By Michael Powell
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, March 25, 2006; Page A01

============================

For example, the Post states as a fact that "The GOP establishment has welcomed the threat" of impeachment. What the story actually shows is that the GOP has, as it must, responded aggressively to the challenge of impeachment. The Republican Party is mobilizing its (shrinking) hard core base around the issue. That hardly proves that GOP leaders genuinely "welcome" the increasing popularity of impeachment as an option among the anti-Bush majority.

The Post also quotes Rep. Barney Frank, an increasingly reliable voice of Democratic Party centrism, characterizing the push for impeachment as "an outlet for anger and frustration," and as "therapy." This is dismissive language, and fits perfectly into the Post's implicit thesis.

The pro-impeachment voices in the article, on the other hand, are those of ordinary people, and of a couple of scholars. These are good to hear, but it would also be illuminating to hear why experienced elected officials, as well as people who have helped build some of the powerful movements of our times, think impeachment is the right political target at this time. (Among those the Post could have talked to are Progressive Democrats of America, part of the new progressive forces that got out a winning vote in 2004 and fought the vote theft in Ohio, or to a long-serving and high ranking Member of Congress, Rep. John Conyers, or ANSWER, which has helped organize the largest coordinated campaign of protest in history.)

The Post also could at least have noted that in our history we have not seen a wartime president faced with a significant grassroots call for impeachment. Neither Johnson nor Nixon faced this type of opposition during the height of the Vietnam war. Nixon's impeachment only became an issue after he had already pulled most US troops out of Vietnam. It would not have been so easy for the Post to find people who unhesitatingly called for impeachment in 1968 or 1971, even though those were turbulent times. While Ronald Reagan (despite the myths we now hear) was a profoundly unpopular president, even after he presided over the deaths of 241 Marines and then "cut and ran" from Lebanon, there was no serious movement to impeach him.

In other words, this article is not organized around the facts -- which indicate that impeachment is, for the first time in these circumstances, becoming an increasingly real political option, based on an increasingly credible set of arguments. Instead, this article is organized around the beliefs of the reporters and editors who were involved in putting this story together that:

• calling for impeachment is an understandable expression of impotent rage out in the hinterlands,
• but the push for impeachment is not a practical effort and
• it will backfire politically and help the Republicans.

The Post staff believed similar things about the movement against the war in Iraq, and, back in the day, about the civil rights movement and the anti-Vietnam war movement. It's true that when Democrats were in power, the Post was more liberal. But it never strayed far from centrist orthodoxy, though it loves to play at being 'contrarian.' When Martin Luther King Jr. denounced the Vietnam war, the Post said "King has diminished his usefulness to his cause, his country, his people."

The Post's reputation as an opposition paper really comes from its Watergate reporting -- but Watergate was an inside Washington story. The Post, like other mainstream papers, has never done well at stories about real social change, whether local, state or national.

Let's face it. A national newspaper closely interwoven with, and often cleverly used by, those at the center of national power is a lousy source of information, or perspective, on grassroots-driven change. This is, of course, becomes more true as the isolation of those at the center of national power -- and thus of the Post -- increases.

After 9/11, the political initative was in the hands of the Bush administration. Opposition was extraordinarily difficult. Now, oppostion is increasingly commonplace and increasingly powerful. But intelligent, strategic, real opposition, untainted by political opportunism, is simply incomprehensible within the limited sphere within which the Washington Post operates.

Note on the liberal media:

The right wing loves the old red herring that most major media reporters are Democrats. Sure it’s true, just like it’s true that most young people working at McDonalds like to wear baggy jeans.

But when the young employees show up at McDonalds, regardless of what they like to wear, they put on the paper hat and outfit prescribed by the company. By the same token, no matter how much liberal reporters in the major media may want to indulge their preference for Democrats in those media, that isn’t up to them.

The executives of the major media corporations determine what version of journalists’ work gets broadcast or published. Sure, the owners of the mainstream media may eventually turn on Bush/Cheney. But when the sale on Big Macs ends, and the Quarter Pounder gets pushed instead, you don’t blame the kid working behind the counter.

You can see a previous rant along these lines here.