This un-nuanced adoration could also be found from the longtime newspaper journos who run Calbuzz:

“Releasing this report is an important step to restoring our values and showing the world that we are a just society,” Feinstein said on the Senate floor, calling the CIA’s post 9/11 interrogation program, “a stain on our values and our history.”

Under enormous pressure, Feinstein could have punted, mumbled about bipartisanship and played it safe by letting Republicans water down the report or bury it for good after she loses her committee chairmanship when the new Senate convenes. Such an option was most likely a non-starter for someone of her self-regard, but that she ultimately did not choose it may well stand as the greatest legacy of the 81-year old Senator’s years in Washington.

But if you bothered to look beyond the conventional wisdom advanced by the New York Times and the print media, much of the Left wasn’t buying the Feinstein-is-a-hero narrative. This is from BuzzFeed’s news coverage:

The Central Intelligence Agency tricked everyone. Senate Democrats’ recently released inquiry into Bush-era torture revealed a lot of shocking new details, but none quite as shocking as the the idea that the CIA successfully misled Congress, President George W. Bush, and even top intelligence officials about how brutal and ineffectual the program really was.

Most damningly — and politically conveniently — the report somehow manages to combine harrowing details of torture while exonerating nearly every top official whose job it was to prevent it from happening, and place the blame on a powerful political entity that is the most likely to emerge unscathed: the CIA itself.

Fox News shows had many variations on the same theme of scapegoating and blame-ducking. Here’s an example:

SEAN HANNITY: Let’s go to Dianne Feinstein back in 2002 when she said the following, this was quoted in New York Times, where she said, you know, it took that real attack, I think, to kind of shiver our timbers enough to let is know that the threat is profound and that we have to do some things that historically we have not wanted to do to protect ourselves.

You were there. You knew these senators, these lawmakers. Do you remember any specific meetings? Was Dianne Feinstein told specifically what the CIA was doing in terms of enhanced interrogation?

JOSE RODRIGUEZ: There are about 40 instances where we briefed the Senate and the House intelligence committees over the life of the program from 2002 to 2009. And we briefed Dianne Feinstein and Nancy Pelosi and Rockefeller and many others all the time. And we at the outset, at the beginning, back in 2001, I remember very clearly them telling me, you know, the problem that you guys have is that you are risk adverse. You need to use the authorities that we have given you to go out there and destroy this organization and to kill bin Laden. So we feel that we briefed them and briefed them thoroughly, and they are, you know, hypocritical.

Libertarians and anyone who believes in individual rights and who fears government power have to be happy that Feinstein has to a degree pulled back the covers on the anti-terrorism industrial complex.

But anyone who has watched the good cop/bad cop routine from Washington pols on national security  is not likely to readily accept the Feinstein-as-hero narrative.

By Chris Reed

President Barack Obama’s re-election has led some California small-government types to pull back on their criticism, perhaps thinking that the Chicago Republican must be doing something right if he can win the Golden State’s popular vote by 23 percent with the state economy in such terrible shape.

But the California electorate’s conclusions can’t hide the wreckage from Obama’s years in the White House. He’s been one of our worst presidents, a smug faculty-lounge smart guy who has no understanding of or sympathy for the private sector — as well as being the epitome of the liberal big-spender who thinks you can print borrowed money for years on end with little consequence. And on the management front, for all his political savvy, the president’s administration is loaded with examples of incompetence and wastefulness.

Case study: the Federal Aviation Administration. When the stimulus bill’s $800 billion was being spread around, the FAA was insanely wasteful, according to an internal probe released in August 2009:

“Officials in the U.S. Department of Transportation have allocated millions of dollars in stimulus funds for small airports, even though the projects did not qualify for funding under the criteria established by the agency. The findings were uncovered by the Transportation Department’s inspector general, whose August 7 advisory reported that 50 projects were given money despite the fact that they scored less than the minimum required 62 on a 0-100 scale created to determine eligibility for federal stimulus funds. Inspector General Calvin Scovel III said the Federal Aviation Administration chose low-priority airports for stimulus money so that every state got at least some of the funding.

“One example cited in the IG’s report was the new airport in the remote Alaskan village of Ouzinkie on Spruce Island, population 167, which received $14.7 million even though it already had a gravel airstrip, landing area for sea planes and access to cargo barges. Ouzinkie averages 42 flights a month.

“An airpark near Dover, Delaware was given $909,806 to design (rather than build) a runway because that was Delaware’s only ‘ready-to-go’ project.”

Before that report came out, Pro Publica and CBS News also had this stomach-turning scooplet:

“The Federal Aviation Administration has now allocated all of its $1.1 billion in stimulus money for airport improvements. But the complex set of rules laid out in the recovery act has led to some counterintuitive results.

“The biggest winners aren’t the busiest airports. And more than $100 million is going to airports that have fewer than one flight an hour—airports that cater to recreational fliers, corporate jets or remote communities.”

Prudent cuts? Nah! Let’s endanger people!

By Chris Reed

California Attorney General Kamala Harris is among the many Americans of all political persuasions who are outraged that few are taking the fall for the grotesque irresponsibility that led to the housing bubble, its collapse, and the recession of the past six years.

She sued quasi-federal mortgage-issuing giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in December over their foreclosures of 12,000 homes in California. Last week, she targeted Standard & Poor’s over the credit-ratings agency’s high marks for many firms involved in the bubble.

But Harris, who is half black and half Indian-American, is doing more than a little grandstanding here. Like most politicians and most of the media, she chooses to ignore the coarse racial politics that led both George W. Bush and Bill Clinton to push policies that inevitably inflated the housing bubble. It’s the uncomfortable back story that is usually ignored in favor of the tidy narrative of evil Wall Street and supine regulators.

On June 17, 2002, Bush announced a drive to get 5.5 million minorities out of apartments and into their own homes. The primary method amounted to affirmative-action lending — eliminating down payments and loosening income requirements. As The New York Times noted in a 2008 analysis, Bush’s primary means of achieving this end was insisting that “Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac meet ambitious new goals for low-income lending.”

Against this backdrop, Harris’ insinuation that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were racially predatory looks grossly demagogic. This is from a Huffington Post account of her lawsuit:

“Harris also called on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to disclose whether they have complied with civil rights laws protecting minorities and members of the Armed Forces against unlawful convictions and foreclosures.”

So if affirmative action backfires, the quasi-government agency pursuing affirmative action under pressure from the president faces civil liability?

Clinton’s role in inflating the housing bubble was every bit as direct as Bush 43’s. In 1997, he appointed Andrew Cuomo, the current New York governor, to be secretary of housing and urban development. Cuomo had little banking or lending expertise, but he had a broad banking and lending agenda. Veteran journalist Wayne Barrett laid out his folly in a 2008 analysis in Village Voice:

“Cuomo, the youngest Housing and Urban Development secretary in history, made a series of decisions between 1997 and 2001 that gave birth to the country’s current crisis. He took actions that — in combination with many other factors — helped plunge Fannie and Freddie into the subprime markets without putting in place the means to monitor their increasingly risky investments. He turned the Federal Housing Administration mortgage program into a sweetheart lender with sky-high loan ceilings and no money down, and he legalized what a federal judge has branded ‘kickbacks’ to brokers that have fueled the sale of overpriced and unsupportable loans. …

“Perhaps the only domestic issue George Bush and Bill Clinton were in complete agreement about was maximizing home ownership, each trying to lay claim to a record percentage of homeowners, and both describing their efforts as a boon to blacks and Hispanics. HUD, Fannie, and Freddie were their instruments, and, as is now apparent, the more unsavory the means, the greater the growth.…

“Cuomo … did more to set these forces of unregulated expansion in motion than any other secretary and then boasted about it, presenting his initiatives as crusades for racial and social justice … .”

Somehow I doubt this coarse and depressing history will be mentioned by Kamala Harris, who is an utterly conventional California Democrat despite her exotic background and moralistic rhetoric. Wall Street did behave with gross irresponsibility, Standard & Poor’s did fail as a credit-ratings analyst, and thousands of other white-collar types did behave unethically. But the ethical failing that started it all was bipartisan racial pandering dressed up as the pursuit of “social justice.”

The result here in the Golden State:

“Latino and African-American homeowners in California have experienced foreclosure rates 2.3 and 1.9 times that of non-Hispanic white borrowers.  Latino borrowers alone make up 48 percent of all foreclosures.”

That is from a 2010 report by the California branch of the Center for Responsible Lending. How perverse that from 1997 to 2006, the Center for Irresponsible Lending was at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.

By Chris Reed

When the Bush administration responded to 9-11 by using “advanced interrogation techniques” and detaining hundreds of terror suspects indefinitely, all without offering clarity about exactly what it was doing and the legal rationales it used to justify its actions, the editorial page of The Los Angeles Times was a harsh and persistent critic. Examples:

Jan. 15, 2004

“The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday bought the Bush administration’s leaky logic on terrorism, tacitly endorsing secret detentions of hundreds of suspects after the 9/11 attacks. Moreover, by embracing the ends-justify-means reasoning in this case, the justices set a dangerous precedent as they ponder other key challenges to the administration’s anti-terror policies before them this term.”

Aug. 8, 2004

“In June, the U.S. Supreme Court ordered the Bush administration to let the hundreds of detainees it claims are terrorists meet with lawyers and challenge their imprisonment — nearly three years behind bars for some. The high court decisions were a resounding defeat for the president, who has steadfastly asserted his right to round up and put away pretty much anyone he deems a terrorist. …

“The Pentagon has let a few detainees meet with a lawyer as a goodwill gesture, providing the lawyer agrees to let officials listen in and promises not to ask about conditions of the client’s confinement or if he has been abused. However, the government is contesting almost every motion and writ, tying up the cases as it continues to claim, incredibly, that the Guantanamo detainees have no constitutional right of access. …

“Congress could step in, defining the detainees’ rights to counsel, the burden of proof that would apply in court proceedings and the limits on detention. But in a nation where Pentagon and Justice Department officials must, like the rest of us, abide by the rule of law, shouldn’t the Supreme Court’s conclusion — that even detainees are entitled to due process — be the final word?”

Jan. 8, 2006

“Terrorism presents the U.S. with an enemy unlike any we have seen before. Most Americans agree with Bush that intelligence-gathering on Al Qaeda and its spawn may require more extensive investigative authorities. But the more sweeping the powers granted the executive branch, the more vital it is that Congress provide meaningful oversight. …

“The struggle against terrorism will not end soon, and the choices we make in fighting it will help define us as a nation for decades. To allow any president to invent the law as he goes along is to invite contempt for the law for many presidencies to come.”

Feb. 7, 2006

“The administration continues to confuse Article II of the Constitution — which enumerates the president’s duties as commander in chief — with justification for disregarding the other two branches of government. Article II does give the president power, but the Constitution also has a couple of other articles — the first and third, if anyone from the administration feels like looking them up — outlining the powers of Congress and the judiciary, respectively.

“It’s hard to say what’s more disturbing: the attorney general’s unsound legal reasoning or his transparent efforts to avoid a legal conversation altogether in favor of emotional appeals aimed squarely at the court of public opinion. Practically the first words of his opening statement were: ‘Al Qaeda and its affiliates remain deadly dangerous.’

“As several senators reminded him, the hearings are not a contest to see who hates Al Qaeda more. They’re to find out about the NSA’s secret program and to see whether the White House accepts any restraints on its power.”

Feb. 14, 2006

“Gitmo … is a global embarrassment that does the U.S. more harm than good in the fight against terrorism.”

April 16, 2006

“From the beginning, President Bush essentially has argued that the post-9/11 war on terrorism authorized him to act as judge, jury and executioner of enemy combatants, including U.S. citizens. In 2004, the Supreme Court pointedly rejected this assertion of power, ruling that both U.S. citizens and foreigners detained at the Guantanamo naval base in Cuba could challenge their confinement.

“‘A state of war is not a blank check for the president when it comes to the rights of the nation’s citizens,’ Justice Sandra Day O’Connor wrote in holding that Yaser Esam Hamdi, a Louisiana native, was entitled to a hearing before a neutral decision-maker. …

“[The U.S. should] try suspected terrorists in federal court … or in military tribunals authorized by Congress and conducted in accordance with international law.”

May 22, 2006

“Saying goodbye to Guantanamo would be more than a symbolic change of policy. Confining detainees in a geographically isolated location encourages abuses by authorities and despair and disruption among inmates; witness last week’s detainee suicide attempts and subsequent attack on guards. But appearances are important too. As British Atty. Gen. Lord Goldsmith said in calling for the closing of Guantanamo: ‘The historic tradition of the United States as a beacon of freedom, of liberty and of justice deserves the removal of this symbol.'”

Jan. 4, 2007

“However else it might modify its behavior in dealing with a new, Democratic-controlled Congress, the Bush administration is still stonewalling when it comes to sharing information about its tactics in the ‘war on terror.’ That’s a mistake.”

Dec. 13, 2007

“Congress is appropriately indignant about the revelation that the CIA destroyed videotapes of interrogation sessions at which suspected terrorists were subjected to ‘enhanced’ techniques that may have included the simulated drowning known as waterboarding. That outrage needs to be channeled into legislation that would prevent the agency from engaging in the sort of behavior captured on those tapes.”

After President Obama was elected, the Times editorialized that it was crucial he shut down Guantanamo, abandon torture, embrace due process and be open about U.S. policies.

Four years later, Guantanamo remains open, the Obama administration is so secretive that a federal judge complains she is barely able to issue a coherent decision on administration terrorism policies, and the president asserts he can kill any American suspected of working for or with al-Qaeda, and without an indictment. Drones have been used to kill several thousand people around the world, including two Americans.

If George W. Bush had done this, just imagine what the Times would have written. But he wasn’t their guy. So here’s the Times’ mild verdict on the actions of the Obama administration.

“In the coming weeks, the Senate Intelligence Committee will have an opportunity to demand answers about targeted killings when it holds hearings on [John Brennan’s] nomination to head the CIA. He should be prepared to share the contents of the proposed ‘playbook’ and the legal authorities on which it rests. Decisions about targeted killings may rely on classified information, but the process by which such fateful decisions are made should not be a secret.”

That’s from a Jan. 28 editorial.

The outrage that vanished

Concerns about the Second Amendment to the Constitution? About a presidency without any limits on his power? About a commander-in-chief acting as judge, jury and executioner? About negative international reactions to U.S. policies?  About years of administration stonewalling?

They’ve all disappeared. The fundamental view that no president is above the law, you see, only applies to presidents that The Los Angeles Times doesn’t like.

I’m a libertarian who is unhappy with the defense policies of both Bush 43 and Obama. Due process for American citizens, at the least, has to be sacrosanct.

That said, it should be mind-boggling to any honest person, not just libertarians, to witness so much of the mainstream media tolerating presidential assassinations, including of U.S. citizens, after rebuking Bush for torture.

I won’t hold my breath waiting for an explanation from the Times’ editorial board, however.