Bernie Ward vs Chris Baker

Bush has expressed his anger over the New York Times story that revealed a program that monitors financial transactions. Of course, like all the previous programs involving spying on others, the claim is its only on suspected terrorists and only on international transactions. As a result, the program is on the legal up and up and no judge or congressman needed to sign off on it or be informed.

Keep in mind that this is the same series of lines fed to the public when the programs on wire tapping and phone call records was being revealed and all was later learned to involved collecting information on American's, their domestic, not international calls, and that the information being collected is actually pretty random since you don't really know for sure who a terrorists is until they reveal themselves. Anyway, history is repeating itself for the third or fourth time these last few years.

Anytime something like this is revealed, the republican army rises as one, writes up their talking points and sends their soldiers out to sway the media and the public. Usually, the democrats, unprepared and incapable, wilter under the onslaught of talking points and other nonsensical "facts". However, it seems at least one democrat spokeperson has tried to learn from previous fiascos.

Bernie Ward finally did something that few do on television today against the grand spinmasters of the republican party - he held his ground, found a question worth answering and demanded an answer. This of course is something that is simply never done anymore by anyone in the media who usually may ask a question but allows the "answer" to be a spinfest of talking points that doesn't really address the question at all.

Chris Baker tried that today when Bernie Ward kept asking "Do you want the government to tell news papers what to do or not?" Its a yes or no question and over and over Chris tried to dodge the question and go into a diatribe about national security and the evil of revealing information. This has nothing to do with the question itself and Bernie Ward kept calling him over and over on it. The end result is Chris lost control of his temper, cut his interview short, and gave Bernie the final word on the issue. Usually something that the republican spinmasters are granted.

Click here for the link and videos of the exchange.

(source)