David Crisp
In his Sunday column in the Billings Gazette, editor Darrell Ehrlick dropped this nugget, just two days before the election: Prior to September’s debate in Billings between U.S. House candidates Ryan Zinke and John Lewis, Zinke said, “John plays the guitar. I waterboard.”
Now, waterboarding has its defenders, but let’s be clear: It is a war crime. It is a crime under the Convention Against Torture signed by President Reagan in 1988, and America has a history of prosecuting people who waterboard. If we were to learn that a foreign country was waterboarding our soldiers, we would consider that an act of war.
When people say the rules don’t apply to us because we are on the side of justice and freedom, they miss the point. We are on the side of justice and freedom because we play by the rules.
So when a major party candidate for a congressional seat suggests that he endorses a war crime, and perhaps is even complicit in it, that sounds like news, right? Not to Ehrlick. He dismissed it as an offhand comment.
The Lewis campaign, by Ehrlick’s account, apparently then leaked the remark to the Los Angeles Times, which quoted both the remark and the emailed response of Zinke, who called it a joke.
Some joke. One might have expected the Gazette to follow up with a story about Zinke’s actual views on waterboarding. At the very least, the comment would appear to cast doubt on the political savvy of a candidate who based his entire campaign around his record of honorable military service. You’d think a major political candidate would know better than to joke about torture in front of his opponent and in front of the editor of the state’s largest newspaper.
But Zinke apparently knew his audience. As Ehrlick acknowledged, “no one has asked or seriously broached the subject of Zinke and waterboarding.”
Surprisingly, this was not a mea culpa in which the editor acknowledged that he treated the remark too lightly in the heat of debate preparations. We all make mistakes like that. Instead, he criticized the Lewis campaign for leaking the remark.
Look, the Lewis campaign deserves criticism. It’s understandable that Lewis went after Zinke to fully disclose his military records. Ordinarily, an honorable discharge ought to be sufficient evidence that a candidate served his country well, but Zinke’s intense focus on his military qualifications justified closer scrutiny.
Did the Lewis campaign then back off? No. Instead, Montana Democrats issued a news release accusing Zinke of lying. It might have fooled me if I hadn’t already known that candidates who accuse other candidates of lying are usually lying.
How did the Zinke campaign react? By accusing Lewis of lying. Liar, liar, liar, the charges went, all the way to the ballot box.
But the Lewis campaign did nothing wrong in leaking Zinke’s remark about waterboarding. And it’s understandable that it went to the Los Angeles Times instead of to the state’s largest newspaper, which already knew about the remark and had done nothing.
No wonder Republican operatives who uncovered Sen. John Walsh’s plagiarism went to the New York Times with the story instead of to a Montana newspaper. As much as conservatives criticize the Times, they know it has a long history of getting stories that other publications never get, no matter which party the story hurts.
In Montana, we can rest secure in the knowledge that our leading newspapers will spare us the difficult task of sorting out which candidates’ remarks should be disregarded as jokes and which should be taken as serious policy statements.
If it were anything we needed to know about, someone surely would tell us.
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The Yellowstone County News has been sold to Jonathan and Tana McNiven of Huntley, who own McNiven Enterprises, which operates websites for Lockwood, Shepherd and Huntley Project. In a news story, they said they plan no major changes.
Rebecca Tescher Robison and her husband, Pete, had owned the News for more than 20 years. In a farewell column, Robison said that letting go of the weekly paper was like sending a child off to college.
“Pete and I pass this baby on—to grow and mature in the hands of new caregivers,” she wrote.
I have often said, and occasionally written, that Becky was the best newspaper editor in Yellowstone County. Now the rest of us finally have a chance.
