I went to the trouble of making a mini-podcast of the portion of today's Meet the Press where Bill Bennett appeared along with Dana Priest of the Washington Post, Bill Safire, and others, talking about the LA and NY Times' outing of the terrorist finance tracking program. It is an appalling conversation. Bennett is the only one who makes any sense; Safire plays an especially dishonorable role. And Dana Priest gets in an outrageous cheap shot against Bill which demonstrates, once again, why the words "liberal" and "mean-spirited" go hand in hand.

It is a very sad spectacle, and the arguments adduced by the liberals are astonishingly thin. (To take just one example: I want all of our liberal readers to send us every piece of evidence that supports the claim, oft-repeated in the liberal media, that the terrorists knew all along that we were collecting data on money transfers from SWIFT. We will happily reproduce every such item of evidence that we receive. I am quite confident that the total will be zero. I have yet to see a single fact offered in support of this claim, which is, on its face, implausible.) It is important for everyone to realize, I think, how low the level of discourse in the legacy media has fallen. So: listen and weep.

One more thing: on the absurd claim that the front page, above the fold story about SWIFT didn't disclose any secrets, because everyone already knew it, see this post by Blog of the Week Patterico's Pontifications:

Eric Lichtblau, Meet Your Own Story and Headline

Eric Lichtblau’s story in the New York Times, June 22:

Bank Data Secretly Reviewed by U.S. to Fight Terror By ERIC LICHTBLAU and JAMES RISEN

Eric Lichtblau today, on CNN’s Reliable Sources:

“USA Today”, the biggest circulation in the country, the lead story on their front page four days before our story ran was the terrorists know their money is being traced, and they are moving it into—outside of the banking system into unconventional means. It is by no means a secret.

That's only the beginning; the fun goes on and on!

Posted by John at 08:33 PM  |    |