This particular emergency involved the lower end of the FM radio dial. Republicans, in an urgent budget-cutting maneuver, were voting to cut off funding for National Public Radio. All $5 million of it--or one ten-thousandth of 1 percent of the federal budget.

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office ran the numbers and calculated the impact this emergency measure would have on government spending: "No effect."

One of the rules of corporate media balance is that if you criticize Republicans, you have to find an example of similar buffoonery on the other side. Milbank finds that in an effort to end the nine-year-old Afghan War, which nearly two-thirds of Americans now say is not worth fighting:

Democrats would have been in a good position to point out the Republicans' lack of seriousness, except they were engaged in their own trivial pursuit. On Thursday, the same day the Republicans were doing battle with Diane Rehm, the House was also debating a bill by Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) ordering full withdrawal from Afghanistan by year’s end.

Milbank explains: "Neither a vindictive slap at public broadcasting nor a pell-mell pullout from Afghanistan would be good policy," though in the end he gives the Democrats more credit for opposing majority opinion on the war:

In the end, the Democrats proved somewhat more adult in restraining impulses. Party leaders opposed Kucinich's Afghanistan pullout plan as irresponsible, and most Democrats voted against it.

Well, thank goodness someone in Washington is being a grown up.

The desire to not debate the Afghan War seems to be a popular one at the Post. Today Fred Hiatt (3/21/11) cheers the fact that David Petraeus' Congressional appearances on the Afghan War were free of rancor--unlike his 2007 testimony on the Iraq War:

At a time when our political system is said to be incapable of rising above poisonous partisanship to promote the national interest, Gen. David Petraeus’s visit to Capitol Hill last week was instructive.

Hiatt adds:

Obama's escalation, when 73 percent of Americans want substantial numbers of troops brought home, would seem to open fertile ground to Republicans. But from their leaders on down, they haven't sought to plow there. In this instance at least, politics really has stopped at the water's edge.

For the Post, it seems, democracy is supposed to stop at the water's edge.

The film dramatizes the story of Joseph Wilson, a former ambassador who blew the whistle on the Bush administration's intelligence manipulation, and his spouse Valerie Plame Wilson, who was outed by the administration as a covert CIA officer in retaliation for her husband's criticism. The Post editorialists have been grinding their axes on the Wilsons' case for a long time now, and the film version gives them an opportunity to do so anew.

FAIR's Peter Hart documented in Extra! (5-6/06) how Post editorial page editor Fred Hiatt cherry-picked evidence to turn reality upside-down, making the Bush administration the victim of Joseph Wilson's intelligence manipulation. I wrote another piece (Extra!, 9-10/06) on the Post editorial page's efforts to dismiss the campaign to destroy Valerie Wilson's career as nothing but "gossip." (The Post's case rested on the idea that Richard Armitage, who first leaked Plame Wilson's name, was an official of unquestionable integrity--this is a guy who once served as a character witness for a Vietnamese mobster.

Fair Game is a devastating portrayal of an establishment media used as a weapon against dissidents--no wonder the Post didn't enjoy watching it.

Update: Eli Stephens of Left I on the News writes in comments:

It's interesting what passes for proof at the Post. The editorial asserts categorically: "The movie portrays Ms. Plame as having cultivated a group of Iraqi scientists and arranged for them to leave the country, and it suggests that once her cover was blown, the operation was aborted and the scientists were abandoned. This is simply false. In reality, as the Post's Walter Pincus and Richard Leiby reported, Ms. Plame did not work directly on the program, and it was not shut down because of her identification."

But the article by Pincus and Leiby says no such thing. Here: "It's true that Valerie Plame Wilson was working with one of the CIA's teams trying to gather intelligence on Iraq WMD operations, but she evidently did not play the central role that the film puts her in. She was not directly part of the scientist program, according to agency officials."

And, as to whether the program was shut down, Pincus and Leiby offer this "definitive" evidence: "Although the film suggests that the blowing of Valerie's cover led directly to the shutdown of the Iraqi scientist exfiltration, an intelligence insider told us: "Something like this, if it was going on, wouldn't have been canceled for this reason.""

So, since Plame continues to maintain her responsibility to not talk about her role, we are to rely on unnamed "agency officials" using couched language "not 'directly part' of the scientist program" to conclude in no uncertain terms that this is "simply false," and the opinion of one "insider" (not even an "agency official") who offers his or her opinion on what "would or wouldn't" have happened. "Simply false" my eye.

Fair enough. But what kind of debate does Hiatt wish the country to have, anyway? His job gives him a chance to affect the national discussion about these wars, and the evidence suggests that he's done little to provide a forum for dissenting views. 

As FAIR's Steve Rendall wrote in his study of the Post's op-ed page and Afghanistan (for the first 10 months of 2009):

In the Washington Post, pro-war columns outnumbered antiwar columns by more than 10 to 1: Of 67 Post columns on U.S. military policy in Afghanistan, 61 supported a continued war, while just six expressed antiwar views. Of the pro-war columns, 31 were for escalation and 30 for an alternative strategy.

At times the Post's editors seemed unaware that an antiwar position even existed. For instance, in an op-ed roundtable (9/27/09) appearing in its recurring "Topic A" feature, the section's editors, in their words, "asked foreign policy experts whether President Obama should maintain a focus on protecting the population and rebuilding the country, or on striking terrorists."

Excluding withdrawal from the discussion was a theme echoed by Post columnist Fareed Zakaria, who began a column (9/14/09): "It is time to get real about Afghanistan. Withdrawal is not a serious option."

Interestingly, Hiatt also had a similar beef with the debate over healthcare reform--writing (from the right) back in October,  "Single-payer national health insurance may be the best outcome, but we should get there after an honest debate, not through the back door." As we pointed out then, the Post had done next to nothing to provide an "honest debate."

If Hiatt really wants the country to debate these issues, he should start with his own paper.

One of the bright spots at the Washington Post media enterprise was Dan Froomkin's column, "White House Watch," for WashingtonPost.com.  It often struck us that Froomkin had a whole different attitude--skeptical of those in power, and critical of their journalistic enablers--than most of his colleagues at the Post Co. So it was perhaps not too surprising to hear that Froomkin, one of the Post's most popular online writers, had been fired--not long after his column was placed under the authority of editorial page editor Fred Hiatt, who's one of the journalists who best exemplifies the Post's dominant ethic of service to authority.

Those who had accepted the premise that the purpose of journalism was to advance the agenda of official Washington were understandably resentful of Froomkin, who was a constant reminder that that was not, in fact, the only way to report the news.  Post ombud Deborah Howell wrote a column back in 2005  complaining that Froomkin was "highly opinionated and liberal"--hilariously quoting the Post's then-national political editor John Harris as saying that Froomkin's column "dilutes our only asset--our credibility."

Let's be clear--it's not that they don't like you injecting opinion into the news at the Washington Post; in fact, they do that so much that economist Dean Baker refers to them as "Fox on 15th Street." But they have to be the right opinions--if, like Post columnist Dana Milbank, you think single-payer advocates are pathetic and ridiculous, that's an opinion the Post Co. is happy to showcase.  If your opinion is, like Froomkin's, that torture performed by the U.S. government ought to be called "torture," well, that might be putting at risk what the Washington Post calls "credibility."

I was struck in writing this item by what I couldn't do, which is quote Froomkin's powerful statement about the importance of journalists pointing out when officials aren't telling the truth--because Froomkin repeatedly refers to this key journalistic function as "calling bullshit"--and if we had quoted that on the air, the stations that run our show would risk being fined by the FCC.  (I could have translated that to "calling BS," but somehow euphemizing Froomkin's unvarnished call for journalistic forthrightness didn't feel right.)  Just a reminder that the petty censorship policies of the FCC do have political consequences.