SmartRemarks

Chuck Todd is the White House correspondent for NBC News. He is, frankly, one of the smartest political analysts on network TV—certainly he was among the best covering last year’s elections.

And yet… events this week make it clear that Chuck Todd has no faith in the American justice system, has no confidence in the democratic process, and doesn’t even trust mass-media journalism—his own profession—to do anything for public discourse other than debase it. Apparently even a top-level practitioner of the Beltway media establishment still can’t help but embody its worst systemic flaws.

This all arose when Chuck was on MSNBC’s Morning Joe on Tuesday discussing AG Eric Holder’s possible appointment of a special prosecutor to investigate Bush administration war crimes (as I wrote about here). Salon’s Glenn Greenwald jumped all over Chuck’s casually dismissive remarks about the idea, and Chuck (to his credit) agreed to a detailed interview with Glenn. The results were very revealing, and very discouraging.

Here are excerpts (all emphases mine) from what Chuck said on Tuesday…

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Tags: Chuck Todd, DOJ, Eric Holder, Glenn Greenwald, John Yoo, journalism, media, torture

What have we learned this week, boys and girls? We’ve learned that every time we think we know the worst about Dick Cheney, every time we think we understand the fetid depths of the clandestine government that sick fuck and his neocon cabal were running out of the Bush White House, every time we fool ourselves into thinking some sense of closure might actually be in sight… another rock gets turned over to reveal something new and even more disgusting underneath.

Attorney General Eric Holder was already considering appointing a special prosecutor to investigate the details and extent of the torture regime set up by the previous administration. (Or “brutal interrogation practices,” as Newsweek put it… but let’s not mince words; torture is clearly defined in law and precedent, and the mainstream press wouldn’t hesitate to call it what it is were any government but ours involved.)

But even while that story was still developing, before any decision had been made, the news broke about a CIA “program” that had existed since 2001, kept entirely secret from Congress (and even from new agency director Leon Panetta) at the direction of Dick Cheney… and then that this mysterious program apparently involved covert assassination squads.

And the closer you look at the details, the more repulsive and arcanely interconnected it all gets.

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Tags: Congress, Constitution, death squads, Dick Cheney, DOJ, Eric Holder, international, John Yoo, torture