the Associated Press had been sitting on a big scoop about a foiled al-Qaeda plot at the request of CIA officials. Then, in a hastily scheduled Monday morning meeting, the journalists were asked by agency officials to hold off on publishing the story for just one more day. The CIA officials, who had initially cited national security concerns in an attempt to delay publication, no longer had those worries, according to individuals familiar with the exchange. Instead, the Obama administration was planning to announce the successful counterterrorism operation that Tuesday. AP balked and proceeded to publish that Monday afternoon. Its May 2012 report is now at the center of a controversial and broad seizure of phone records of AP reporters' home, office and cellphone lines. Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. said the unauthorized disclosure about an intelligence operation to stop al-Qaeda from detonating explosives aboard a U.S. airliner was among the most serious leaks he could remember, and justified secretly obtaining records from a handful of reporters and editors over a span of two months. Now, some members of Congress and media advocates are questioning why the administration viewed the leak that led to the May 7 AP story as so grave. The president's top counterterrorism adviser at the time, John O. Brennan, had appeared on "Good Morning America" the following day to trumpet the successful operation. He said that because of the work of U.S. intelligence, the plot did not pose an active threat to the American public. Holder said this week that the unauthorized disclosure "put the American people at risk." Bryan Preston: "Get that? The administration wanted to own the story, and wanted AP to hold off publishing until Obama et al could announce it themselves." Doug Mataconis: "Even if this leak didn't compromise national security, the fact that there's someone in the government leaking information like this raises the possibility that they'd leak something damages in the future. At the same time, however, it seems fairly clear that the claim that this leak was among the most damaging in American history simply doesn't add up. If that's the case, then why would the CIA have told the AP that the national security concerns it had previously expressed were 'no longer an issue?'" RB at the Right Sphere: That sound you heard was the "national security" justification going POOF! The AP dutifully held back on reporting the story in order to protect national security and the Obama administration screwed them anyway. The AP reported the story only after it was made clear that the information wasn't sensitive anymore. The information was going to be used for PR purposes by the Obama administration and the AP essentially stole their thunder. Stealing the Obama administration's thunder is now grounds for secret subpoenas on the press. What's the Big Picture to Keep in Mind During This Scandal-Mania? Quite the week, huh? A lot of wise voices are urging us to keep our eye on the ball in these day-to-day developments. Listen to the National Review editors: Democratic scandal does not take the place of a Republican agenda. It does not reform the tax code or reduce the debt or ease regulatory burdens on small business. It cannot substitute for a strategy to replace Obamacare. By all means, Republicans should run against the president and his party — against their refusal to take the entitlement crisis seriously, against the implementation of their "train wreck" health-care law, and even against the unusually politicized executive-branch culture that contributed to the post-Benghazi cover-up. They should at the same time understand that a purely negative message, however justified, will not produce the governing majority Republicans should be aiming for in the next two elections. Even worse than relying on scandal would be advertising the fact. Republicans should not indulge in public speculation about the electoral repercussions of these scandals for 2014 (much less 2016!). Doing so plays into the Democrats' hands by making legitimate inquiries seem like opportunistic partisan exercises, and is thus likely to be a self-canceling prophecy. Listen to Kevin Williamson: I myself doubt very much that the president or any of his immediate circle had a hand in [the IRS scandal] — it is in the nature of the Left (and in the nature of political power itself) that no marching orders from the top are necessary. University presidents do not tell hiring committees to discriminate against conservative academics, they just do it. No president or Treasury secretary had to tell the IRS to do this. In some ways, the received version of events is worse than would be a top-directed cabal of rogue IRS agents acting on orders from political superiors. A corrupt element within an agency can be rooted out, and a criminal conspiracy can be unraveled. When the agency is the criminal conspiracy, then the challenge of reform becomes that much greater. And listen to Ben Domenech, also known as That Guy Who Writes That Other Newsletter That I Hear Is Pretty Good If You're Okay With Subscription Fees: The point is that these scandals cut at the core conceit of Obama's ideology: the healthy and enduring confidence of big government to be good government. As technological capabilities advance and the scope of government expands, the types of domestic scandals we're seeing here are only going to increase in frequency and invasiveness, with personal information shared more frequently, easier for even low level bureaucrats to acquire and manipulate. At the same time, Americans are becoming increasingly skeptical and cynical about their public institutions, with their trust in the federal government at historic lows. They distrust the agencies and bureaucrats even as the politicians of our age are investing more and more power in them. Today, the media, the Obama administration, and David Axelrod are undertaking the task that conservatives could not: illustrating with each passing day that the progressive approach to modern governance and policy is inherently flawed and that vast governments are ripe for abuse. What we are seeing from the IRS and the DOJ is not something new, nor does it represent a perverse approach to benign bureaucracy: it is the inevitable consequence of an approach which puts mechanisms in place and then assumes they will not be used for ill. You should expect government to go as far as it can, whenever it can, in any ways that it can, toward the full exploitation of the power made available to it. Expecting government to behave otherwise is to expect the scorpion not to sting the frog . . . When this period of scandal draws to a close, if the idea still survives that a more competent and ethical president would be able to effectively govern a $4 trillion bureaucracy, it will be a sign Republicans have failed. They can succeed by ignoring the tempting bait of making this about the president they despise, and focusing instead on the false philosophy of expansive government which represents the true danger to the American experiment. Doing so will require them to go against their own short-term viewpoint, so prevalent in recent years, and look instead to the long game.  A Spoiler-Filled Assessment of the Latest Iron Man Sequel It's late enough for a spoiler-filled look at Iron Man 3, right? Iron Man 3 is a wildly uneven movie. When it works, it really works; when it doesn't work, it falls flat on its iron faceplate. The first part that I liked, and thought was a strong screenwriting decision, was the choice to have Tony Stark suffering from panic and anxiety attacks because of his near-death experience in The Avengers. A couple of recent movies and television shows have irked me recently when their characters go through major, dramatic, often life-threatening or certainly outlook-altering events . . . and then return to being just fine afterwards. I can hear it now: "Come on, Jim, that's just the magic of the movies," but plot holes and slipshod characterization aren't actually what's supposed to be "magic" about the movies. If a character goes through an experience that should be consequential and significant, then we need some signs that it actually was consequential and significant. If the actions of the characters have no real consequence, why should the audience get involved in the show? I can believe, for the sake of the story, that aliens exist, that superheroes exist, robots, magic, whatever you want — so long as the fictional universe I'm seeing has a certain internal consistency to the whole thing. A recent example of the writers botching came a few months ago on Castle, when the protagonist's daughter was kidnapped, taken overseas, her life threatened . . . and the next episode everything was fine, no mention made of it. In fact, I don't think any character made any reference to it until this week's season finale. What I watch in a fictional television series may not have to be realistic, but it does have to be believable. I had high hopes for Ben Kingsley's portrayal of the Mandarin, and as a result, the "twist" revealed halfway through the movie struck me as a nearly insurmountable hurdle. First, the makers of Iron Man 3 decided that the Mandarin's propaganda videos would make the villain really, really resemble and echo Osama bin Laden. I don't think that's necessarily offensive or exploitative; I think that's hitting the notes that stir fear in our subconscious in a very effective way. (Ben Kingsley talks a bit about it here.) He hates the United States of America for reasons that seem unclear, he's determined to teach us a lesson, and he launches random, explosive terror attacks at various targets. But making the Mandarin a "fake" figure created by a greedy Pentagon contractor who seeks to "control supply and demand of the War on Terror" . . . well, it's one step away from joining the 9/11 Truthers. Director Shane Black more or less made this point explicitly: I would say that we struggled to find a way to present a mythic terrorist that had something about him that registered after the movie's over as having been a unique take, or a clever idea, or a way to say something of use. And what was of use about the Mandarin's portrayal in this movie, to me, is that it offers up a way that you can sort of show how people are complicit in being frightened. They buy into things in the way that the audience for this movie buys into it. And hopefully, by the end you're like, "Yeah, we were really frightened of the Mandarin, but in the end he really wasn't that bad after all." In fact, the whole thing was just a product of this anonymous, behind-the-scenes guy. I think that's a message that's more interesting for the modern world because I think there's a lot of behind-the-scenes, a lot of fear, that's generated toward very available and obvious targets, which could perhaps be directed more intelligently at what's behind them. Except that the terrorists we see in the real world are not in fact driven by "anonymous behind-the-scenes guys" like shady defense contractors. The Boston bombers were not secretly being manipulated by Halliburton. The guys who killed our ambassador in Benghazi were not being paid by somebody who wanted a fat contract to provide embassy security in the future. This is conspiracy-theory thinking, and not only does it not fit in well in an Iron Man movie . . . it takes what had been this movie series' most thoroughly menacing, frightening figure and turns him into a quick, cheap joke, and refocuses us on Guy Pearce's Killian villain. Meh. Killian's grand plot to "control supply and demand in the War on Terror," by the way, makes little or no sense. Is the notion that as he does it, he'll get rich? He's already rich. He wants to humiliate Tony Stark, to get revenge for ditching him back in 1999? Meh. He has many opportunities to kill him, and fails to do so. Oh, and while the president played by William Sadler seems like a good guy who wants to protect the company, we get the tired trope of the evil, or at least supremely morally compromised vice president. With all this complaining, what worked? Well, the movie's theme, emphasized explicitly by its closing line, is that our hero is really Tony Stark, not Iron Man. The creators decided that Tony would spend a large chunk of this movie torn down to his core, without all of his wealth and high-tech toys, forced to improvise creative new solutions in life-and-death circumstances. If indeed this is the last Iron Man movie, we're left with a relentlessly enjoyable character . . . who never quite had a plot or villain that matched what he brought to the screen. ADDENDA: My brother: "Here we see Obama with Corporal Poppins." NRO Digest — May 17, 2013 Today on National Review Online . . . RICH LOWRY: After this spate of scandals, the media should stop rolling their eyes at mentions of tyranny. The Media's Tea-Party Moment. JONAH GOLDBERG: Sure, Obama probably didn't tell the IRS what to do. But he set the tone. An Agency After Obama's Heart. ANDREW STILES: The IRS audited an existing conservative educational institution, even asking after its individual interns. The IRS's Intern Audit. BETSY WOODRUFF: Was a Texas Republican audited because he helped a tea-party group in his district? GOP Congressman: I've Been Targeted. SENATOR MIKE LEE: To prevent abuses of government, we must reduce government power. Washington vs. the People. DEROY MURDOCK: The IRS scandal teaches us that the dangers of government overreach are inescapable. This Is Big Government. JOHN FUND: In the executive mansion, a small group of people play politics all the time while the president is aloof. Strange-Goings On at the White House. MARK KRIKORIAN: Supporting the Schumer-Rubio bill means taking Obama at his word. We Trust Barack Obama. SAMUEL AQUILA: The embryos killed at the first class of victims; the second will be the rest of us. The 'Therapeutic' Cloning of Embryos. CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER: Benghazi may not be another Watergate, but the White House has a credibility crisis. White House Wordplay. To read more, visit www.nationalreview.com Save 75%... Subscribe to National Review magazine today and get 75% off the newsstand price. Click here for the print edition or here for the digital. National Review also makes a great gift! Click here to send a full-year of NR Digital or here to send the print edition to family, friends, and fellow conservatives. Conservatives — stay healthy! Get plenty of Vitamin Sea on the next National Review cruise. Visit www.NRCruise.com for complete information.   National Review, Inc. This email was sent by: National Review, Inc. 215 Lexington Avenue, 11th Floor New York, NY 10016