In a way, Russert’s deliberate distortion in Wednesday’s debate made Hillary look better to most of us, and not only because of her blanket rejection of torture as some kind of acceptable post-9/11 American norm; when Russert sprang his trap, announcing that the scenario she’d just rejected had been offered up by her husband and our former President, Bill Clinton, her quick witted response - “He isn’t the one standing here” - was her best moment of the evening.

So far, though, not many people seem to have realized that Russert’s characterization of Clinton’s Meet The Press comments, circa, Sept of 2006, was essentially a lie.

Yes, Clinton did invoke the possible scenario of an American government with a top Al Queda terrorist in its grasp and certain knowledge of a possible bomb about to go off and thus having to choose between torture and the death of Americans, but Clinton didn’t present it either as his own formulation, or as one he accepted, or as one he thought likely enough to justify any of the Bush policies meant to normalize what, at any other point in our history, would have been considered torture, and are still so considered under the Geneva Conventions.

Before Clinton even got to that unlikely “what if,” he made crystal clear where he stood on the Bush administration’s obsession with “enhanced” interrogation techniques.

MR. RUSSERT: What did you think when Colin Powell said, “The world is beginning to doubt the moral basis of our fight against terrorism”?

MR. CLINTON: I think he was referring to the, the questions that have been raised about the original evidence, which plagues him and in which he was, I think, unwittingly complicit. I don’t think—I think it’s pretty clear, based on what all the people that worked for him have said. I think he was most worried about the question of torture and the conduct of the prisons at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib. And of course, he weighed in in this debate about the extent to which the CIA or others could engage in conduct which clearly violates the Geneva Convention.

Now, we—as you and I talk, and we hear that they’ve reached an agreement, the senators and the White House, and I hope they have. But Colin pointed out that, you know, we’ve got soldiers all over the world. If we get a reputation for torturing people, the following bad things are going to happen: We’re as likely going to get bad information is good, just for people to just quit getting beat on; two, we’re likely to create two or three or five enemies for every one we break; and three, we make our own soldiers much more vulnerable to conduct which violates the Geneva Convention. That is, we can’t expect our friends, much less our enemies, to accept the fact that because we’re the good guys, we get to have a different standard of conduct. And most people think the definition of a good guy is someone who voluntarily observes a different standard of conduct, not someone who claims the right to do things others can’t do.(emphasis mine)

Gee, sounds quite a bit like what Hillary’s been saying, and pretty much every major Democrat, with the exception of Joe Lieberman; oh yes, hot damn, he isn’t a Democrat anymore; gosh, it felt good being able to write that.

Then, reasonably enough, Russert asked Clinton:

MR. RUSSERT: Would you outlaw waterboarding and sleep deprivation, loud music, all those kinds of tactics?

MR. CLINTON: Well, I—here’s what I would do. I would figure out what the, what the generally accepted definitions of the Geneva Convention are, and I would honor them. I would also talk to people who do this kind of work about what is generally most effective, and they will—they’re almost always not advocate of torture, and I wouldn’t do anything that would put our own people at risk.

Now, the thing that drives—that, that gives the president’s position a little edge is that every one of us can imagine the following scenario: We get lucky, we get the number three guy in al-Qaeda, and we know there’s a big bomb going off in America in three days and we know this guy knows where it is. Don’t we have the right and the responsibility to beat it out of him? But keep in mind, in 99 percent of the interrogations, you don’t know those things.

Now, it happens like even in the military regulations, in a case like that, they do have the power to use extreme force because there is an imminent threat to the United States, and then to live with the consequences. The president—they could set up a law where the president could make a finding or could guarantee a pardon or could guarantee the submission of that sort of thing ex post facto to the intelligence court, just like we do now with wire taps.

So I, I don’t think that hard case justifies the sweeping authority for waterboarding and all the other stuff that, that was sought in this legislation. And I think, you know, if that circumstance comes up—we all know what we’d do to keep our country from going through another 9/11 if we could. But to—but to claim in advance the right to do this whenever someone takes a notion to engage in conduct that plainly violates the Geneva Convention, that, I think, is a mistake. (emphasis mine>,

Taking someone’s words out of context doesn’t quite cover this, does it? To set up that “gotcha” moment, Russert had to essentially lie about a reality that a simple check of an online transcript would have exposed. It is not news that our media elite would never think to question one of their own.

I know that many of you will say, why bother? We know how bad our no-nothing, terrified-of-the-rightwing media is.

Yes, we know, but they still set the terms of the debate too much of the time, and I believe that there is a connection between the many narratives they foment which target the liberal base of the Democratic Party and what I perceive to be a genuine change between the performance of the congressional Democrats their first six months in office, and their current shocking ineffectiveness.

This does not relieve them of blame or responsibility for this ineffectiveness; they need to be able to close that triangle that Peter Daou spoke of and our own Shystee elucidated so brilliantly here and here.

We underestimate the malevolent impact of our truly terrible media elite at our peril.