However, this isn't just a problem with front page political reporting. It afflicts the Op-Ed pages as well. Paul Krugman's column today, on why we shouldn't let bygones be bygones, is quite illustrative of this:
[T]here are indeed immense challenges out there: an economic crisis, a health care crisis, an environmental crisis. Isn’t revisiting the abuses of the last eight years, no matter how bad they were, a luxury we can’t afford?No, it isn’t, because America is more than a collection of policies. We are, or at least we used to be, a nation of moral ideals. In the past, our government has sometimes done an imperfect job of upholding those ideals. But never before have our leaders so utterly betrayed everything our nation stands for. “This government does not torture people,” declared former President Bush, but it did, and all the world knows it.
Now, if you're sixty-five years old, this might seem to be an enlightening take on things. And indeed, amidst the Times' columnist line-up (Frank Rich is the only other columnist at the Times whom I could see this critique coming from. Bob Herbert is obsessed with New Orleans; Gail Collins with dull observation; Maureen Dowd with yammering on about new hats and Blackberrys and gifts; Tom Friedman with becoming the personal stenographer for any person he's ever met whose name even slightly resembles "Ramesh Kapur"; David Brooks with David Brooks; and Roger Cohen with being the Times' default "anti-semitic" punching bag) this is actually a very nice, lucid assessment of things.
There's one problem: It's basically boilerplate by now. Glenn Greenwald has been harping on this for years. Obviously the issue is front-and-center now that Obama's DOJ is considering prosecutions and the "Torture Memos" have been released. But even that was over a week ago. Matt Yglesias, Andrew Sullivan, Ta-Nehisi Coates, everyone at Firedoglake and Kos, David Sirota and Chris Bowers, Josh Marshall, John Cole, and Atrios have all been writing the same thing multiple times a day for 10 days. And yet apparently, since a) Krugman felt this column needed to be written and b) Andrew Rosenthal felt this column needed to be published, there is an implicit understanding that this, a convincing argument in favor of prosecutions, will be new and fresh to many of its readers.
The only problem is that it's anything but fresh. It's incredibly stale.
It's one thing to be reading yesterday's news. It's a whole different ballgame when you're reading week/month-old arguments.
