The MSM had a field day emoting over the disaster, misreporting, and blaming Bush. Lisa of Bohemian Conservative links an illuminating perspective by Wilfred M. McClay:

Anyone who has ever lived in New Orleans recognizes the state of mind that prevailed before Katrina. That something like this could happen, and probably would happen, was utterly common knowledge. Equally known was that local officials were too corrupt and incompetent to manage a catastrophe. But a combination of fatalism and denial, and a good stiff drink, always served to banish the reality principle.

John Hinderaker at Power Line quotes the article below, containing news you won’t find in the New York Times.

The mainstream U.S. media outlets have failed to report a major terrorist plot against the U.S. – because it would tend to support President Bush’s use of NSA domestic surveillance, according to media watchdog groups.

News of a planned attack masterminded by three Algerians operating out of Italy was widely reported outside the U.S., but went virtually unreported in the American media.

Italian authorities recently announced that they had used wiretaps to uncover the conspiracy to conduct a series of major attacks inside the U.S.

Italian Interior Minister Giuseppe Pisanu said the planned attacks would have targeted stadiums, ships and railway stations, and the terrorists’ goal, he said, was to exceed the devastation caused by 9/11.

Italian authorities stepped up their internal surveillance programs after July’s terrorist bombings in London. Their domestic wiretaps picked up phone conversations by Algerian Yamine Bouhrama that discussed terrorist attacks in Italy and abroad.

Italian authorities arrested Bouhrama on November 15 and he remains in prison. Authorities later arrested two other men, Achour Rabah and Tartaq Sami, who are believed to be Bouhrama’s chief aides in planning the attacks.

The arrests were a major coup for Italian anti-terror forces, and the story was carried in most major newspapers from Europe to China.

“U.S. terror attacks foiled,” read the headline in England’s Sunday Times. In France, a headline from Agence France Presse proclaimed, “Three Algerians arrested in Italy over plot targeting U.S.”

Curiously, what was deemed worthy of a worldwide media blitz abroad was virtually ignored by the U.S. media, and conservative media watchdog groups are saying that is no accident.

“My impression is that the major media want to use the NSA story to try and impeach the president,” says Cliff Kincaid, editor of the Accuracy in Media Report published by the grassroots Accuracy in Media organization.

“If you remind people that terrorists actually are planning to kill us, that tends to support the case made by President Bush. They will ignore any issue that shows that this kind of [wiretapping] tactic can work in the war on terror.”

“The mainstream media have framed the story as one of the nefarious President Bush ‘spying on U.S. citizens,’ where the average American is a victim not a beneficiary,” commented Brent Baker, vice president of the Media Research Center, a Washington, D.C.-based organization dedicated to encouraging balanced news coverage, “so journalists have little interest in any evidence that the program has helped save lives by uncovering terrorist plans.”

The Associated Press version of the story did not disclose that the men planned to target the U.S. Nor did it report that the evidence against the suspects was gathered via a wiretapping surveillance operation.

Furthermore, only one American newspaper, the Philadelphia Inquirer, is known to have published the story that the AP distributed. It ran on page A-6 under the headline “Italy Charges 3 Algerians.” The Inquirer report also made no mention of the plot to target the U.S. – although foreign publications included this information in the headlines and lead sentences of their stories. Nor did it advise readers that domestic wiretaps played a key role in nabbing the suspected terrorists.

One obvious question media critics are now raising: Did the American media intentionally ignore an important story because it didn’t fit into their agenda of attacking President George Bush for using wiretapping to spy on potential terrorists in the U.S.?

“It’s clear to me,” says AIM’s Kincaid, “that they’re trying their best to make this NSA program to be an impeachable offense, saying it is directed at ordinary Americans. That’s why they keep referring to this as a ‘program of spying on Americans’ – whereas the president keeps pointing out it’s a program designed to uncover al-Qaida operations on American soil.”

The New Year is frequently selected as the occasion for surveys of the previous year’s accomplishments. Patterico’s Pontifications published yesterday a third annual review of malfeasance, distortion, and generalized left-wing bias on the part of the Los Angeles Times. Patterico’s survey will be a handy thing to have around for the next time one of my liberal friends starts pooh-pooh’ing the existence of media bias.

On October 26th, editorial cartoonist Mike Lukovich published the above cartoon in the Atlanta Constitution. Danielle Ansley, a 17 year old 11th grade high school student, produced the following reply, which Lukovich and the Constitution had class enough to publish yesterday.

Brent Bozell’s Media Research Center’s 18th Annual Awards for the Year’s Worst Reporting. The awards really start on page 2.

Quote of the Year

Reporter Brian Ross: “Mary Mapes was the woman behind the scenes, the producer who researched, wrote and put together Dan Rather’s 60 Minutes report on President Bush’s National Guard service, a report which Rather and CBS would later apologize for airing . . .”

Ross to Mapes: “Do you still think that story was true?”

Ex-CBS producer Mary Mapes: “The story? Absolutely.”

Ross: “This seems remarkable to me that you would sit there now and say you still find that story to be up to your standards.”

Mapes: “I’m perfectly willing to believe those documents are forgeries if there’s proof that I haven’t seen.”

Ross: “But isn’t it the other way around? Don’t you have to prove they’re authentic?”

Mapes: “Well, I think that’s what critics of the story would say. I know more now than I did then and I think, I think they have not been proved to be false, yet.”

Ross: “Have they proved to be authentic though? Isn’t that really what journalists do?”

Mapes: “No, I don’t think that’s the standard.”

– on ABC’s Good Morning America, Nov. 9

Hat tip to AJStrata and Real Clear Politics.

Patrick Godfrey thinks the administration’s months of passivity in the face of countless opposition leaks and attacks might really be Karl Rove’s most diabolical maneuver yet:

As a long time Boxing fan and as a student of the Sweet Science, it was thrilling to watch Muhammad Ali in his prime and in particular, his patented “Rope a Dope” strategy. In the later rounds, when his opponent was particularly aggressive, Ali would back against the ropes and cover up his head and mid-section as his opponent would unleash a barrage of punches. Many of those punches would be absorbed by his arms and gloves, but occasionally some would get through. He would take some punishment as his foe would be a blur of activity, the blows coming nearly non-stop as it appeared Ali might be in trouble, on the ropes and covering up, not fighting back. His opponent would be feeling good, seemingly scoring at will, his punches hitting a man on the ropes. Eventually however, even the best conditioned fighter would become arm weary, and take a step back to rest.

This would be the moment Ali was waiting for.

Ali would come off the ropes swinging, his rested arms pounding his worn out opponent. Sure, he was on the ropes and took a few shots, but it was all part of a strategy. Once his opponent had spent himself, Ali would go in for the knockout. Now Politics isn’t Boxing and care must be taken to avoid specious analogies. That being said let me point out some things.

Like you, I have been worrying and wondering what has been going on at the RNC.

For months, I have listened to a constant refrain of; Bush Lied, Quagmires, imagined scandals and that “He doesn’t have a plan”.

I would read, with a growing sense of anxiety, daily updates of doom and gloom. Rising Troop losses, one sided reporting. A defensive posture and Bunker-like mentality was the order of the day.

Seemingly prodded by Maverick House Members and its increasingly alarmed base, the White House is finally firing back. Along with this new offence have come rising poll numbers which, lets face it, were approaching Carter-Like numbers.

It has puzzled me for a long time, why hasn’t the White House fired back on this stuff? Some of it was so easy to refute it was almost a “gimme” for the other side. A quick trip back to the Front Pages of only 2 years ago would have been enough for some of the more egregious whining.

Then it struck me, could this all be on purpose?

Time to summon another special prosecutor and conduct a major Congressional Investigation. Under the Bush Administration, the dread National Security Agency has been caught violating federal law:

The National Security Agency’s Internet site has been placing files on visitors’ computers that can track their Web surfing activity despite strict federal rules banning most files of that type.

The files, known as cookies, disappeared after a privacy activist complained and The Associated Press made inquiries this week. Agency officials acknowledged yesterday that they had made a mistake…

Until Tuesday, the N.S.A. site created two cookie files that do not expire until 2035.

Don Weber, an agency spokesman, said in a statement yesterday that the use of the so-called persistent cookies resulted from a recent software upgrade.

Normally, Mr. Weber said, the site uses temporary cookies that are automatically deleted when users close their Web browsers, which is legally permissible. But he said the software in use was shipped with the persistent cookies turned on.

“After being tipped to the issue, we immediately disabled the cookies,” Mr. Weber said.

In a 2003 memorandum, the Office of Management and Budget at the White House prohibited federal agencies from using persistent cookies – those that are not automatically deleted right away – unless there is a “compelling need.”

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The level of coverage accorded this kind of triviality demonstrates, once again, the generalized dearth of minimal intelligence, technological savoir faire, and rational perspective among the bozos of the MSM.

(yawn)

For anyone who’s worried:

In MS Explorer, to eliminate all, including persistent, cookies, click on TOOLS, INTERNET OPTIONS, then DELETE COOKIES.

In Firefox, click on TOOLS, OPTIONS, PRIVACY, then the CLEAR button in COOKIES.

The Onion is breaking the latest Bush Administration leak scandal:

Rove Implicated In Santa Identity Leak
December 21, 2005

WASHINGTON, DC—The recent leak revealing Santa Claus to be “your mommy and daddy” has been linked to President Bush’s senior political adviser and deputy chief of staff Karl Rove.

“More Iraqis think things are going well in Iraq than Americans do. I guess they don’t get the New York Times over there.”—Jay Leno

George W. Bush came to Washington ambitious to fulfill a promise to be “a uniter, not a divider.” He had been successful as Governor of Texas in governing in a relationship of cooperation with legislative democrats, and he believed that he could successfully apply his natural amiability and charm to achieving the same kind of good-natured bipartisanship at the national level. George W. Bush was dead wrong. No one in Washington was open to being charmed. The stakes are looked upon as too high, and its adversarial politics are these days professionally conducted on the basis of calculation, not personalities. His political opponents had never accepted the legitimacy of the Bush electoral victory in 2000, and when he easily turned aside what they had fondly believed would amount to a formidable challenge in 2004, they were even more furious.

Bush’s re-election with increased congressional majorities appeared to represent an historic political watershed. The democrat party was seemingly in complete disarray. The liberal establishment’s traditionally decisive weapon of MSM domination had proved astonishingly ineffective during the 2004 campaign. The MSM wouldn’t cover allegations about John Kerry’s military service and awards, and his veteran opponents just published a book which topped the best seller list for weeks. No one had any problem learning what John Kerry’s fellow sailors thought of him. The left tried to turn the tables by producing a Big Story attacking Bush’s military record, and the Blogosphere brought down Dan Rather and humiliated CBS. It looked as if conservative AM talk radio combined with a newly ascendant Blogosphere, operating as alternative information sources, had arrived as the Republican Party’s fully operational ABM system, able to repel and refute MSM attacks, and able as well to launch devastating counterstrikes.

Then came 2005.

No one on the Right foresaw that what the MSM could not do in the 2004 campaign, they could do given a natural disaster to work with.

No one in the Bush camp recognized the possibility that endless repetition of the claim that “Bush lied” would ever succeed in gaining traction beyond the circles of the leftwing lunatic fringe, and rise in the minds of the general public to the level of accepted fact.

No one in the leadership of the Administration seems to have recognized that the executive branch, from the Intelligence Community and the State Department to the Department of Justice, featured significant numbers of entrenched and disgruntled liberal opponents ready to work systematically to bring down the administration from within.

The Bush Administration has stood there, like the proverbial deer in the headlights, doing nothing to save itself, while its pouting spook opponents from the Intelligence Community have run a disinformation operation that has successfully forced the resignation of the Vice Presidential Chief of Staff, and which promises also to “take out” the president’s chief advisor. While this organized group of administration opponents has successfully managed to criminalize disputes over the interpretation of intelligence by promoting a trivial press leak into a major scandal and full-blown criminal investigation, it has also leaked far more substantive and far more damaging information routinely on a weekly basis without the least sign of any administration response.

Bush is about as unpopular as presidents get right now without being impeached. He has an excellent chance of being accorded a place in the history books in the general vicinity of Warren G. Harding and Richard Nixon. How many more weekly leakfests does this administration think it can sustain?

It doesn’t have to be this way. Get Porter Goss to swear out a complaint of the violation of intelligence statutes. Find the meanest, and sharpest, and most press-hungry Harvard or Yale Law-educated Republican Appeal Court judge you can find, and get somebody actually on your side in the Justice Department (not the guy who appointed Patrick Fitzgerald), to appoint that man the next Special Council, and let slip the dogs of prosecution.

The President can make the news, you know. Instead of waiting for the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, or Mr. Zarqawi, to write the weekend’s headlines, why don’t you guys write some yourself? Let’s invade Syria. Just like Iraq’s, the Syrian dictatorship will crumble like a rotten pumpkin with one good kick. There’ll be a lot less insurgency in Iraq, once the Syrian base is out of business. Terrorism all over the Middle East wil be significantly reduced. Maybe Iran will think twice about that nuclear bomb project when they see US tanks rolling through Damascus.

Let’s bomb Al Jazeera. So what if they set up a second operation elsewhere? We do actually have more than two loads of bombs. I bet they run out of broadcasting facilities, before we run out of ordinance.

Your opponents are leaking US Intel secrets like a sieve. Leak some yourself. Tell some war stories. Go on television, show pictures, and tell the people how we caught this really bad guy, or that one, up to some serious form of skulduggery.

You’re getting lots of static about the treatment of terrorist captives and lack of terrorist due process. Let’s have some due process. Put on a show trial. Take one or several murderous jihadist fanatics, from whom we’ve gotten every piece of information we can, put them on trial on television, convict them, and then ceremoniously hang them.

You need better news management. Making a case for the war, making a case for the administration’s policies, needs to be a completely different scale of priority. Our adversaries in the Middle East cannot possibly defeat US military forces in the field, but they can defeat us, and bring about our ultimate humiliation and withdrawal, by winning (with the aid of the domestic left) the battle for control of the US public’s perception of reality. The fight for control of domestic American opinion needs to be understood as absolutely vital to the successs of American arms.

And the active, and skilled, conduct of the battle for public opinion is essential for this administration’s place in history, its effectiveness at governing, and –at this point– its very survival.

One of our correspondents in the Comments section, who signs himself “Charles Peirce” (clearly a pragmatist), cites a CNN article, dated 11 Feb 2004, in which it is reported that:

Sources told CNN that Plame works in the CIA’s Directorate of Operations — the part of the agency in charge of spying — and worked in the field for many years as an undercover officer.

“If she were only an analyst, not an operative, we would not have filed a crimes report” with the Justice Department, a senior intelligence official said.

Thanks to “Charles Peirce” for bringing this to our attention, but the question remains: is it actually true that Valerie Plame was in the Directorate of Operations? The Counterproliferation Center was clearly an analytic, rather an operational, entity.

A bit of web searching discloses an earlier Valerie Plame career as an CIA officer working with Non-Official Cover, what is called an NOC:

Plame worked as a spy internationally in more than one role. Fred Rustmann, a former CIA official who put in 24 years as a spymaster and was Plame’s boss for a few years, says Plame worked under official cover in Europe in the early 1990s — say, as a U.S. embassy attache — before switching to nonofficial cover a few years later. Mostly Plame posed as a business analyst or a student in what Rustmann describes as a “nice European city.” Plame was never a so-called deep-cover NOC, he said, meaning the agency did not create a complex cover story about her education, background, job, personal life and even hobbies and habits that would stand up to intense scrutiny by foreign governments. “[NOCs] are on corporate rolls, and if anybody calls the corporation, the secretary says, ‘Yeah, he works for us,'” says Rustmann. “The degree of backstopping to a NOC’s cover is a very good indication of how deep that cover really is.”

We find also some speculation on her earlier career:

France to expel US ’spy’ diplomats Evening Standard (London) February 22, 1995

FRANCE has accused four American diplomats and a fifth US citizen of political and economic spying and has ordered them to leave the country, Le Monde newspaper has reported.

Interior Minister Charles Pasqua wrote to President Francois Mitterrand that the five worked for the CIA and were guilty of “acts of interference”, including attempts to recruit aides to Cabinet ministers, the newspaper said. The letter reportedly said the five were uncovered in a “long, detailed investigation” by France’s counter-intelligence service. It was not immediately clear whether France had set a deadline for them to leave. The State Department would not comment today on the expulsion but former deputy assistant Secretary of State Ernest Preeg, who ran the White House Economic Policy Group, said the action seems unnecessarily dramatic and may have an ulterior motive. “It looks as if this may be just a little hanky-panky around the edges,” he said.

‘Every country has people trying to get intelligence one way or another. It’s standard practice, even among allies. You don’t do anything as sensational as expelling five Americans unless there is something else going on.” Mr Preeg added: “It is well known that the French are doing a lot of espionage in America, most of it commercial.”

Other sources suggest the motive for CIA recruitment of French officials may be political. France’s recent relations with Iran and Iraq have been worrying to Washington, which has focused a great deal of intelligence activity on the two governments.

One of the five, a woman, worked with “clandestine cover” outside the embassy, said Le Monde. One is considered the head of the CIA’s Paris operations and a second his deputy. The other two, a man and a woman, also have diplomatic status, said the paper.

Exaggeration on the part of the pouting spooks of the hazardous character of Valerie Plame’s CIA activities is not unknown:

Former CIA official Larry C. Johnson, who left the CIA in 2004, indicated Plame had been a ‘non-official cover operative’ (NOC). He explained: ‘…that meant she agreed to operate overseas without the protection of a diplomatic passport. If caught in that status she would have been executed.’

Valerie Plame graduated from the College of Europe, an international-relations school in Bruges, in 1995. One tends to doubt that even the bloodthirsty Belgians would really have executed the poor girl, no matter how mad the frogs had gotten at US attempts to suborn ministerial assistants or to steal recipes.

Valerie Plame is next known to have met Joe Wilson at a Washington party in early 1997. If she is, in fact, working in Washington in “early 1997,” then she is not stationed overseas five years before July of 2003, and no one has violated the Covert Agent Identity Protection Act.

Tom Maguire quotes Don Luskin, who concludes:

Was Plame really a covert operative? Yes, but this will be difficult to officially confirm and there will be debates as to just how covert she really was, and what real harm was done by outing her.

But is that really true?

Bob Novak, in the infamous 14 July 2003 column, refers to her imprecisely as an Agency operative on weapons of mass destruction. The word operative suggests that Valerie Plame was an officer in the CIA’s Directorate of Operations, and a covert agent, working undercover on hazardous overseas assignments.

Valerie Plame was working in the Directorate of Operations, but she was working domestically in the DO Counterproliferation Division (CPD).

corrected 1 May 2006.

The MSM made much of Valerie Plame’s Brewster Jennings & Associates cover. The reality is not that Mrs. Wilson infiltrated the barbed-wire fortified boundary of a hostile foreign state, trusting for protection in her forged Brewster-Jennings parking permit. She merely listed that imaginary firm as her employer in connection with a 1999 one thousand dollar campaign donation to Al Gore. It appears that the reality is that “Brewster-Jennings” was merely a general purpose CIA front address, established in 1994, and available to numerous CIA personnel for use as a very modest form of employment camouflage.

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The real case for prosecuting the leak of Valerie Plame’s CIA employment is based on the 1982 Intelligence Identities Protection Act, which defines the protected category of covert agent as:

The term “covert agent” means—
(A) a present or retired officer or employee of an intelligence agency or a present or retired member of the Armed Forces assigned to duty with an intelligence agency—
(i) whose identity as such an officer, employee, or member is classified information, and
(ii) who is serving outside the United States or has within the last five years served outside the United States; or
(B) a United States citizen whose intelligence relationship to the United States is classified information, and—
(i) who resides and acts outside the United States as an agent of, or informant or source of operational assistance to, an intelligence agency, or
(ii) who is at the time of the disclosure acting as an agent of, or informant to, the foreign counterintelligence or foreign counterterrorism components of the Federal Bureau of Investigation; or
(C) an individual, other than a United States citizen, whose past or present intelligence relationship to the United States is classified information and who is a present or former agent of, or a present or former informant or source of operational assistance to, an intelligence agency.

She obviously was not serving outside the United States at the time of the publication of the Novak column, so the basic question for a Special Counsel ought to have been: did Valerie Plame Wilson within the five years prior to 14 July 2003 really serve on CIA assignment outside the United States? If she did not, he ought to have packed his bags, closed the investigation, and gone back home to Chicago.