Salon.com columnist Joe Conason wrote on March 23 of the media's apparent amnesia about Karl Rove's history of lying. Though Rove's previous dishonesty would seem to be quite relevant to coverage of the current controversy over whether he should be placed under oath and his statements transcribed when talking to Congress about the Bush administration's prosecutor scandal, Conason writes, the “porous brainpans of the Washington press corps” seem to have forgotten all about recent history.

A town full of worthless memories

Salon.com columnist Joe Conason wrote on March 23 of the media's apparent amnesia about Karl Rove's history of lying. Though Rove's previous dishonesty would seem to be quite relevant to coverage of the current controversy over whether he should be placed under oath and his statements transcribed when talking to Congress about the Bush administration's prosecutor scandal, Conason writes, the “porous brainpans of the Washington press corps” seem to have forgotten all about recent history. According to Conason:

The proposal to interview the president's chief political counselor without an oath or even a transcript is absurd for a simple and obvious reason. Yet the White House press corps, despite a long and sometimes testy series of exchanges with [White House press secretary Tony] Snow, is too polite to mention that reason, so let me spell it out as rudely as necessary right here:

Rove is a proven liar who cannot be trusted to tell the truth even when he is under oath, unless and until he is directly threatened with the prospect of prison time. Or has everyone suddenly forgotten his exceedingly narrow escape from criminal indictment for perjury and false statements in the Valerie Plame Wilson investigation? Only after four visits to the grand jury convened by special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald, and a stark warning from Fitzgerald to defense counsel of a possible indictment, did Rove suddenly remember his role in the exposure of Plame as a CIA agent.

[...]

By now the porous brainpans of the Washington press corps not only seem to have excused Rove's leaking and lying about Plame's CIA position, but also to have erased that disgraceful episode from their memories. The president and all his flacks can stand before the public and act as if Rove should be treated like a truthful person whose words can be believed -- and not as someone who lies routinely even in the direst of circumstances. The press secretary Snow can say, without fear of contradiction, that the best way to ascertain the facts about the White House role in the firing of the U.S. attorneys is to interview Rove without benefit of oath or transcript.

Indeed, media coverage of the prosecutor purge has been marked by what seems to be a stunning lack of memory by the political press corps.

For example, just three weeks ago, Scooter Libby was convicted of perjury, making false statements to investigators, and obstruction of justice. You might think that would come up in coverage of President Bush's unwillingness to allow his top aides to testify before Congress under oath, in public, or in any setting that would involve a permanent, objective record of their comments.

Yet the White House press corps seems to have forgotten all about Libby's conviction -- they haven't asked Tony Snow a single question about it during the daily press briefings since Bush refused to allow Rove and others to testify under oath. A president who just three weeks ago saw one of his top aides convicted of perjury and making false statements to investigators now refuses to allow other aides to testify under oath. And apparently nobody in the White House press corps thinks to ask Tony Snow if that's because Bush is afraid of another of his aides committing perjury -- or whether his refusal to allow a transcript is because he's afraid of them getting caught. Nobody remembers Libby's conviction well enough to ask Snow how the White House can possibly insist that a transcript is unnecessary given Libby's own willingness to lie under oath.

And it isn't just that the question has gone unasked in Snow's press briefings: the Washington Post, New York Times, ABC, CBS, and NBC have all neglected to bring up the Libby conviction in the context of the administration's refusal to allow transcripts or statements under oath.

On CNN, Suzanne Malveaux came close to explaining the problem with the White House's stance:

MALVEAUX: Now, Snow responded by saying simply that, look, you know, you're just going to have to get to the truth without a transcript. That is going to be a very big challenge for this White House because essentially they're telling the American people and members of Congress, trust us. This is a White House, as you know, that has had problems in the past with issues of credibility.

Malveaux noted that the White House's position is “trust us” -- and that that position is a “challenge” because of the problems the administration has had “in the past with issues of credibility.” Incredibly, though, she stopped there, apparently having forgotten that just three weeks ago, Scooter Libby was convicted of perjury. Yet Malveaux gave versions of this report on both The Situation Room and Lou Dobbs Tonight without noting Libby's conviction -- or, of course, the history of lies by Rove that Conason describes.

Perhaps more troubling is that political reporters seem to have forgotten that this is not the first time President Bush has acted to head off an investigation involving his close friend and attorney general, Alberto Gonzales. As we noted last week, Bush personally quashed a 2006 investigation of his administration's warrantless domestic spying operation. Journalist Murray Waas reported last week that Bush did so after receiving advice from Gonzales -- and after Gonzales was informed that his own conduct would likely be a subject of the investigation.

Incredibly, this hasn't come up in media coverage of President Bush's efforts to slow or thwart an investigation involving Gonzales; it has apparently been forgotten by the nation's leading news organizations. (And, of course, editorial boards like that of The Washington Post -- which wrote on March 22 that "[i]f Mr. Bush is serious about wanting the truth to come out, he will relent on this issue" -- apparently forget that they've written similar things in the past, only to be disappointed time and time again.)

Nor have many reporters seemed to remember what White House allies who currently defend Bush's refusal to allow aides to testify had to say about executive privilege when Bill Clinton was president -- with one notable exception. Snow was asked in a press briefing this week about a 1998 column in which he essentially accused Clinton of attempting to claim a “constitutional right to cover up.”

But there's more where that came from. During a July 28, 1995, appearance on CNN, for example, Snow accused the Clinton administration of making “the bogus argument that they have executive privilege,” which he described as going “right back to the Nixon playbook.”

In 1998, House Judiciary Committee Republicans even included the charge that "[t]he President frivolously asserted executive privilege" in a draft version of the fourth article of impeachment against the president. (The executive privilege language was removed via amendment, and Article IV was overwhelmingly rejected by the full House of Representatives.)

MSNBC's Chris Matthews suggested that Bush's refusal to allow aides to testify (which Matthews gushingly described as his “Texas loyalty,” adding, “God, he was Jim Bowie at the Alamo tonight”) was nothing unusual. In fact, Matthews suggested, no president would ever allow a top aide to testify before an opposing Congress:

MATTHEWS: Do either one of you think there's any chance in the world that any president -- weak, Republican, Democrat, liberal, or conservative, early in the term, late in the term -- would ever let his top political henchman testify before an opposing Congress under oath? Would anybody ever let that happen?

JILL ZUCKMAN (Chicago Tribune Capitol Hill correspondent): Oh, I don't think so, Chris. I think this is a fight that every president would take up. No one would just turn over their top political adviser.

MATTHEWS: Everybody's got hatchet men in this business -- the guy or woman they keep in the closet that does the dirty work and doesn't necessarily tell them everything, with plausible deniability, and they can do all kinds of things. But if they sit up there under the threat of perjury, which has recently been real with Scooter, I wonder.

Do you agree, Matt, there's no way any president would ever let his top person go up there?

MATTHEW CONTINETTI (Weekly Standard staff writer): Yeah, I don't see -- I don't think Bill Clinton would make [former Clinton campaign manager] Jim Carville go up there under oath. So I don't see this, Rove, going up there any time soon.

MATTHEWS: That would also be interesting.

But Matthews had apparently forgotten the numerous times that top White House aides have testified under oath before a hostile Congress. To take the most obvious example, Clinton Deputy White House Chief of Staff Harold Ickes frequently testified before Congress, including memorable -- but not to Matthews -- sparring sessions with the Republican-led Senate Whitewater Committee in 1996 and the Republican-led Senate Governmental Affairs Committee in 1997.

***

Another of the week's top stories, former Vice President Al Gore's global warming testimony before Congress, provided still more examples of the short memories of political reporters.

Slate.com's Jacob Weisberg, for example, took a familiar shot at Gore, writing this week that “Al Gore claimed he invented the Internet.” Weisberg has apparently forgotten that Gore never claimed to have invented the Internet. Either that, or he's lying, because it certainly isn't the case that Weisberg never knew the truth. After all, Weisberg himself wrote on September 30, 2004:

A big element of the GOP's superior skill is the technique it has refined for depicting Democratic candidates in terms of a simple, troubling vice -- and then reinforcing that portrayal relentlessly and pervasively. In 2000, the Bush team did Al Gore in with the charge that Gore was prone to boastful exaggeration. At first, this seemed a pretty weird and marginal critique. Who cares if a politician exaggerates his accomplishments -- don't they all do that? What's more, many of the specific attacks were baseless. Gore never really took credit for inventing the Internet. He didn't really claim to have been raised on a union lullaby that hadn't yet been written when he was a baby. A number of Gore's other infamous howlers were equally dubious.

Interestingly, Weisberg's memory seems to fade in and out. During the 1999-2000 presidential campaign, when Al Gore was a candidate, Weisberg accused him of “brag[ging] about pioneering the Internet” and reported that Bush mocked Gore for “claiming to have invented” the Internet -- without bothering to point out that the charge was false.

In 2004, with Gore out of the spotlight, Weisberg told the truth: “Gore never really took credit for inventing the Internet.”

Now, in 2007, with Gore receiving widespread attention and credit for his work on global warming -- and with more than a few people urging him to run for president -- the inconvenient truth that “Gore never really took credit for inventing the Internet” has apparently faded from Weisberg's memory. Now, Weisberg flatly states: “Al Gore claimed he invented the Internet.” He must just have forgotten. Either that, or he's lying.

Speaking of Al Gore, just last year, The Politico's John Harris was saying that the “biggest” reason Al Gore lost the 2000 presidential election was that the media treated him unfairly. Harris and ABC's Mark Halperin wrote in The Way to Win, “Not every election is a fair fight” -- and the media's treatment of the candidates rigged the fight against Gore. Now, Harris has apparently forgotten the media's role, as he blames Gore's purported lack of poise, focus, and self-confidence for the 2000 loss -- with no mention of what he had previously described as the biggest reason for Gore's loss: his unfair treatment at the hands of the media.

Jamison Foser is Executive Vice President at Media Matters for America.