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As we do every year, we are pre-empting our "Friday Talking Points" columns for the next two weeks, to bring you our best and worst of 2014. And, yes, we are going to continue our supercilious and no-doubt-annoying habit of using the editorial "we" throughout these two columns, so thanks for asking! Heh.
The Bill of Rights celebrated its 223rd anniversary yesterday. Anyone who believes this is a positive addition to America's history should thank the Anti-Federalists, since they were responsible for the creation of the first ten amendments to the United States Constitution. There aren't a whole lot of folks today who call themselves "Anti-Federalists," so you'll have to salute their memory instead.
Thanks to the tireless efforts of Senator Dianne Feinstein, we now have an official record of what, exactly, was done in all our names in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. As President Obama has already admitted, this can be summed up as: "We tortured some folks." We can't pretend it wasn't torture anymore, because the facts weren't swept under a historical rug this time.
What walks like a duck and quacks like a duck but seems to have serious mobility problems?
With one week to go until the 2014 midterm elections, almost all of the punditocracy world is absolutely chomping at the bit for this cycle to already be over, so they can concentrate on the much-more-fun 2016 presidential election season. This is pretty obvious, with some media now swooning over Jeb Bush's possible candidacy and the Clintons out stumping for other Democrats (and being covered more in the news than the actual candidates).
About a month ago, a debate erupted when Apple and Google announced they were going to start providing encryption services for smartphones that could not be cracked by anyone -- including the police. James Comey, the head of the Federal Bureau of Investigations, was horrified at this prospect and began a public-relations push to convince the companies (and the public) that this was a terrible idea. He tried to get the companies to change their decision to (as he put it) "market something expressly to allow people to place themselves beyond the law."
A program note, before we get started: there will be no Friday Talking Points column next week. We have to make room for our traditional Hallowe'en column, where we try to scare the pants off of everyone across the political spectrum with spooky tales of what the upcoming election might mean (plus, we get to show off our politically-inspired Jack-o-lanterns). So don't miss that, but the Friday Talking Points column won't be back until after the election.
That title, by my own standards here, should really be: "From The Archives -- Interview With Betty Medsger, Author Of The Burglary." I am reprinting the following interview I conducted earlier this year with a woman who was a young reporter in Ben Bradlee's newsroom around the time of Watergate and the Pentagon Papers. Since Betty Medsger is the only one I've ever personally been in touch with who knew and worked with Ben Bradlee, I thought it would be appropriate to mark his passing. Bradlee was a lion of the newspaper publishing industry, and deserves all the praise that is currently being heaped on him, and more. If you didn't read the series when I first published it this spring, follow the links to the two-part book review, and (once again) I highly recommend this book to one and all. The story of the Media, Pennsylvania burglary of the F.B.I. office is one that is not well known, but that doesn't make it any less important in today's debate over secret surveillance by government agencies.
One counter to the argument I made in this article (which was basically: "Go Apple! Go Google! Right on!") is to wonder why any upright citizen would object to police searching their photos and data, especially under a court-ordered search. It's not like the cops are going to misuse that data, right?
Today I am taking a victory lap of sorts, because while the term "tipping point" is now in a lot of headlines, I actually predicted this chain of events a year and a half ago, in the column below. That doesn't sound like a whole lot of time, but consider that when I wrote this the following was true: