Invited to "Meet the Press" this morning to "debate" the criminal euphemism called "enhanced interrogation" and its integral connection to the assassination of Osama bin Laden were -- are you braced? -- a former Bush administration CIA director, a former Bush administration secretary of homeland security, and Rudy "9/11" Giuliani.
No dissenting Bush administration officials were invited; no actual interrogators were invited, who have from experience universally denied waterboarding's effectiveness; and no Constitutional scholars were invited, who have routinely argued that at any rate the controversy is pointless, since torture is both strikingly unConstitutional and in gross violation of international law.
I'm not sure if I have ever witnessed such a wholesale abdication of mainstream journalistic responsibility such as that of host David Gregory's this morning. His was, to use an overused word, breathtaking. When I heard him promo the upcoming segment earlier in the show, I thought perhaps I had missed a name; it was incomprehensible that those would be his only three guests on the topic of torture. But when the segment aired minutes later, there they were, just the three ideological monkeys, blind, deaf, and mute -- with Gregory doing his usual job of eliciting nothing but more talking points.
Is Beltway journalism dying from its own corporate and ratings-driven weight? Or are feckless journalists like Gregory simply killing it?