"EVADING" THE ISSUE
Andy McCarthy
The Corner
Today's article on the Plame Leak Investigation is prototypical of the NYTimes's disingenuous approach to all Bush admin matters -- the approach by which the paper pretends to objectivity while pounding a partisan narrative. It's always in the small choices of words.
Note this sentence (which both is in the article and, as of mid-morning at least, is the tease in the online edition that encourages you to click on the article):
"Yet Mr. Bush has yet to address some uncomfortable questions that he may not be able to evade indefinitely."
EVADE? There is no credible suggestion at this point that President Bush is EVADING anything. He encouraged the investigation, he made statements about taking action against wrongdoers, and he has repeatedly said he wants the independent counsel to press ahead because he wants to know what happened. He has also sat for an interview himself and encouraged everyone in his administration to be cooperative.
Is the president AVOIDING some questions? Of course he is. He should not, for example, give a definitive answer to hypothetical questions about what he will or won't do if the investigation turns out a certain way. The investigation is continuing, and it could thwart his direction that people cooperate with independent counsel Patrick Fitzgerald if POTUS started laying out what will happen if people get indicted.
Discretion, however, is not EVADING. Avoiding assertive declarations before all the facts are in -- and when such declarations could hamper the fact-seeking process, is close to the opposite of EVADING. The connotation of EVADE, the word the Times chose to use instead of AVOID, is that Bush is doing something affirmative to obstruct, or something misleading to circumvent, either the media or the independent counsel.
This is a classic example of how the Times spins the narrative. If President Clinton was the one in the eye of the storm here, does anyone think there is a chance that the Times flatly says he has been EVADING anything? With Clinton, the Times offered us legalistic justifications for false statements on the basis of whether they were "material" or whether they affected a zone of sexual privacy. To the extent the Clintonian spinmeisters actually evaded the investigation, the Times faithfully hewed to their scripts and subtly shifted to the issue to how competent and strategic they were in spinning, as opposed to the fact that they were spinning.
Now Bush, who is not evading, is flatly said to be evading. And yet, all the while, the Times evades the issues that (a) its reporter is in jail for withholding information from the investigation (irnonically, under the guise of protecting the public's right to know), and (b) that the organized media has argued in the U.S. courts that this whole matter (Bush is supposedly evading about) does not in fact constitute a crime. As my dad used to say, people who live in glass houses shouldn't throw wild parties.
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