It’s been a long, news-filled week, and I thought everyone could use a little break this morning.  The above YouTube is a tribute fan video of Miyazaki’s My Neighbor Totoro, set to “I Hope You Dance.”  I would never have put the two together, but it works somehow and gave me a smile this morning.  I love this film — it is so adorable, and The Peanut and I often watch it cuddled up in a chair, laughing all the way through.  Hope this gives you a giggle this morning as well.

And now, something a bit more substantive.  Although only a bit:

Digby points to a piece that KagroX did on DKos regarding the Joe Klein anti-liberal-blogger screed.   But it was the follow-up bit from David Frum quoting Eli Lake that really caught my eye — that weird need that conservatives have to dismiss their critics as either kids in pajamas or failed professionals is truly idiotic — especially given their penchant for being propped up by copious amounts of someone else’s money for nothing (the aptly titled wingnut welfare largesse…if the payola fits, eh?).

For the record, I had a very successful legal career, from which I walked away to write (I was working on a novel.) and to try and have a child.  (Our doc thought that 16 hour days and murder and other felony trials might, perhaps, be causing issues due to stress.  Given that I got pregnant within a month of taking time off, I’d say he was probably right.)   I’d spent a number of years in private practice with my own firm before switching hats to become an assistant prosecutor. 

I’ve waded through nasty autopsy photos, disgusting child sexual abuse cases, even worse child pornography prosecutions (you do NOT want to know), domestic abuse, stabbings, drug dealers at junior high schools…you name some hideous thing one human being can do to another, and I’ve probably had to handle it at some point.  I’ve survived death and violence threats, re-upped my NRA certification to maintain a conceal carry permit, and at one point or another had to back an angry family member into the corner to get them to leave me alone so I could finish grocery shopping (no one is ever happy when grandpa goes off to prison for his 8th DUI conviction, I suppose).  I say this not for some sort of sympathy and admiration, but because that whole “ivory tower, doesn’t live in the real world” bullshit stereotype that people like Frum front out really pisses me off.  Especially given that the man worked in the oh so real world of Presidential speech writing, where one is confronted with the occasional cup of oldish coffee in the cafeteria and the occasional misattribution mishap.  You sit down with a 14-year-old, pregnant with her own father’s child due to an incestual rape or an elderly woman whose family has abandoned her to die in a home with no water or heat, and gangrene in her feet…or any of the other very real world issues with which I have dealt in my lifetime, and then preach to me about who blogs and why.

So, anyway, I had a child, and was home with her, watching the news, reading online, and getting more and more irritated…by what I was not seeing.  I started blogging primarily out of disgust with coverage of the Traitorgate investigation — reporters were missing the legal information that was right in front of them, no one seemed to understand grand jury procedure, and the big pieces like the SF-312 agreement requirements for clearance and the larger picture of the betrayal of Valerie Plame Wilson causing problems not just for her and her family, but for every other agent and asset with whom she had worked just got glossed over, time and time again.  I got sick of reporters being held back by timid editors, and really tired of people like Victoria Toensing and Barbara Comstock and Gold Bars Luskin filling in the gaps with misinformation and outright fabricated spin.  Frankly, someone had to start calling them on it, and it might as well be me since I knew the procedure and legal information.  And I had a little time on my hands between time at the park and feedings — and it was good to put my mind to work on helping others understand legal issues.

FWIW, having met a number of readers here at FDL, many of them are successful professionals in their own right — some professors and teachers (And, since when is it bad, Mr. Frum, to be a literate, educated person who takes the education of others on as their life’s work?  What is the matter with you?!?), quite a few lawyers, a few members of the clergy, some stay-at-home mommas and dads, business owners, veterans, retired folks worried about the nation that will be left for their grandkids.  In short, a whole lot of regular Americans who are all fed up with things the way they are.

And that includes being fed up with our current political system and the media that covers it.

I decided that I couldn’t just sit back and wait for the media or our politicians to fix themselves — that was up to you and me.  No more waiting for destiny to help us out in the long run, but instead more carpe diem with a little elbow grease thrown in on a daily basis.  What I want — what a lot of you want — is more transparency:

During the Republican-controlled Executive and Congressional reign of the last six years, we had a perfect storm of failures of oversight.   The Bush Administration has failed to police itself in terms of integrity and ethics, preferring instead to go on an orgy of cronyism and power consolidation.  The Republican-led Congress all too happy to enable the Bush Administration in this, in order to maintain its hold on the perks purse and the PR appearance of power.  The judiciary tied itself in Constitutional knots over terrorism prosecutions and ideological tangents over precedential, Constitutional duties.  And, in the meantime, the vaunted Fourth Estate concentrated more on perfecting its curtsy to the Unilateral Executive, save for a few members who continued the important wariness and mistrust of those in power, but consequently spent far too much of their time relegated to page A-17 on a Friday by a timid editorial class whose personal interests were thought to be served by not ticking off those in power.This is not new — the need to please those in power warring against the public’s interest in questioning those self-same political power brokers has always been fought.  But the unprecedented scope of these failures across such a broad spectrum from the top to the bottom of political leadership in this nation of ours has been as painful as it has been infuriating.

It has taken the jolt of multiple, successive failures to wake up a large portion of the American electorate, the political establishment and the media at large.  And, even so, we have so much further to go — and it is going to take all of us to keep things moving in a more pro-active direction.

We must continue to ask questions, demand accountability, and search for answers.  From ourselves, our elected officials, and anyone in the public sphere.

It is the questions that are important — for it is through the questions that we begin to see that more are needed — and to understand that whatever initial answers are given, they are the opaque and superficial first blush.  The opacity of the Bush Administration has been especially honed — not just with the American press, but with the public at large — but it is to the public that the Administration is, ultimately, answerable at every level.  We forget that at our peril, and the press forgets this at a costly mortgage to all of our futures for generations to come.

The price of the failures of the last six years is steep.  We have lost something that will be years in the regaining, if ever, and that is our national integrity.  I keep going back to the basics that Dan Froomkin laid out in his Neiman piece back in February — that any of it had to be written down astonishes me, but clearly there is a desperate need for some plain-spoken common sense.  Skepticism ought not be a lost art, especially in Washington, D.C., given the penchant for spin that so many within the Beltway possess.  Someone’s interpretation of events is variable, depending on the perspective, but the facts themselves ought not be malleable.  And we would do well to remind ourselves of that frequently.

What I would like is more reporting which lays out clearly when someone is giving personal opinion, and what is based on hard, cold fact; what is interpretive, and what is analytical; what interest or rationale is propelling the analysis, and what is behind a particular push — in short, the surrounding circumstances and the history alongside the spin, including some background on the person doing the spinning.  This is what we try to do here every day, and what people do all across the blogs on both sides of the aisle — people do not get information in a vaccuum, they are sophisticated enough to know that there is context behind every parsed, focus-group-tested phrasing.  What we do not need from the press is more sales pitch — instead, we would, as Sanger suggests, appreciate a bit more deconstruction.  And some plain, old honesty and skepticism from the people we depend on to peer into the halls of power and report not just what they are told to say, but also what those who are doing the telling would prefer that we not know — the devil, as they say, is in the details.

Transparency in government is necessary.  It is equally appreciated in reporting.  It puts us all on an equal footing, trying to parse out the reality from the malfeasance which can only, in the long run, serve as a deterrent to those who would seek to use the public sphere as their own, personal ideological playground. 

Is that too much to ask? I don’t think so. Would that the Joe Kleins of the world were asking it not just from the liberal blogosphere but also from themselves and those around them inside the Beltway. Then we might begin to see a glimmer of progress…and a lot less self-serving wankery.  My child deserves better, as do all of us.

PS — Happy birthday, dakine!

Related posts:

  1. Early Morning Swim
  2. Early Morning Swim: Dick Cheney’s Mouth was Moving on Fox
  3. Morning Swim: Finally Friday
  4. Early Morning Swim: Rachel Breaks Story about Obama Extending Benefits to Same Sex Partners
  5. Early Morning Swim: Chuck Schumer Optimistic on Countdown