They Laughed

On February 20th, I wrote: "A real town hall meeting in Ohio or Pennsylvania or Michigan, primetime on a Tuesday night, tickets actually available to the public, no scripts, random questions with no prescreening by aides, and families of current servicemen in the audience."

On Monday, President Bush was in Ohio. No, it wasn't primetime. But I've either watched the tape or read the transcript for every one of his Potemkin Village Q+A sessions over the past few years, and yesterday was a departure in that both the audience and the questions seemed completely unscreened. The transcript is here.

Today, just 24 hours later, the president held a press conference at the White House. As an indication of his newfound glasnost, Bush even fielded a question from Helen Thomas---the first question he's taken from her in several years. Yes, his responses were often misleading or absurd. Nothing new there. But beggars can't be choosers---and during the past few years, those of us who value the role of the press in presidential accountability have been paupers indeed. So for now, let's at least acknowledge Bush's new openness and appreciate the potential for the past few days to represent a new trend. We'll see.

What the press actually did with today's opportunity, though, is quite another matter. I counted over a half-dozen bursts of giggles and laughter from the crowd of reporters. On a day when four more troops were reported killed in Iraq with another six currently pending confirmation/family notification, expecting the White House press corps to maintain at least some semblance of professionalism apparently is expecting too much. Moreover, this space has chronicled the numerous misleading intimations and allegations about Iran's nuclear program that Bush and other senior administration officials have made during the past few months. Unless I've missed something, not once has a reporter asked Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Bolton etc. how their dire warnings comport with our intelligence community's estimate that Iran is a decade away from nuclear weapons capability. Since the invasion of Iraq, there's been a lot of mirror-gazing and teeth-gnashing by the Fourth Estate about its own prewar failings. Today was the perfect opportunity for reporters to at least get the president on record about a crucial issue. Instead, they laughed.

Since purportedly professional reporters seem incapable of framing the question themselves, I'll do it for them: "Mr. President, you and other members of your administration have been sounding the alarm about Iran's nuclear program. Common to these warnings is a sense of urgency---that this is a problem that must be confronted now, and with military force if diplomacy fails. But in late 2005, a National Intelligence Estimate published by the U.S. intelligence community projected that Iran is about a decade away from the ability to produce a nuclear weapon. How does that comport with the urgency you've used to frame this issue, and have you seen any intelligence that contradicts the NIE?"

That type of question was not asked before Iraq. So far, it's not been asked about Iran. Assuming there's still time to inject some sanity and clear thinking into our Iran policy, isn't it about time the press stopped giggling and started doing its job?