Why doesn't a tough reporter just cowboy up, challenge Bush's BS, & call him a liar?

[Marley23]

Here’s a link to a Washington Post article about Scott McClellan.
The piece itself discusses how little McClellan has to say at times. Of course, “sacrificial lamb” is probably somewhere on his resume - you can’t talk to the President like this, but the Press Secretary is another story. It does include this exchange:

It started when the president told Fox News’s Brit Hume last week that he believed that Rep. Tom DeLay was not guilty of money-laundering charges in Texas. This undercut McClellan’s vow that he would not comment on the Plame matter because it is an “ongoing investigation,” something he has repeated hundreds of times in recent months. We join Thursday’s episode in progress:

Reporter: “Why would that not apply to the same type of prosecution involving Congressman DeLay?”

McClellan: “I just told you we had a policy in place regarding this investigation, and you’ve heard me say before that we’re not going to talk about it further while it’s ongoing.”

In a flurry of follow-ups, McClellan repeated that the White House had a policy on the Plame case (four times) and that the policy was not to comment (three times).
NBC’s David Gregory broke in, declaring the administration to be “inconsistent,” then “hypocritical.”

“You have a policy for some investigations and not others, when it’s a political ally who you need to get work done?” Gregory asked.

[Leaper]

@buns3000

So if a journalist challenges the President over a supposed lie, thats proof of his/her left-wing bias?

Well, you have to admit there’s a percieved attitude difference between “Mr. President, on this date you said X, but this source from your own government says Y. What comment do you have?” and “Bush, you are a goddamned liar” (which is what the OP seemed to be advocating).

[Jonathan_Chance]

The closest I can recall to something like that was in Reagan’s 1987(?) Iran Contra press conference. Sam Donaldson asked some pointed question and Reagan came back with what seemed to me a canned replay and Donaldson snapped back something like (very agressively) “Mr President, the American people simply don’t believe you!”

As for McClellan save your sympathy. The back and forth during the daily press briefings is much higher and less deferential. It’s his JOB to take bullets for the President. Hell, McClellan’s been beaten up, it’s true, but it’s been NOTHING like what happened to Mike McCurry during the Monica Lewinsky thing.

McClellan gets questions about the President commenting on ongoing investigations and ‘did the President lie about WMD in Iraq’. Well and good.

McCurry got ‘Mike, is the semen on that dress the Presidents?’

Christ, if there’s a low point in a press man’s career it’s that question. Ugh.

[Kimstu]

AFAICT, the people most “damaged” by Joe McCarthy were anticommunists themselves and Republicans. This was because his self-serving, partisan grandstanding about Communist infiltration in government (most of which had been detected and eliminated by liberal bureaucrats in the 1940’s) didn’t actually accomplish much except to discredit anticommunist concerns as “witch hunting”.

From a panel discussion on Coulter’s book Treason:

Klehr: Mr. Brennan claims never to have heard of any people falsely or maliciously attacked by McCarthy. How about James Wechsler, editor of the New York Post? Wechsler had long been public about his Communist background in the student movement of the 1930s and had for years been a vigorous and forthright anti-communist liberal. Senator McCarthy went after him largely because Wechsler had criticized McCarthy and suggested that Communist denunciations of Wechsler were actually part of a Communist effort to make him appear to be an anti-communist.

Even when he was attacking Communist sympathizers or fellow-travellers, McCarthy was often reckless and wrong. Did it do the anti-communist cause any good to accuse Owen Lattimore, a despicable man to be sure, of being the top Soviet spy in the United States? Whatever Lattimore’s sins, that was not one of them. The more errors McCarthy made the easier he made the job of the pro-Communist left: to call anyone accused of communism a victim of a McCarthyite slander.

Haynes: Let’s get the dates straight. Joseph McCarthy did not emerge as an anticommunist spokesman until 1950. By that time the back of the domestic Communist movement already had been broken and anticommunism dominated both major parties. President Truman in 1948 set up a massive loyalty program to remove Communists from federal employment. Truman’s Justice Department convicted the leadership of the CPUSA under the Smith Act, convicted Alger Hiss, and in 1950 arrested and later convicted the Rosenbergs, David Greenglass, Harry Gold, and Morton Sobell for espionage. […]

McCarthy’s anticommunism was a partisan bludgeon used for short-term partisan gain. His target was not an already crippled American Communist movement but Truman and the Democratic party.

[E-Sabbath]

I can confirm that, as far as the KGB files go, while there was heavy infiltration earlier, reaching all the way to the White House at one point… (a nephew of Roosevelt, IIRC), by the 50s, it was all but gone. Source: The Sword and Shield, the Secret Files of the KGB.

[Marley23]

@Jonathan Chance

As for McClellan save your sympathy. The back and forth during the daily press briefings is much higher and less deferential. It’s his JOB to take bullets for the President. Hell, McClellan’s been beaten up, it’s true, but it’s been NOTHING like what happened to Mike McCurry during the Monica Lewinsky thing.

Oh, he gets no sympathy from me. He’s a boring, obfuscating motherfucker. But as you say, that’s pretty much the name of the game for the press secretary.