Noah Shacht­man writes The Ene­my is Me. In his speech on Mon­day, Pres­i­dent Bush decried an L.A. Times arti­cle on an unde­ployed anti-IED sys­tem. Noah, who has writ­ten about these tech­nolo­gies as well, says:

Folks, that does­n’t pass the laugh test. This tech­nol­o­gy, Ion­a­tron’s Joint IED Neu­tral­iz­er, has­n’t even been shipped to the field — and may nev­er get there. So insur­gents are post­ing instruc­tions on how to beat a device that they’ve nev­er seen? Based on a few, vague para­graphs in the L.A. Times? Yeah, right.

After years of rel­a­tive­ly small invest­ments, the U.S. is spend­ing sev­er­al bil­lion dol­lars of our pub­lic mon­ey to try to stop road­side bombs. 40 Amer­i­can sol­diers are dying every month, because of these IEDs. The pub­lic has a right to know how that mon­ey is being spent, and how those sol­diers are being pro­tect­ed. Peri­od. And this attempt to demo­nize the media for hand­made bombs is just a way to keep folks from ask­ing why more was­n’t done soon­er to deal with the IED threat.

Exact­ly, and this has been the way things have been for years. The Bush admin­is­tra­tion would rather blame the mes­sen­ger than fix the prob­lem. That’s why we get them and their allies com­plain­ing about press cov­er­age of the civ­il war slaugh­ter in Iraq, rather than try­ing to actu­al­ly, you know, fix it. Gov­ern­ment sci­en­tists are blamed for point­ing out how poli­cies don’t have the intend­ed effect, rather than the pol­i­cy mak­ers hav­ing to take 

The admin­is­tra­tion’s apol­o­gists like to whine about the New York Times reveal­ing the exis­tence of the ille­gal domes­tic wire­tap­ping. But the prob­lem isn’t that peo­ple report­ed it, the prob­lem is that it was happening. 

I could go on, and I’m sure you could too. I recall some dis­cus­sion of “tak­ing respon­si­bil­i­ty” back in the 2000 cam­paign. What ever became of that?