I guess it’s easier to admit what a clusterfuck it was if you weren’t part of the clutsterfuck, but I give Jake Tapper a lot of credit for this in any case:
When recently talking to Jake Tapper about his new show, I asked the CNN host for his reflection on the 10-year anniversary of the Iraq invasion and the media’s role leading up to it.
Tapper, then a freelance writer and not part of the White House press corps, said that “too many members of the media got caught up and were beating the drum and were excited to be embedded and there was a very big failure.”
“There were notable exceptions,” Tapper said. “Some of the reporters with McClatchy, for example, did amazing work. But there was a big failure. It was incredibly influential. I cannot overstate how influential that failure of the media was to the way I approached my job when I was White House correspondent. It was constantly informing how I did my job and how important I felt it was to ask tough questions on any subject regardless of my personal feelings because I felt it was important for us to be checks on this incredibly powerful place.”
Tapper was covering Howard Dean for Salon in the run-up to the war:
From Washington come the barbs — The New Republic calls it proof he’s (Dean’s) “not serious.” ABC News’ “The Note” wonders if he’s backed himself into a corner. Dean has opposed the pending war because he didn’t think President Bush had made his case. If he doesn’t support military action now, the thinking goes, then he’s just contradicting himself. Or, at the very least, he’s been put in an untenable and — for the moment, at least inside war-ready Washington, unpopular — position.
Good times.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Okay, but how do you get from that to “Fox news is my sister network”?
pamelabrown53
The problem with Jake and his merry band of beltway reporters is that by becoming non-critical stenographers and cheer leaders to the run up of the Iraq War, their current response is to not even try to bring us the facts but to just suck more.
peach flavored shampoo
Jake Tapper is a great pr0n name.
r€nato
I’m still waiting for the apologies due to me and everyone else who vocally opposed the war. I believe we were called Saddam-lovers, terrorist-coddlers, and America-haters and traitors. Not just by the usual suspects but also by our leaders and most of the media.
nellcote
My major complaint with the well received “Hubris” doc is their lack of holding the media accountable. I’m glad Jake mentioned the work at McClatchy.
sb
Honestly, I can’t believe it’s been ten years; it seems more recent to me. Perhaps it’s because so many of the people who were so very wrong, if not outright lying at the time, are still part of the VSP club.
Turgidson
And here we are, with all the same Very Serious morons agitating that we invade the wrong country (MUST CUT SPENDING OR THE DEBT WILL BE A MUSHROOM CLOUD!) and calling anyone who says otherwise an extremist (Scar v. Krugman).
And there is, of course, no mention that it’s the same people lining up to be wrong-but-popular vs. right-and-ignored.
Hey meteor, are you coming or what? I can’t take much more of this.
pamelabrown53
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: “Fox news is my sister network” was the Villagers’ reply to the President when he intimated that Fox was not helpful to a thriving democracy. The response was to avoid anything substantive and focus on the stenography and trivial and the inane.
PeakVT
“There were notable exceptions,” Tapper said. “Some of the reporters with McClatchy, for example, did amazing work.
McClatchy (as in McClatchy DC, I assume) occupies a weird position in the media – not a newspaper, not an independent wire service, yet still possessing its own web portal and audience. I think this position gives it a bit more freedom than most newspapers and cable channels.
Hill Dweller
Fuck Tapper and his Monday morning quarterbacking. Tapper is thin-skinned, and let’s his personal feelings influence his reporting far too often. Some of his grandstanding during the WH press briefings bring to mind David Gregory’s behavior when he was covering the WH.
Although, it should be said that that sort emoting on camera usually leads to a hosting gig.
Turgidson
@r€nato:
They’re too busy giving each other tug-jobs over how serious and brave they are to heroically advocate for deep spending cuts on the undeserving Applebee’s salad bar crowd (but not themselves, natch – just like other people and their children should go fight the wars they so love) to get around to admitting fault or mistake or to even consider self-reflection.
taylormattd
He was writing that at the same time Even The Liberal Jonathan Chait had launched a full-on jihad against Howard Dean getting the nomination.
Anoniminous
@r€nato:
Apologies will be given when something about “Hell” and “Freezing” happens.
srv
War pounding over Syria – Chemical Attacks! Obama’s “Red Line” has been crossed! Move the carriers… oops, Sequestration…
Obama says Iran is “one year” from a nukular device!
FlipYrWhig
I don’t remember Jake Tapper standing out for asking tough questions, so I’m not sure if he’s living up to the lesson he’s claiming to have learned.
Cacti
And at the head of the drum line was Fox News, also known as Tapper’s “sister network”.
pseudonymous in nc
McClatchy was still Knight-Ridder back then, I believe, and their independence (serving local papers, not the DC-NY nexus) made a difference. Bart Gellman at the WaPo was good in Iraq, fact-checking while Hotlips Judy Miller travelled in the generals’ cars; Walter Pincus was good on the spook beat in DC but consistently relegated to page D21.
Tapper is a fucking shameless careerist whore.
Mandalay
Credit for what? For explaining that the reason he is so great is that his peers were so useless when covering the invasion of Iraq.
Everything Tapper said was self-serving.
Hill Dweller
Along the same line, here is Charlie Pierce eviscerating Richard Perle(among others) for this type of nonsense:
Turgidson
@FlipYrWhig:
He asked preening gotcha questions and false equivalence questions that were calculated more towards making him the story than they were towards extracting important information about the issues of the day.
And, somehow, that actually made him better at the job than most of the WH Press Corpse. Whatta country.
Hill Dweller
More Charlie Pierce from his blog post I linked earlier:
Smiling Mortician
@Hill Dweller: When Pierce is good, he’s very good.
ranchandsyrup
I don’t give Tapper any credit. Everything he does is to maintain or improve access to one side or the other. Fuck him and his 90’s goatee.
Comrade Jake
The problem with Tapper is that he thinks a “tough question” is something along the lines of “Mr. President, when did you last smoke a cigarette?”
I look forward to his new show on CNN being yet another both sides do it escapade.
taylormattd
@srv: What the fuck does your latest gibberish have to do with Jake Tapper?
Ash Can
@FlipYrWhig: This. My reaction to this whole post was one of confusion — I wasn’t sure what we were supposed to be congratulating Tapper for, and I even wondered if the headline and first paragraph were meant to be sarcastic. Tapper’s hindsight is 20/20, at least on this issue, and he says so. Um, hooray?
Kristin
@Hill Dweller: Charlie Pierce is a national treasure.
Omnes Omnibus
@Hill Dweller: This. The people who realized their error and corrected it get credit. But it should be remembered that plenty of people got it right at the time.
DonT
Ah, ten years ago when presstitute and in-bedded had such a delightful and ironic ring.
Ted & Hellen
We need to hear more from Juicers about what a joke and idiot Howard Dean is, just like Bradley Manning.
kay
@Comrade Jake:
Exactly. Further, he had a chance to prove how he’d handle a big story, with Bengazi. I think he did a terrible job. Bengazi wasn’t about a legalistic parsing of Susan Rice’s words. Chasing that was a failure. They found out nothing.
I don’t know what happened in Bengazi, but I knew Susan Rice was a sideshow
Cacti
@Omnes Omnibus:
As one of those who smelled bullshit from the very start about the necessity of the Iraq war, I give zero credit to the “Road to Damascus” crowd who were either too dumb, partisan, or careerist to oppose the invasion when it might have mattered.
DonT
@Anoniminous:
there’s always Dante’s 9th circle. oops, that was fiction
Ted & Hellen
@Hill Dweller:
Sweet Jesus God, this.
Keith G
Speaking of war lovers, every time I see Pope Francis, I think I am watching Giuliani once again in drag.
Mandalay
@pamelabrown53:
Correct, and nothing has changed. Here is an exchange between Jay Carney and a probing reporter:
Our fearless fourth estate at work.
Redshirt
Jock Tapper is more like it, amirite or what?
Cris (without an H)
Man I was excited about the Dean candidacy. He was the first politician to make me wake up from my idiotic “pox on both” contrarian Chomskyism and admit that yes, I vote for Democrats, I should damned well call myself one.
BerkleeyMom
@r€nato:
Yeah, and in 10 years the beltway gang will all be talking about what a bad idea it was to cut Social Security and raise the eligibility age for Medicare. Hey, we just got caught up in the moment, the beating of the drum, and the excitement of shared sacrifice. Same old, same old.
Julia Grey
Fuck Tapper and his Monday morning quarterbacking. Tapper is thin-skinned, and let’s his personal feelings influence his reporting far too often.
Exactly. He hated Gore because Gore’s people didn’t hold the plane for him, and never said another good thing about Gore, because that incident, the diss agains HIM, Jake Tapper, somehow illustrated the basic horror of Gore and his people. He hates Obama because Jake Tapper smelled cigarette smoke on him and Obama had the NERVE to lie to Jake Tapper about it. So therefore Obama is and always will be a liar about everything, and contemptuous of the press, too. Because Jake Tapper IS The Press, you know. And therefore everything said to him or done in his presence is not only of equal and equally dire importance, but a complete demonstration of your entire character.
That doesn’t count when it comes to Jake himself, of course. If he makes a mistake, if he makes everything — EVERYTHING (witness the answer to the question comes back to what HE did, and what HE oh-so-cleverly observed, what he learned, yadda yadda) — when he makes everything All About Jake, it’s just what he said or did that day, and even repeated incidents of this kind of behavior don’t mean he’s blind, incompetent, arrogant, narcissistic, or viciously ambitious. Because Jake is perfect. Jake is cool. Jake is The Press — no, wait, not just The Press, The Press in its GLORY!
Okay, yeah, yeah, when he pays attention and sticks to facts, he can write good shit (Outpost is supposed to be excellent), but don’t talk to him about his job, his colleagues, or the politicians he covers, because they’re inevitably based on how Jake feels they’ve treated him personally. Wound his pride, even slightly, and he’ll hate you and everything about you forevermore.
Because wounding The Great JAKE TAPPER’S pride is indicative of sociopathy. Q.E.D.
fuckwit
I remember now what a dark time that was. I was out on the streets protesting in October 2002, right after Paul Wellstone was assassinated (yes! I said it!), and John Mohammad was running around loose in DC with a rifle, still uncaught, and we marched through Market Street in SF anxiously looking up at the office buildings for snipers.
I remember marching at one point with a clatch of Code Pink women, and then with a crusty old Vietnam-era Marine, who said during the Vietnam days before he joined the military, he was a cop, and he’d have been out beating us with billy clubs back then, but now, there’s no way he was going to support this war.
I remember looking around at the middle-class white-ass suburban families, with kids in strollers, marching, and thinking this looks so much more like a crowd going to a Giants game, than any kind of radical hippies, so there’s no way this war is going to happen.
I remember trying to get a guy I knew who was an Air Force veteran from Vietnam, and worked at NASA, to join the protest, and he said, no, he was involved in satellite reconnisaince himself, and had met Colin Powell, and if Powell said there was reason to be scared, he believed him.
I remember when blogs were a freaky fringe thing, completely drowned out by TV talking heads. I remember walking down the street the day of the Wellstone memorial and hearing the fucking talking heads scolding the memorial for being “political”.
I remember “UNITED WE STAND”, and creating my own version that showed the United Nations logo instead of the American flag, with the same slogan.
I remember former friends calling me a muslim communist liberal terrorist traitor, and whatever else they could think up.
I remember volunteering with Enemy Combatant Radio at Indymedia, helping keep their creaking old servers running.
I remember on this exact day, 10 years ago, marching through the streets, trying to get onto the Bay Bridge, and facing off against the cops, trying to keep it from escalating.
I remember watching people laying in the streets to stop traffic. “SHUT IT DOWN!” was the theme.
What’s most bizarre is that I was such a nutty moonbat radical back then, and I’m such a boring mainstream establishment fuck now, without changing a single political opinion. How the hell did that happen?
DonT
@Redshirt:
you’re right
Mandalay
@fuckwit:
You really believe that?
DonT
@fuckwit:
I remember going to a rally at Daley Plaza to hear union leaders and a State Senator from Hyde Park speak against going into Iraq. It was a middle class and very middle age crowd.
Maude
@kay:
I have to add that Hillary made herself the story at the hearings. We didn’t know anything more after she testified than we did before.
The Republicans have bollixed the who situation of Bengazi. It was a political ploy to destroy Obama. They didn’t care what happened.
hitchhiker
And he was proved correct. President Bush never made his case. Instead, with Jake Tapper’s help, he bullied the people who didn’t think he’d made the case by making them out to be hysterical peacenik terrorist loving fools.
President Bush never made the case because there was no case. The neocons just made it all up out of whole cloth. God, I still can’t get my head around the fact that they pulled this off.
kay
@Maude:
Republicans approached it purely politically, which is what Republicans do.
Why is Jake Tapper doing that?
It was ridiculous. “Investigating” doesn’t mean parsing the same paragraph over and over and over. It was clear that Rice was not the key to the thing, and that was obvious almost immediately.
The truth is that if the O Admin. WERE covering up, focusing on Rice helps them do that. But Rice was an easy target, so she got the “tough questions”
I think he fucked it up. He led media on it. They found out nothing. That’s a failure.
Chyron HR
@Ted & Hellen:
We need to hear more from Tim about how he’s in favor of anything “Bots” are against, up to and including rape.
(In before Tim starts incoherently squealing about “projection”.)
Another Halocene Human
@Mandalay: FUCK THOSE RACIST FUCKS!
And Bams can come to Florida any time. Holla at me.
Redshirt
Speaking tangentally of Fox News, I was forced to watch it at times due to recent travels, and WOW. A totally alternate rally. Still hammering Benghazi in every rotation. Weepy sentimental pieces about that mean old Obama shutting down the White House tours – its ARE HOUSE!!!!
Also, all hail Michigan Republicans, apparently. And Big Gulps.
It was like being in the Trek Mirror Universe. It actually made me sad to walk down the aisle of the JetBlue flight and see how many people had Fox News on. Like little windows of poison being fed directly into their brains.
Maude
@kay:
Tapper was hoping to make a name for himself in the celebrity sweepstakes called the WH Press Corps.
ricky
@Comrade Jake:
The self serving twit not only thinks that is a tough question, he has to write it up with a lede pat on his back for having an olfacotry trained to root out smoke. Which he then blows up his readers’ kiester.
And don’t get me started on his role in Obama playing the race card back in ought 8.
Ted & Hellen
@Cris (without an H):
Your sort of Emoprog Unicorn Deaniac talk is not welcome here.
Paul in KY
@fuckwit: Thank you for what you did back then.
ricky
Sorry Comrade Jake, you just opened the old floodgates of fond rememberances of courageous journalist Tapper. One of my favorites was his extensive coverage of a comedian telling an off color joke at an Obama rally in 08. I tried commenting that the joke was nothing compared to the thigh slapper old Straight Talker told about Janet Reno being Chelsea Clinton’s father.
For that I was banned from Jake’s blog at ABC forever.
Cain
@Hill Dweller:
Awesome. I need a cigarette after that. It’s too bad though. These people need to be put in JAIL.
I don’t understand this justice system. There are prosecutors aplenty out there trying to make an example of lawbreakers but the cabal of people who are responsible for thousands of people dying, billions of money lost are still here and most are willing to do it again. Fuck these people.
Ted & Hellen
@Mandalay:
Conspiracies (plans) never happen, donchyaknow.
Ted & Hellen
@Cain:
You are wrong. That is not happening anymore. President Obama is going on five years in office and the department of hope and change has taken care of all that.
Cacti
@Cain:
The criminal justice system works exactly as intended. Control the poors and protect the plutocrats.
kay
@Maude:
I watched Clinton’s testimony and I was cheering.
She’s RIGHT. It doesn’t matter they “caught” the admin. spokesperson in an inconsistency. That would only matter if it led somewhere.
I think a lot of people feel like this. The cleverness of the question isn’t the point. It’s not the goal. We’re not out here scoring statements on level of veracity or sincerity. We’re not trying to “nail” liars, and then sit back. Their goal is to find something out, supposedly. Do you know one more thing about what happened there after the months of reporting on Rice’s paragraph?
Me neither. But they sure showed that Susan Rice!
gene108
What’s sad about the people in this country is that in 2004, I remember a lot of conservatives saying Bush, Jr. was the greatest President evah for bringing freedom to Iraq, keeping us safe and defeating Saddam, while leading an economic recovery.
There’s just some group of people, who do not want to believe America can ever be wrong (unless America is being run by Democrats).
Maude
@kay:
The polls were always against the Republicans on Bengazi. It fell flat. They can’t make it an issue.
HRC didn’t go on that Sunday show, she said at the hearing, because she didn’t want to. At the time she said she was too tired. That’s how Rice got in the cross hairs. There wasn’t anyone else who could go on tv and talk about it.
Rice doesn’t take hostages.
dance around in your bones
@peach flavored shampoo:
Oooh! I like this! Like Dirk Diggler or Dick Pokey or Buster Hymen or Biggus Dickus or Putin Too Hard or Sam in That or….well you get the picture.
kay
@Maude:
I feel like Lindsey Graham knew they screwed it up, and he was bitter, on purely political grounds that Clinton sailed on by.
Judging by their performance on that story, and the lazer-like insane focus on Susan Rice, who was just reciting boilerplate CYA, I am not at all confident they won’t do another Iraq-level job.
Mandalay
@ricky:
And the ultimate thigh slapper of course is dubya joking about not being able to find weapons of mass destruction, while the White House correspondents laugh along.
If you were compiling evidence to show that this nation can be evil, this video would be part of that evidence.
It’s one thing to be incompetent and nefarious. It’s quite another to gloat about it, and receive the glowing approval of the media for gloating.
Bush should be behind bars for the rest of his life.
fuckwit
@Mandalay: “Believe” is a bit strong. I’m old enough now to know not to really believe anything anymore. But it is my current working hypothesis, and has been for the last decade, if that’s what you’re asking, yes.
fuckwit
@dance around in your bones: Don’t forget Seymore Butts.
gene108
@Cain:
You act like this is the first time the powers-that-be fudged the truth get us into a war.
Between the War of 1812, Mexican-American War, Spanish American War and Vietnam War the causes of why we really, really had to fight get a bit murky.
dance around in your bones
@fuckwit: Right up there with Oliver Klozoff.
ricky
@Mandalay:
Bush should be behind bars for the rest of his life.
For an ex-President, being relegated to getting attention solely for your podiatric self-portraiture is sort of political penal confinement.
The Moar You Know
Obama still smoking? Cause Tapper’s my go-to guy for tough questions like that.
He’s not part of the solution, he is very much part of the problem, is aware of it, and desperately trying to dodge blame for it.
Chris
@Hill Dweller:
I was really struck by Sooner’s comment on another thread (didn’t read it until it was dead) that the reason he’d been passed over for promotion was because of a “does not support the chain of command” report card after being asked what he thought of the Iraq War and daring to say something other than the party line.
Political officers? Who needs ’em? There are regular officers eager to fulfill the same purpose, apparently.
Julia Grey
@ricky:
Typical Jake Tapper. He had already decided, because of the personal insult that he felt he had received when Obama LIED TO HIS FACE! about smoking, that anything associated with Obama was going to be The Worst Thing Ever. From that moment forward, as with Gore after the campaign plane incident, Jake was ever on the lookout for examples of Obama and Co’s depravity. This comedian’s joke was an irrefutable example of the Obama administration’s unprecedented horrors.
You refuted his example. That was an insult to Jake Tapper. You were therefore deemed a sociopath, unfit to mingle with normal people. So of COURSE you were very properly banned, to prevent you from corrupting the rest of Tapper’s polite company.
Mandalay
@ricky:
Maybe, but I’d prefer life without the possibility of release.
ruemara
@Mandalay: Hell, I believe that. I most certainly believe that. I’ll admit it’s my gut opinion, but it’s one I do believe.
Redshirt
Jock Topper?
David Koch
Raymond ShawJake Tapper is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I’ve ever known in my life.Silver
So Jake Tapper would have been more a lickspittle fuckup than he already is if we hadn’t killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis?
Clearly, a net win for the country.
RSR
fffuuuuuuuu…..
Dean’s position on Iraq was a primary reason for my support of his candidacy. Yeah, he wasn’t great at everything, but his “what I want to know” speech at the CA teachers convention asked a bunch of questions, some of which we’re still asking ten years after. I wanted more questions, and more people asking those questions.
We got there, but it took too damn long.