MONDAY'S LETTERS: Readers Take Aim at David Brooks' 'No Cancer' Column

By: E&P Staff Today we hear from several readers responding favorably to Greg Mitchell's column criticizing New York Times columnist David Brooks, who declared in his Sunday Op-Ed that the indictment of a single Bush administration official in the CIA leak investigation, Vice President Cheney's chief of staff Scooter Libby, proves that "there is no cancer on this presidency." Brooks went on to argue that liberals angry at the Bush administration can't accept that their political opponents may have committed "honest mistakes." Also, we hear from readers concerned about anonymous sources, responses that arose after reading Joe Strupp's interview with Watergate journalist Carl Bernstein.

***

I read both Kit Seelye's piece on media coverage of the 2,000 deaths in Iraq and your selections of Mr. Brooks' latest effort to dismiss the majority of the country's misgivings.

The truth is that the Brooks and Seelyes of our press think the only thing we provide them is some insight into the zeitgeist; we don't really exist for them, anymore than do the dead we mourn.

In this, they are perfect mirrors of our politicians who pay lip service to the ideals of democracy while manipulating us to promote their own agendas and shore up their sense of importance. Can a democracy survive such a press, working to support such a government? I think perhaps not.

People like Seelye and Brooks want to believe that everyone believed there were WMD and that Saddam had to go. But not everyone did. In fact, there was a very large and healthy anti-war sentiment in this country prior to the invasion of Iraq. People who were following the news knew that El Baradei's IAEA had found the Niger documents to be forgeries shortly after Colin Powell's media-praised speech to the UN.

But the same media did not give the IAEA's assessment much coverage and certainly they did not give it any real credence. Now, when report after report is showing there was no planning for reconstruction and much of the moneys to be spent have been disappeared or lost, that torture was part of the system for dealing with prisoners of war from the start and remains unrejected by this administration, now the Seelyes and Brooks think it's all about "dutiful" reporting of the vigils for the dead and getting rid of that one bad apple, yet again.

Democracy is neither practiced nor promoted by having comfortably situated, somewhat cowardly people of supposedly differing political biases pretend to debate one another on television or the Op-Ed page. As for the new trend toward self-analysis on the part of the press, Kit Seelye and her peers were directly responsible for the selling of George Bush in years past. How can this cohort of reporters be trusted to do serious, objective analysis of the very bias they have been so instrumental in creating and selling?

Deborah Schultz
Delaware

***

Great piece on David Brooks in E & P. Brooks has gone completely bonkers ever since he spoke the truth about White House officials a few weeks ago. He was on one of the talk shows, maybe Hardball, I'm not sure -- but he claimed that White House workers admitted to him, or at least his W.H. source, that they lie to the press deliberately and intentionally. Since then he has tried to back away from this slip and has recently become more and more extreme in his support of Bush/Cheney and Co. Sunday's piece in the NY Times and his appearance on Meet The Press highlight just how obsequious his prose and persona have become. That great liberal newspaper, The New York Times, employs David Brooks, John Tierney, Elizabeth Bumiller, and Judith Miller -- go figure. The NYT has become the paper of republican revisionism since their reporting on Whitewater when Clinton was in office and it gets more reactionary everyday Sulzberger Jr., heads that paper.

Thanks for your insight.

Tony DiBiasio
Westlake, Ohio

***

Brooks and 'Honest Mistakes'

Even if it were an honest mistake, that does not make it legal. I do not get a pass on traffic tickets for honest mistakes of no consequence at all (speeding, not coming to a complete stop, rolling through a yellow that turned red). Law and order and zero tolerance are all the rage in law enforcement nowadays; I see no reason to exempt anyone in the White House. How about Wen Ho Lee? He didn't even do anything, and spent nine months in solitary confinement. How about Martha? I don't think she even made it all the way to perjury, but they got her for lying to investigators and she spent time in jail.

I should also add that "honest mistakes" are not supposed to happen with classified information. My dad worked on guidance systems for ICBMs, and I worked at Honeywell one summer. Good friends of mine worked at Ford Aerospace. There are certain rules you don't break, and you take plenty of care not to break them.

David Chase

***

Thank you for the article pointing out the absurdities in David Brooks' Sunday, NY Times Op-Ed. While reading it myself, my kids clearly heard Dad fulminating and calling Brooks "an idiot," out loud. These apologists doth protest way too much and their fuzzy headed rationalizing is becoming increasingly embarrassing. What will it take to open the eyes of those who will not see?

Al Krulick
Theatre/Cultural Arts Director
Jewish Community Center of Greater Orlando
Maitland, Fla.

***

Thank you for responding to John Tierney and David Brooks. As a lay reader, I feel helpless reading that garbage. Thanks.

Jacob Lozano

***

Re: Carl Bernstein Finds Plame Parallels To Watergate

Thanks for the insightful interview. As a longtime WP and NYT reader it seems to me that the number and nature of anonymous and so-called unidentified sources has multiplied and mutated. Certainly the relationship is symbiotic, since important sources trade scoops for advancing their own agendas. Are there any statistics on the prevalence over time of such attributions, and have journalistic practices significantly changed as reflected in editorial supervision? The use of independent confirmation (wasn't at least one and preferably two the rule with the WP Watergate stories?) of unattributed information seems to have declined precipitously of late.

Latrry Bakst

***

I appreciated your article with Bernstein quotes. I think Carl has a way better handle on all of this than his partner, Woodward.

Diane Kjellnberg