That Oh-So-Liberal Media

Michiko Kakutani reviews The Politics of Truth for NYT this morning, but I'm not impressed. "The story of former Ambassador Joseph Wilson would seem to have all the plot elements of a Hollywood thriller," she claims, but I don't see the pitch--"guy goes to Africa trying to figure out if Saddam's looking for uranium, proves he isn't, and when he says so, the vice-president's chief of staff or somebody like that goes after his wife, and then the guy REALLY tells the press how he feels"--selling as a movie, unless you throw in a bunch of guns maybe.

Kakutani's actually pretty good on the summary of that scandal, until she gets to talking about how "some beltway (sic) watchers anticipated that Mr. Wilson's book might reveal the identity of the White House leaker." Well, maybe some fools did, but did sensible people really expect that Wilson had been pounding the D.C. streets for clues and was going to spill the beans in his book? I mean, if he knew anything for sure, he'd be talking to the federal investigators. So it's hardly fair to say "the book... serves up little but Mr. Wilson's own speculation and a rehash of material familiar from newspaper and magazine articles." Anybody with any intelligence knew going in that's all the book was going to contain, unless he'd somehow managed to get one of the reporters to whom his wife's career was disclosed to reveal the source.

Kakutani then repeats the same mistake the Times made when the news desk covered this story last week. As Josh Marshall pointed out:

The White House has gone to great lengths not to deny that these men were involved in disclosing Plame's identity. In fact, they've refused to do so. Rather, they've clung to hyper-technical claims that none of the three were involved in the "leaking of classified information" in the hope that journalists will read this as a blanket denial, which is it not.

But on to Kakutani's criticisms of the book's style...

The problem with "The Politics of Truth" is that it doesn't know what kind of book it wants to be. The lurches in tone and subject matter make for a mishmash.

I don't happen to think so. Sure, it's a couple stories rolled into one book, and the only thing holding the stories of a career diplomat in Africa, the confrontation with Saddam Hussein in Baghdad during the rampup to the Gulf War, the mission to Niger, and the controversy surrounding the leak is, well, Joseph Wilson. Like most of us, though, Wilson hasn't just lived one type of life, and these so-called "lurches" reflect that. His personality--and his storytelling skill--bring all these elements together effectively.

She then criticizes Wilson for going Hollywood on us, further attacking him for "overheated denunciations of the administration and even strained analogies between 'the thugs in my own government' and 'the thugs in the Iraqi regime.'" The irony of calling such analogies strained when the torture of Iraqis by American solders dominates the headlines escapes Kakutani completely.

And then she has the audacity to conclude:

In the end the tabloidlike subtitle of the book...underscores the trouble with this volume: its problematic conflation of the most substantive of policy issues with personal grievance...

Well, gee, Ms. Kakutani, don't you think that conflation started when, oh, I don't know, some high-ranking government official decided the best way to discredit Joseph Wilson's criticisms was to have Bob Novak tell the world his wife was a CIA agent?

...and Mr. Wilson's efforts to turn one powerful moment, in which he stood up and challenged the administration's selling of the war and its use of intelligence, into a long, self-dramatizing pat on the back.

As if this administration's every gesture wasn't "a long, self-dramatizing pat on the back"? At any rate, from my perspective, the charge against Wilson simply isn't true. He's not out to congratulate himself for serving his country; in fact, he makes quite an effort to demonstrate how doing so caused setbacks in two previous marriages. And it's not like he wanted to make a name for himself by saying the Bush administration was either mistaken or lying, the guy already had a name for himself, such as it was. If senior administration officials decided he needed to be slapped down hard, that's hardly his fault, is it?