-By Warner Todd Huston
Former Bush operative John Yoo has said that President Obama is now reaping the whirlwind of a “leak-happy world” that he and his colleagues created to destroy George W. Bush’s administration and is ruefully amused that they are finding the whole thing suddenly distasteful.
In a statement, Yoo, who as the deputy assistant attorney general in Bush’s Office of Legal Counsel in the Justice Department, asserted that this most recent scandal of the Dept. of Justice secretly obtaining the phone records of scores of reporters at the Associated Press, “shows that this administration cares far more about power than political and civil liberty.”
“It has intruded on the freedom of the press in ways that the allegedly power-hungry Bush Administration would never have dreamed,” Yoo said.
The former deputy AG also noted that during Bush’s days when leak after leak was seen in Washington, neither the media nor the government seemed to care much about “protecting national security and preventing the media from publishing classified information”
“But now President Obama has to live in the leak-happy world that he and his colleagues created to undermine the last administration. And they don’t like it. Unlike the Bush administration, however, they are willing to go to lengths that threaten the freedom of the press to stop it–this administration has conducted far more investigations and prosecutions for leaking than its predecessors. And, for the most part, this administration has gotten away with it from the press, which has given them a pass on civil liberties compared to how they treated Republicans.”
Yoo went on to say that he has no sympathy for the caterwauling from the AP. “But I have no sympathy for the AP or the mainstream media, because this is how you get treated when you are in a politician’s pocket,” he said sharply.
“If the AP’s editors and reporters and their colleagues at other newspapers had been more adversarial toward this President, as they were with President Bush, they would been treated with far more respect. The AP should wish for a return of the days of a Republican administration, which considered the press a worthy adversary, rather than a servant to be mistreated at will.”
You reap what you sow, as it were.
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“The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”
–Samuel Johnson
Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer. He has been writing opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and before that he wrote articles on U.S. history for several small American magazines. His political columns are featured on many websites such as Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com, BigHollywood.com, and BigJournalism.com, as well as RightWingNews.com, RightPundits.com, CanadaFreePress.com, StoptheACLU.com, AmericanDaily.com, among many, many others. Mr. Huston is also endlessly amused that one of his articles formed the basis of an article in Germany’s Der Spiegel Magazine in 2008.
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