I’ve just listened on CSPAN to the president’s May 21st speech about national security and the planned closing of the prison at Guantanamo Bay. I’m struck, upon hearing the speech entire, by its substance and seriousness. I’m now listening to Richard Cheney’s outrageous attack delivered immediately following the speech last Thursday. It seems clear that Republicans have made here the same sort of cynical political calculation they made about the stimulus package — oppose it and hope it fails.

But that calculation is less interesting than what seems to be the media determination to give the Republican search for a successful wedge issue equal time. The president has characterized the Republican attack as fear mongering. I think it goes far beyond that; it’s a mixture of fear mongering, hate mongering, nativism, and naked self-interest — I’m listening to Mitch McConnell smile his way through it now — and I don’t understand giving it the play it’s now being given on CSPAN, not to mention the sensational treatment it has been given by CNN and the other cable news outlets.

David D. Kirkpatrick and David M. Herszenhorn report in today’s New York Times that Republicans had planned the present concerted attack before the president’s inauguration. That’s useful knowledge. But these reporters’ conclusion that “Republicans have now beaten the Democrats twice on this issue in the last two years with overwhelming votes against transferring detainees to the United States,” says more about media cynicism than about anything else.

And there seems a constant stream of media “scrutiny” directed against the president’s popularity, such as the piece in this morning’s New York Times bearing the headline: Some Obama Enemies are Made Totally of Straw, presumably a news piece but remarkably long on assertion and short on evidence. The CSPAN piece I just listened to, the one that included Mitch McConnell’s enlightened critique, came down solidly on the side of “protecting the American people.” The moral argument about Guantanamo is now dismissed as a public relations argument designed to court favor in Europe. And the critique of the Bush administration’s lawless pursuit of presidential power is now obscured by the charge of phony moralism.

Of course the Clintons wrote the book on this strategy and gave it to the Republicans. Amongst the ranks of congressional Democrats, brave souls, who voted en masse to deprive the president of funds to close Guantanamo, there must be some who view the president’s popularity askance and would willingly see it diminished.