PrintJanuary 8, 2010
MS-NBC: Intelligence Failure a 'Conspiracy' against Obama?
One thing you've got to say for MS-NBC: They stand by their man. But even Tammy Wynette would cringe at the senseless devotion to Barack Obama they displayed this week.
To call it puppy-dog-like would be an insult to canines.
Just days after seven CIA officers and operatives lost their lives in defense of this country, MS-NBC conspired with unnamed senior White House sources to slander the victims and the rest of the intelligence community, just to try to defend Obama's incompetence on intelligence.
MS-NBC spent much of its Monday prime-time promoting the spurious contention that intelligence agencies may have deliberately allowed the attempted Christmas Day plane bombing to proceed in order to make Obama look bad.
This contemptible idea was floated during the "Countdown" comedy hour when The Sportscaster reported "Breaking News" that White House sources believe the intelligence community's failure to stop the plot "might have been intentional and not accidental." Further, "the information was in some way deliberately withheld from some higher or broader authority to make someone look bad," leaving little doubt that the victim of this new, vast right-wing conspiracy was Obama.
Earlier, fellow Obama sock-puppet Richard Wolffe reported that White House officials said the intelligence debacle was the result of "a failure by individuals who maybe had an alternative agenda."
Wolffe "covered" the 2008 campaign for Newsweek while simultaneously penning a paean to Obama. He was granted frequent access to Obama as a candidate and reportedly is now working on a second book, presumably with similar access. Wolffe and MS-NBC have already been accused of deceiving the public about Wolffe's various conflicts of interest.
Three guesses as to Wolffe's source on what Obama is thinking about the Christmas Day bomb attempt?
Wolffe, who was born in Birmingham, England, declared that the question being asked in the White House about the intelligence failings was "Cockup or conspiracy?"
MS-NBC continued to promote Wolffe's charges as "Breaking News" on the following program. "What's new and particularly worrying," uber-lib Rachel Maddow solemnly intoned, "is the prospect that intelligence was deliberately withheld by one part of the American intelligence community from another, either by a grudge to make somebody look bad, or for any other reason that put petty politics above national security."
Apparently, even this White House realized they had taken liberals' animus against the intelligence community too far. Wolffe, their unofficial spokesman, immediately began walking back the allegation. Wolffe had "just checked in" with his masters, and he told Maddow by phone that the storyline he and The Sportscaster had spun was, in reality, "ten steps ahead of where the White House is right now," and that "this comes down to human error more than this is some willful withholding." Granted, Wolffe added that the conspiracy "questions are being asked."
In other words, this White House trial balloon went over about as well as the Balloon Boy stunt.
But the damage was done. The left-wing blogosphere -- the kind that puts all those Os in looney toons -- quickly picked up the Obama talking points, confirming that instead of "the Place for Politics," MS-NBC is actually the Place for Propaganda.
The airtime between Wolffe's regurgitation of White House talking points and MS-NBC's character assassination of the intelligence community was filled with -- surprise! -- Bush-bashing. Somehow the release of Gitmo prisoners, which the left had pursued with the persistence -- and the lack of sense -- of a child holding his breath, was Bush's fault. That so many of the released Gitmo prisoners were from Yemen was also, inexplicably, Bush's fault.
(MEMO TO COUNTDOWN PRODUCERS: The previous administration is just that: previous. You've become a one-trick-pony show whose pony done died.)
So far, no apology is forthcoming from either the White House or Wolffe to the thousands of hardworking professionals they slandered, or to the families of those in the intelligence community who have died in the nation's defense.
As for MS-NBC, it has sunk to yet another nadir in its eagerness to pimp Obama's political agenda, its reportage now the stuff you scrape off shoes.
William Tate is an award-winning journalist and author.
