The Permanent Disgrace of the National Journal: Stuart Taylor, Jr.
Why oh why can't we have a better press corps?
That the National Journal did not fire Stuart Taylor, Jr., after he denounced our NATO allies
already in an overwrought tizzy about the supposed mistreatment of the 158 detainees at Guantanamo Bay...
is to its permanent shame. That the National Journal and the Atlantic continue to employ him today is to their deep and permanent disgrace. Here is Taylor defending Alberto Gonzales:
OPENING ARGUMENT: Are The Democrats Serious? (7/23/2007): [B]oth sides deserve to lose the brewing battle over congressional Democrats' subpoenas for information about White House deliberations on the firings of nine U.S. attorneys.... The congressional Democrats deserve to lose because they have... no serious proposal to... anything else -- besides beat their chests in righteous rage -- that shows a genuine need for whatever information they might obtain....
I am not accusing Gonzales of impeachable offenses. Have his multiple misleading and sometimes false statements to Congress been deliberate lies? Or mere manifestations of the cloddish inability to play big-league ball...? Darned if I know.... [H]e seems less a Nixonian villain than a nice man in the wrong job....
There is no criminal investigation into the firings... no very strong legislative purpose behind the subpoenas. So the House and Senate Judiciary committees have so far failed to show that the information sought is "critical" to their functions, as required by a leading Appeals Court decision.... The administration has already provided thousands of documents and dozens of hours of testimony from Gonzales and other Justice Department officials, while offering to allow informal, unsworn, untranscribed interviews of Bolten, Miers and Taylor....
The courts are well aware that whenever Congress is controlled by political adversaries of the president, it will be tempted to abuse its "oversight" powers to make political hay and -- in the process -- distract the subpoenaed officials from doing their jobs, even to the point of paralysis....
Given all this, unless congressional Democrats show more seriousness they seem unlikely to accomplish anything more than embarrassing an administration that already (at least in the case of Gonzales) seems beyond embarrassment.
