NOTHING in the past 100 years is a better argument for BRINGING BACK CORPORAL PUNISHMENT, than the cowardly, lying, traitorous editors and publishers of the Washington Post.
AS we recently laid out in a previous column, IF a John Kerry, Al Gore, or Bill Clinton were president, you could bet that the Cowardly Washington Post would be shouting "CLINTON DEFICITS!" and "VICE PRESIDENT LINKED to HALLIBURTON CORRUPTION!" and "ADMINISTRATION REWARDS KATRINA CONTRACTORS DESPITE ENTIRE REGIONS BURIED IN TRASH in New Orleans!" every damn day of the week.
In fact, it should be remembered that the COWARDLY, LYING editors and publishers of the WASHINGTON POST managed to join with the Rethuglicans into making the Clinton overnight guest list at the White House into a SCANDAL, if not a CRIME: Remember "Lincoln Bedroom 'scandal'"?
Even worse than that was when the COWARDLY, LYING editors of the Washington Post ran with the Karl Rove/Karen Hughes Republican SMEAR of departing Clinton-Gore staffers, ACCUSING THOSE Democratic staffers of "TRASHING THE WHITE HOUSE!" and "DESTROYING FEDERAL PROPERTY" - without one single photograph of evidence.
Of course those "get Clinton" lies, distortions, fabrications, and fabricated SMEARS were just the tip of the iceberg for WASHINGTON POST MENDACITY, the Post would slavishly go along with the Bush administration in COVERING UP GROSS NEGLIGENCE bordering on DERELICTION OF DUTY re the 9-11 attacks (for example, FBI lead counter-terror expert John O'Neill QUIT the FBI in disgust, when his FBI superiors STONEWALLED his investigation into the Al Qaida bombing of the USS Cole in October of 2000... a time when the Bush campaign had its ENTIRE BAND OF FOREIGN POLICY and "national security" EXPERTS assembled, including of course not only Condoleeza Rice (Bush's choosen appointee for National Security Advisor) but Collin Powell AND FORMER SECRETARIES OF DEFENSE DICK CHENEY and DON RUMSFELD as well.
As we now know, the WASHINGTON POST were LEAD CONTRIBUTORS to the "MUST WAGE WAR ON IRAQ!" Bush-Cheney narrative, second only in the media to Judy Miller and her editors/publisher at the New York Times. (And it is an open question to ask if Ms. Miller was actually on the CIA payroll, lord knows the CIA loves tossing around money to buy journalists, and the ultimate journalist to buy out are those who get column-inches and bold headlines on the New York Times front page.)
But LYING to SMEAR the Clintons and Democratic staffers of the Clinton White House... LYING to OVERLOOK and BURY the story of criminally DISENFRANCHISED VOTERS in Florida in 2000.... LYING to cover up gross Bush admin. INCOMPETENCE if not criminal negligence leading up to 9-11 (and, at that, helping the Bush admin. BURY the anthrax-terrorist story under a mountain of bogus dead-ends); and LYING TO PUSH THE UNITED STATES INTO THE IRAQ war were only the most evident of the Washington Post's lies and complicity.
NOW we learn that the Post is in full-on SMEAR MODE yet again, this time TRYING TO BLAME AMBASSADOR WILSON for the "OUTING" of his wife as a CIA agent, and "outing" which destroyed the cover of HER ENTIRE COVER ORGANIZATION (Brewster Jennings Energy Consultants) AND everyone ever associated with that outfit.
Like the NEW YORK TIMES, the cowardly WASHINGTON POST has MUDDIED THE WATERS on the Karl Rove/Dick Cheney/Scooter Libby INTENTIONAL OUTING of Ms. Valerie Plame's identity, as a means of silencing and intimidating her whistle-blower husband, Ambassador Joe Wilson, who publicly wrote in a New York Times editorial in July of 2003 that not only was the story of "Niger yellowcake uranium for Iraq's WMD program" NOT TRUE, but that President Bush KNEW IT WAS NOT TRUE when he included it in his "IRAQ HAS WMDs!" January 2003 State of the Union speech (SOTU), trying to beat the drums for an American invasion and occupation of Iraq.
That is, Ambassador Wilson told the whole world that President Bush WAS LYING when he included the "Niger yellowcake uranium for Iraq WMDs" story in his Jan. 2003 SOTU speech, and in the days after Mr. Wilson wrote his editorial exposing that lie, SMEARING and SILENCING Ambassador Wilson BECAME JOB #1. in the Cheney-Bush White House.
Which is why Karl Rove, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, and possibly the Vice President himself were ALL DISCUSSING Ms. PLAME's STATUS with various reporters outside the White House, including Bob Novak, Time's Matt Cooper, and the aforementioned New York Times 'reporter' Judith Miller.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/8525978/site/newsweek/
HAVING HELPED the Bush White House MUDDY THE WATERS on the criminal culpability of Karl Rove, Scooter Libby, and possibly Vice President Cheney in illegally "shopping" Valerie Plame's identity to these reporters, the WASHINGTON POST is now in the business of DOING KARL ROVE's WORK FOR HIM again: SMEARING Ambassador Wilson and his wife, the VICTIMS of the illegal "outing", as the perpetrators!
AS we said at the top of this column locking the POST editors and publishers up in stocks, or FLOGGING them with 50 lashes, would be a damn good argument for bring corporal punishment back, these cowardly smear-artists having so systematically LIED to the American public and SMEARED innocent officials on behalf of a power-mad, deceitful, unAmerican administration.
Mr. Johnson says "NO QUARTER!" to those who DISABLED a major CIA counter-proliferation organization, to which we add a hearty "AND FLOG and PUT 'em in the STOCKS!" to those who aid and abett those lies and criminal conduct.
Smearing the Wilsons and Sliming America
Larry C. Johnson
09.01.2006
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/larry-c-johnson/smearing-the-wilsons-and-_b_28557.html
How low can they go? I refer of course to the latest vitriol directed at Valerie and Joe Wilson by the likes of Christopher Hitchens and Fred Hiatt of the Washington Post, who claim that Joe Wilson, not Bush Administration officials, is responsible for destroying his wife's cover and exposing her as a CIA operative.
Hitchens battle with the bottle may account for his addled thinking, but what is Hiatt's excuse? Both men perform like Cirque du Soleil contortionists in dreaming up excuses for the nutty and destructive policies and actions of the Bush Administration. In watching their behavior we see a parallel with the devotees of Jim Jones who gathered in Guyana almost 30 years ago to drink poisoned kool aid.
Let's focus on the Post's Fred Hiatt. In today's Post editorial page, Hiatt writes:
Nevertheless, it now appears that the person most responsible for the end of Ms. Plame's CIA career is Mr. Wilson. Mr. Wilson chose to go public with an explosive charge, claiming -- falsely, as it turned out -- that he had debunked reports of Iraqi uranium-shopping in Niger and that his report had circulated to senior administration officials.
The claim that Joe Wilson's op-ed from July of 2003 was a pack of lies and misrepresented the truth is an old rightiwng, White House canard. Here is what Joe Wilson said in the July 2003 op-ed:
Though I did not file a written report, there should be at least four documents in United States government archives confirming my mission. The documents should include the ambassador's report of my debriefing in Niamey, a separate report written by the embassy staff, a C.I.A. report summing up my trip, and a specific answer from the agency to the office of the vice president (this may have been delivered orally). While I have not seen any of these reports, I have spent enough time in government to know that this is standard operating procedure.
The question now is how that answer was or was not used by our political leadership. If my information was deemed inaccurate, I understand (though I would be very interested to know why). If, however, the information was ignored because it did not fit certain preconceptions about Iraq, then a legitimate argument can be made that we went to war under false pretenses.
False claim? False claim my ass! There were at least four reports. We now know that the National Intelligence officer for Africa in January 2003 briefed the White House that the Iraq/Niger claim was bunk. Even a partisan Senate Intelligence Committe report cites repeated efforts by the intelligence community to warn the President's advisors that reports claiming Iraq was trying to buy uranium, including British reoirts, were not credible.
What is so bizarre is that the White House did admit that it was wrong to put the infamous 16 words into the State of the Union Address (of course, they blamed the CIA), just days after Wilson's op-ed appeared. If, as Hiatt claims, Wilson's op-ed was false, then why did the White House correct the record by confirming the substance of his claim?
Hiatt also portrays an astonishing ignorance of national security affairs. He offers up this goofiness referring to Joe Wilson's "culpability" for exposing his wife's job:
He ought to have expected that both those officials and journalists such as Mr. Novak would ask why a retired ambassador would have been sent on such a mission and that the answer would point to his wife.
Yes, why would the CIA send the former Director of Africa at the National Security Council, a former Ambassador to Gabon, and the last U.S. official to face down Saddam Hussein to Africa? Because Joe Wilson was uniquely qualified to do the job. Moreover, this is (or at least was) a common acitivity by the CIA. My former boss at State Department, Ambassador Morris D. Busby, made at least two trips I know of at the behest of the CIA after leaving government because of his experience in dealing with terrorism, narcotics, and Latin America. There are times when the CIA wants information and does not want to expose its own assets.
There was nothing on the public record or in any public document identifying Valerie Plame Wilson as a CIA operative. That information was classified. Sending Joe on a mission to Africa does not point the finger at her. Moreover, she did not make the decision to send him. That is another of Hiatt's lies and is routinely echoed by rightwing hacks. As Walter Pincus reported in the Washington Post in July 2005:
"They [the White House] said that his 2002 trip to Niger was a boondoggle arranged by his wife, but CIA officials say that is incorrect. One reason for the confusion about Plame's role is that she had arranged a trip for him to Niger three years earlier on an unrelated matter, CIA officials told The Washington Post." (Washington Post, 27 July 2005)
Harlow, the former CIA spokesman, said in an interview yesterday that he testified last year before a grand jury about conversations he had with Novak at least three days before the column was published. He said he warned Novak, in the strongest terms he was permitted to use without revealing classified information, that Wilson's wife had not authorized the mission and that if he did write about it, her name should not be revealed. (Washington Post, 27 July 2005)
We are forced to revisit this nonsense because we have now learned that in addition to Libby and Rove, Richard Armitage also was shooting off his mouth about classified information. Regardless of Armitage's role as an initial source for Novak, we are still left with the fact that Dick Cheney, Karl Rove, and Scooter Libby abused their power and were actively engaged in a coordinated effort to discredit Joe Wilson for his behind the scene efforts to alert the public to the falsehoods in the President's State of the Union address.
While Richard Armitage may have had no malicious intent, the same cannot be said for Cheney, Libby and Rove. They knew exactly what they were doing. According to The Washington Post, during the week of July 6, 2003, "two top White House officials disclosed Plame's identity to at least six Washington journalists." Sometime after Novak's column appeared, Rove called Chris Matthews, host of MSNBC's "Hardball" and told him that Mr. Wilson's wife was "fair game."
And we have the document released by Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald in United States v. Libby, that provides a copy of notes Cheney had written in the margins of Mr. Wilson's July 6 op-ed. In a court filing, Fitzgerald stated that the notes demonstrated that Cheney and Libby were "acutely focused" on the Wilson column and on rebutting his criticisms of the White House's handling of the Niger intelligence. Those notes became the basis for Republican National Committee talking points circulated and repeated by Ken Mehlman and others.
Why is this relevant? Today the Bush Administration is once again trying to manufacture a case for war. They are calling critics of its policies on Iran and Iraq "appeasers" and decrying the lack of intelligence on Iran. It is deja vu all over again to quote Yogi Berra. They whine about a lack of intelligence on Iran but refuse to accept responsibility for their own role in destroying Valerie Plame's undercover work, which was focused on monitoring the flow of nuclear technology to Iran. They may not have fully understood what Val was doing because of her cover status. But that's the point. They don't think these things true. Their only goal is political survival.
Perhpas the new attention on the Plame affair will fuel public support for accountability in government. The gang of political thugs currently in the White House refuse to be held accountable for anything. With the help of enablers like Fred Hiatt and Christopher Hitchens and others in the main stream media, it is no wonder that Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld skate from disaster to disaster, oblivious to the field of debris left in their wake.
We must also remember that the Government sanctioned attack on the Wilsons is not an isolated event. Just ask former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill or National Security Advisor Richard Clarke. Add to this list the names of the two CIA Baghdad Chiefs of Station who were savaged for their prescient early warnings that Iraq was moving into a civil war. The Plame/Wilson affair stands as a stark reminder that President Bush and his minions prefer destroying those who call them to account for failed policies rather than admit error and take corrective measures that will serve the longterm interests of the United States. As we move towards a new war with Iran, we should not be surprised that people who know the truth are reluctant to come forward. If you choose to blow the whistle you are choosing career suicide and a full frontal assault on your character. In smearing the Wilsons, Bush and Cheney also are sliming America.
-- No Quarter
Friday, September 01, 2006
Text book case, GOOD REPORTING becomes MEDIA WHORING... re CRIME UP in USA...
This very informative CBS article, can't help but play by the media template for dealing with BushCo incompetence and corruption and greed for power: EVERYTHING of importance or substance, when our media deals with BushCo, is distilled down to a "HE SAID, SHE SAID" horse-race.
That means you can take a complex but simple issue, eg "stem cell research WILL SAVE LIVES by using stem cell that WILL BE DESTROYED when they are discarded anyways, instead will be used for cutting-edge medical research" and turn it into a "GRAVE MORAL CONCERN!" by quoting a bunch of pro-slavery Right-Wing Republicans who maintain that "GOD WOULD RATHER SEE BABIES, children, and grown men and women DIE of curable illnesses, than offend His sense of morality by using otherwise discarded stem-cells for cancer, Alheimer's, and back-injury research."
Instead of discussing the potential to end debilitative spinal and neural injuries, the ENTIRE MEDIA STORY becomes about "HOW MANY BUSH SUPPORTERS CAN WE FIND TO OPPOSE such research based on the ludicrous grounds that individual stem-cells HAVE HUMAN SOULS, and therefore to use them for research IS AKIN TO MURDER!"
To this basic, distraction issue - some people OPPOSE stem cell research based on their 'Religious" concerns - you next PILE ON, find ALL THE RIGHT WING SUPPORTERS for the research BAN that you can find, and now make the story ABOUT THEM, and not about how the stem cells would be DISCARDED ANYWAYS, with or without pseudo-religious 'concern' for those cell's eternal souls.
As you can see, with this MEDIA NARRATIVE, the question no longer becomes, "What can stem cell research do for the injured, the ill, the dying?" but instead the story becomes "HOW MANY RETHUGLICAN LUNATICS can we cram into a single story?"
The issue of stem-cell reseach (which is actually a spin-off of the even more judgemental, condemnatory, and moralistic ABORTION 'issue') is not the only such case where the ENTIRE MAJOR MEDIA takes a simple story and SPINS IT into a "he said, she said' narrative, which allows the Press/media to KISS BUSH admin. ASS by craming every admin. toady they can into the story.
THIS otherwise excellent article by CBS news producer Beverly Lumpkin about an increase in crime across the USA is a beautiful, text-book example of media pro-Bush bias in reporting.
The REAL news embedded in Ms. Lumpkin's article is VERY_SIMPLE:
"AN_INCREASE_IN_CRIME_NEARLY_EVERYWHERE_ACROSS_THE_COUNTRY."
Yet the stupid bush-ass-kissing media portrays it is as PEOPLE STORY!
"DOJ Official Skewered at Crime Forum" !!
IF clinton, gore or kerry were presidents, you can bet on some things: THAT the HUGE government DEFICITS would be ON THE FRONT PAGES at least THREE, FOUR TIMES A WEEK.
- That a RISE IN CRIME across the nation WOULD GET BLARING HEADLINES, "CRIME UP ACROSS THE NATION!"
- That the fact that the VICE PRESIDENT was STILL BEING PAID by a company that his government was handing HUGE no-bid, no-oversight contracts to (HALLIBURTON) would be making the Righties FOAM AT THE MOUTH for IMPEACHMENT.
- That the fact that a President clinton/kerry/ or gore went AWOL from the Texas Air National Guard during the Vietnam war (actually, Mr. Bush went AWOL from the Alabama Air National Guard, after REFUSING to take an Air Force flight physical as ordered by his superior and commanding officer in Texas - a ROUTINE part of military order), and is now sending NATIONAL GUARD TROOPS on REPEAT second, third, and FOURTH tours, with MANDATORY RECALLS, STOP-LOSS, and extended tours as a BACK DOOR DRAFT -- all that would be splashed across the front pages "CLINTON ABUSES VOLUNTEER MILITARY for his somalia/kosovo/Afghanistan/Iraq war schemes!"
- The fact that a clinton/kerry/gore White House was SLASHING FUNDING for VETERANS, especially wounded, traumatized, PTSD, and BRAIN INJURED VETERANS would be labelled "TRAITOROUS!" by the frothing-at-the-mouth Right Wing press and media.
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-08-08-brain-center_x.htm?csp=34
Well, thanks to CBS "news" producer BEVERLY LUMPKIN, for giving us a text-book example of how the media WHORES for bush, by turning EVERY story into a 'he-said, she said' personality game.
==================================================
DOJ Official Skewered At Crime Forum
Mayors, Police Chiefs Rip Feds' Lack Of Help In Stopping Crime
Beverley Lumpkin.
WASHINGTON, Aug. 30, 2006
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/08/30/politics/main1953669.shtml
photo - U.S. Deputy Attorney General Paul J. McNulty listens during a press conference at the U.S. Department of Justice in Washington, Aug. 16, 2006. (GETTY)
A Quote
"Every city in the country is saying I got 13-year-olds with guns."
Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick
(CBS) This story was written by CBS News producer Beverley Lumpkin.
Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty spoke Wednesday at the Police Executive Research Forum, where he was barraged with a series of highly critical questions from some very unhappy police chiefs and mayors.
McNulty clearly knew coming in that he was going to be grilled. But the criticism was much stronger than he seemed to have anticipated, and he did not seem to be very well-briefed on some issues of prime importance to the attendees.
Before McNulty began speaking at the forum, where no cameras were allowed, there was a summary of statistics. The numbers clearly reflected an increase in crime nearly everywhere across the country. The spikes were notable and alarming, and PERF head Chuck Wexler said they reflected that the rise in crime "Is not about one city; it's about the country."
With that kind of preamble, when McNulty opened his remarks and quickly mentioned the "potential rise in crime," he was already off on the wrong foot.
He spoke of how much he likes getting together with law enforcement personnel and how important it is to have working partnerships with state and local agencies. He stated several times how anxious he was to hear from them what the feds can do to help. He also delivered an apologia, saying he was "well aware there are many needs and desires on the part of law enforcement that we are not able to address," and adding that the challenge is to look for ways that the feds can help.
The first question went right to the heart of the Bush administration's policy on guns — and the fact that Congress "is making it harder for the police and ATF to track" them. The questioner begged McNulty's aid in making it easier to trace the guns, making the point that the problem is kids with guns and tracing them would make their partnerships work more easily. McNulty seemed unaware of the issue. What in particular, he asked, was the problem?
Trenton, N.J., Mayor Doug Palmer spoke up, citing restrictions on the use of data. He noted that his state has one of the nation's toughest gun laws, but said Pennsylvania has one of the most liberal, and thus guns come into his state far too easily.
"I know the NRA is strong, but we're stronger," Palmer said. In addition, he noted, members of Congress don't have to call a parent whose child has been shot in the face.
McNulty mentioned that he'd recently visited the ATF's tracing center in West Virginia and said that they're making great progress. But, he added, he had to "confess" he was "not familiar" with the issue.
Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick seemed to have heard all he could take.
"What you see is a national evasion of the gun problem. ... The problem has become bigger than Capitol Hill. … We really need a national response," Kilpatrick said.
He added that when he took office, homicides were down but "now everything is exploding again." He "thought it was a Detroit problem" until he got to the meeting. His police chief had been assuring him Detroit was not alone, but he didn't believe it until now.
Kilpatrick argued the need for an effective, national emergency response. It's "the NRA versus the rest of everybody else," he lamented, adding that help is necessary now that "every city in the country is saying I got 13-year-olds with guns" robbing and killing.
The room burst into loud applause when Kilpatrick pointed out that there is $386 billion going to the fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq, but that local law enforcement needed a substantial amount of that money, plus a national plan.
One official complained that President Bush had never met with police chiefs. "There's a war on the streets and the President doesn't meet with us. The federal government has given up on us," he said.
The official also indicated that the feds "came up with a remarkable solution 10 years ago — to send money to locals to take care of crime — but now they've given up on that," referring to the COPS program, launched during the Clinton administration. COPS aimed to send money to states and local entities to hire, train and equip police officers. The goal was to get 100,000 police on the street.
McNulty seemed taken aback, but said he understood very well how significant that funding had been.
"You say there's less police on the streets than before 9/11. That's an important thing to know," McNulty noted.
Bill Bratton, Police Chief of Los Angeles, then noted that the surge in crime has a new and troubling element — it's largely driven by young people who are disassociated from mainstream America. Bratton advised McNulty to relay that message to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, and to President Bush and Congress. Bratton said the COPS program had "gotten it right" and asked for the federal government's involvement anew.
"Homeland security has become the monster that ate criminal justice!" Springfield, Mass., Police Commissioner Edward Flynn added.
The COPS grants have disappeared, but there's no single guilty party, Flynn lamented. What's gradually happened, he said, is that "we've got a zero-sum game.
"Doing our core mission, we can be more effective homeland security partners. But if we are overwhelmed with our core mission, we can't be good homeland security partners," Flynn said. But he added that there can't be a "forced choice" between homeland security and criminal justice "resulting in more dead bodies."
That means you can take a complex but simple issue, eg "stem cell research WILL SAVE LIVES by using stem cell that WILL BE DESTROYED when they are discarded anyways, instead will be used for cutting-edge medical research" and turn it into a "GRAVE MORAL CONCERN!" by quoting a bunch of pro-slavery Right-Wing Republicans who maintain that "GOD WOULD RATHER SEE BABIES, children, and grown men and women DIE of curable illnesses, than offend His sense of morality by using otherwise discarded stem-cells for cancer, Alheimer's, and back-injury research."
Instead of discussing the potential to end debilitative spinal and neural injuries, the ENTIRE MEDIA STORY becomes about "HOW MANY BUSH SUPPORTERS CAN WE FIND TO OPPOSE such research based on the ludicrous grounds that individual stem-cells HAVE HUMAN SOULS, and therefore to use them for research IS AKIN TO MURDER!"
To this basic, distraction issue - some people OPPOSE stem cell research based on their 'Religious" concerns - you next PILE ON, find ALL THE RIGHT WING SUPPORTERS for the research BAN that you can find, and now make the story ABOUT THEM, and not about how the stem cells would be DISCARDED ANYWAYS, with or without pseudo-religious 'concern' for those cell's eternal souls.
As you can see, with this MEDIA NARRATIVE, the question no longer becomes, "What can stem cell research do for the injured, the ill, the dying?" but instead the story becomes "HOW MANY RETHUGLICAN LUNATICS can we cram into a single story?"
The issue of stem-cell reseach (which is actually a spin-off of the even more judgemental, condemnatory, and moralistic ABORTION 'issue') is not the only such case where the ENTIRE MAJOR MEDIA takes a simple story and SPINS IT into a "he said, she said' narrative, which allows the Press/media to KISS BUSH admin. ASS by craming every admin. toady they can into the story.
THIS otherwise excellent article by CBS news producer Beverly Lumpkin about an increase in crime across the USA is a beautiful, text-book example of media pro-Bush bias in reporting.
The REAL news embedded in Ms. Lumpkin's article is VERY_SIMPLE:
"AN_INCREASE_IN_CRIME_NEARLY_EVERYWHERE_ACROSS_THE_COUNTRY."
Yet the stupid bush-ass-kissing media portrays it is as PEOPLE STORY!
"DOJ Official Skewered at Crime Forum" !!
IF clinton, gore or kerry were presidents, you can bet on some things: THAT the HUGE government DEFICITS would be ON THE FRONT PAGES at least THREE, FOUR TIMES A WEEK.
- That a RISE IN CRIME across the nation WOULD GET BLARING HEADLINES, "CRIME UP ACROSS THE NATION!"
- That the fact that the VICE PRESIDENT was STILL BEING PAID by a company that his government was handing HUGE no-bid, no-oversight contracts to (HALLIBURTON) would be making the Righties FOAM AT THE MOUTH for IMPEACHMENT.
- That the fact that a President clinton/kerry/ or gore went AWOL from the Texas Air National Guard during the Vietnam war (actually, Mr. Bush went AWOL from the Alabama Air National Guard, after REFUSING to take an Air Force flight physical as ordered by his superior and commanding officer in Texas - a ROUTINE part of military order), and is now sending NATIONAL GUARD TROOPS on REPEAT second, third, and FOURTH tours, with MANDATORY RECALLS, STOP-LOSS, and extended tours as a BACK DOOR DRAFT -- all that would be splashed across the front pages "CLINTON ABUSES VOLUNTEER MILITARY for his somalia/kosovo/Afghanistan/Iraq war schemes!"
- The fact that a clinton/kerry/gore White House was SLASHING FUNDING for VETERANS, especially wounded, traumatized, PTSD, and BRAIN INJURED VETERANS would be labelled "TRAITOROUS!" by the frothing-at-the-mouth Right Wing press and media.
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-08-08-brain-center_x.htm?csp=34
Well, thanks to CBS "news" producer BEVERLY LUMPKIN, for giving us a text-book example of how the media WHORES for bush, by turning EVERY story into a 'he-said, she said' personality game.
==================================================
DOJ Official Skewered At Crime Forum
Mayors, Police Chiefs Rip Feds' Lack Of Help In Stopping Crime
Beverley Lumpkin.
WASHINGTON, Aug. 30, 2006
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/08/30/politics/main1953669.shtml
photo - U.S. Deputy Attorney General Paul J. McNulty listens during a press conference at the U.S. Department of Justice in Washington, Aug. 16, 2006. (GETTY)
A Quote
"Every city in the country is saying I got 13-year-olds with guns."
Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick
(CBS) This story was written by CBS News producer Beverley Lumpkin.
Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty spoke Wednesday at the Police Executive Research Forum, where he was barraged with a series of highly critical questions from some very unhappy police chiefs and mayors.
McNulty clearly knew coming in that he was going to be grilled. But the criticism was much stronger than he seemed to have anticipated, and he did not seem to be very well-briefed on some issues of prime importance to the attendees.
Before McNulty began speaking at the forum, where no cameras were allowed, there was a summary of statistics. The numbers clearly reflected an increase in crime nearly everywhere across the country. The spikes were notable and alarming, and PERF head Chuck Wexler said they reflected that the rise in crime "Is not about one city; it's about the country."
With that kind of preamble, when McNulty opened his remarks and quickly mentioned the "potential rise in crime," he was already off on the wrong foot.
He spoke of how much he likes getting together with law enforcement personnel and how important it is to have working partnerships with state and local agencies. He stated several times how anxious he was to hear from them what the feds can do to help. He also delivered an apologia, saying he was "well aware there are many needs and desires on the part of law enforcement that we are not able to address," and adding that the challenge is to look for ways that the feds can help.
The first question went right to the heart of the Bush administration's policy on guns — and the fact that Congress "is making it harder for the police and ATF to track" them. The questioner begged McNulty's aid in making it easier to trace the guns, making the point that the problem is kids with guns and tracing them would make their partnerships work more easily. McNulty seemed unaware of the issue. What in particular, he asked, was the problem?
Trenton, N.J., Mayor Doug Palmer spoke up, citing restrictions on the use of data. He noted that his state has one of the nation's toughest gun laws, but said Pennsylvania has one of the most liberal, and thus guns come into his state far too easily.
"I know the NRA is strong, but we're stronger," Palmer said. In addition, he noted, members of Congress don't have to call a parent whose child has been shot in the face.
McNulty mentioned that he'd recently visited the ATF's tracing center in West Virginia and said that they're making great progress. But, he added, he had to "confess" he was "not familiar" with the issue.
Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick seemed to have heard all he could take.
"What you see is a national evasion of the gun problem. ... The problem has become bigger than Capitol Hill. … We really need a national response," Kilpatrick said.
He added that when he took office, homicides were down but "now everything is exploding again." He "thought it was a Detroit problem" until he got to the meeting. His police chief had been assuring him Detroit was not alone, but he didn't believe it until now.
Kilpatrick argued the need for an effective, national emergency response. It's "the NRA versus the rest of everybody else," he lamented, adding that help is necessary now that "every city in the country is saying I got 13-year-olds with guns" robbing and killing.
The room burst into loud applause when Kilpatrick pointed out that there is $386 billion going to the fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq, but that local law enforcement needed a substantial amount of that money, plus a national plan.
One official complained that President Bush had never met with police chiefs. "There's a war on the streets and the President doesn't meet with us. The federal government has given up on us," he said.
The official also indicated that the feds "came up with a remarkable solution 10 years ago — to send money to locals to take care of crime — but now they've given up on that," referring to the COPS program, launched during the Clinton administration. COPS aimed to send money to states and local entities to hire, train and equip police officers. The goal was to get 100,000 police on the street.
McNulty seemed taken aback, but said he understood very well how significant that funding had been.
"You say there's less police on the streets than before 9/11. That's an important thing to know," McNulty noted.
Bill Bratton, Police Chief of Los Angeles, then noted that the surge in crime has a new and troubling element — it's largely driven by young people who are disassociated from mainstream America. Bratton advised McNulty to relay that message to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, and to President Bush and Congress. Bratton said the COPS program had "gotten it right" and asked for the federal government's involvement anew.
"Homeland security has become the monster that ate criminal justice!" Springfield, Mass., Police Commissioner Edward Flynn added.
The COPS grants have disappeared, but there's no single guilty party, Flynn lamented. What's gradually happened, he said, is that "we've got a zero-sum game.
"Doing our core mission, we can be more effective homeland security partners. But if we are overwhelmed with our core mission, we can't be good homeland security partners," Flynn said. But he added that there can't be a "forced choice" between homeland security and criminal justice "resulting in more dead bodies."
Wednesday, August 30, 2006
The Ravenous BEAST of the Media WHORES: FEASTING yet again on JonBenet's corpse, to the EXCLUSION of important news.
Yet another excellent indictment of the GHOULISH dereliction-of-duty "Mainstream Media" and TV news.....
The fact that the Mainstream Media - the corporate media that dominates the large newspapers and cable- and network news - is ENTIREL UNAPOLOGETIC about their "JohBenet-Karr" feeding frenzy feasting-on-corpse story, is indicative of two things: #1. how completely DIVORCED the media whores are from any concept of duty or responsibility or the need to keep American citizens INFORMED about more important issues;
and,
#2.) how MAKING MONEY and surrounding oneself with the trappings of success - deferential staff, helpers, production managers and assistants - becomes the reward in and of itself. How WORSHIPPING THE GOLDEN CALF of MAMON *is* the new American religion.
That is, America's major media anchors are interested ONLY in viewers and profits - the content of their newscasts is important only in its ability to glue viewers to their TV screens. Even when they are shown to have spent hours and DAYS covering a bogus story, as long as they have sold commercials and air-time, they are smug and self-satisfied.
----------------------
And we here at MediaWhoresUSA.blogspot.com APOLOGIZE to the "working ladies of the evening" (as, for example, Jamie Lee Curtis portraying 'the working gal' who saves Dan Akroyd's character on a bet in the Dan Akroyd - Eddie Murphy movie "Trading Places"). For these women perform a valuable service to society (just imagine a military base, ANYWHERE in the world, that didn't have 'working ladies' in close proximity), and many, as the character portrayed by Jamie Lee, work long and hard to pay their bills, save a little money, or even raise their children.
Unlike our paid professional Media Whore liars, who get paid huge salaries to pimp, primp, and blather on the little screen or (like Judy Miller of the nyt) in the pages of the nation's 'news' papers.
Jeff Cohen: Sick Puppy Meets Media Beast
Submitted by BuzzFlash on Tue, 08/29/2006 - 9:49am. Guest Contribution
by Jeff Cohen
http://www.buzzflash.com/articles/contributors/383
John Mark Karr is one sick puppy –- a school teacher who fantasized that he’d engaged in consensual sex so passionately with six-year-old JonBenet Ramsey that he accidentally killed her.
And television news in our country is one ravenous beast -– abandoning any notion of journalism, proportion or decency to again prey upon JonBenet’s corpse for ratings and profit.
God only knows what combination of hurt and mental illness went into producing the sick puppy. On the other hand, there’s no mystery about what created the media beast: corrupt government policies combined with corporate greed.
Make no mistake: The media beast is every bit as compulsive and out of control as Karr, who may yet end up behind bars for child pornography. But the beast is free to maul again and again.
For 10 days, TV news has fixated on this imposter-culprit as if he were a world-historical figure –- like Nelson Mandela emerging from prison, only bigger. TV tracked Karr’s travels across the globe, telling us what he ate for dinner, analyzing his attire.
To extend Karr’s allotted 15-minutes of fame into a 10-day ordeal, TV news ignored important stories of war, environmental degradation, corruption, citizen activism. Instead, TV viewers were offered hundreds of hours of single-minded examination and debate on one burning question: did Karr do it? The inquiry was relentless and aired all sides.
If only we’d had such in-depth, full-spectrum debate when the Bush team was dragging our country into war based on pretense.
I worked in cable news just prior to the Iraq war. As I describe in my book Cable News Confidential: My Misadventures in Corporate Media, journalists at MSNBC got into trouble with management for questioning Team Bush too strongly, for insisting on genuine debate.
By contrast, no one will get into trouble for this embarrassing 10-day spasm of overwrought Karr coverage. . .as long as ratings were good and coverage was cheap. If so, news producers can expect congratulations for a job well done.
Tabloid stories involving sex, crime or celebrity are preferred by TV news management today. These stories are inexpensive to cover, since speculation by alleged experts can fill fill up hours of airtime. And tabloid stories typically don’t offend anyone in political or economic power, including corporate sponsors and media owners.
But aggressively covering an administration bent on war can cause all sorts of problems. Especially for a media conglomerate that has business pending before the Federal Communications Commission. Especially when that media titan is lobbying the FCC to allow it to grow even more titanic –- as was happening in 2003 exactly at the time the Bush White House was launching its invasion of Iraq.
During the run-up to war, I was a senior producer on Phil Donahue’s primetime MSNBC show, the most watched program on the channel, until it was terminated three weeks before the war began. An internal NBC memo soon leaked out, complaining that Donahue was "a difficult public face for NBC in a time of war. . .He seems to delight in presenting guests who are antiwar, anti-Bush and skeptical of the administration’s motives."
Stick to tabloid stories and your TV career will flourish. Be skeptical about officialdom’s war motives and they’ll show you the door.
I’ll never forget my first day of work at MSNBC headquarters in the spring of 2002. As I entered the building's central corridor, I saw a number of framed posters celebrating highpoints of the channel's early history. The first one: "The Funeral of Princess Diana." Then: "Death of JFK, Jr." On the opposite wall, I saw "Columbine Shootings, Live Coverage" and "The Concorde Crash."
I remember thinking: If these are what MSNBC considers its highlights, what were its lowlights?
TV news owners and management love stories that keep viewers passive, on the sidelines -- as spectators. They fear the ones that might motivate us to take action, on the field -- as citizens.
Active, informed citizens seek out (and build) independent media. They’re the kind of pesky activists who intervene in FCC decisions and fight to diversify a mainstream media system that's been surrendered corruptly to a half-dozen conglomerates.
TV news is trying desperately to hold onto its audience of passive consumers: those who know everything about John Mark Karr's dinner of pate and chardonnay, and next to nothing about the court ruling that Bush's warrantless wiretapping is unconstitutional.
Last night, with cable news anchors looking ridiculous over their 10-day JonBenet binge, one MSNBC host seemed to need a scapegoat. If not murder, she asked a legal expert, couldn’t Karr at least be charged with "conspiracy to set off a media frenzy"?
You see, the 10-day hijacking of the airwaves was not her fault, or her bosses' fault. It was Karr's fault. . .TV's version of "the sick puppy ate my homework" excuse.
Buzzflash Guest Contributor
Jeff Cohen is the founder of the media watch group FAIR, and author of the new book, Cable News Confidential: My Misadventures in Corporate Media.
The fact that the Mainstream Media - the corporate media that dominates the large newspapers and cable- and network news - is ENTIREL UNAPOLOGETIC about their "JohBenet-Karr" feeding frenzy feasting-on-corpse story, is indicative of two things: #1. how completely DIVORCED the media whores are from any concept of duty or responsibility or the need to keep American citizens INFORMED about more important issues;
and,
#2.) how MAKING MONEY and surrounding oneself with the trappings of success - deferential staff, helpers, production managers and assistants - becomes the reward in and of itself. How WORSHIPPING THE GOLDEN CALF of MAMON *is* the new American religion.
That is, America's major media anchors are interested ONLY in viewers and profits - the content of their newscasts is important only in its ability to glue viewers to their TV screens. Even when they are shown to have spent hours and DAYS covering a bogus story, as long as they have sold commercials and air-time, they are smug and self-satisfied.
----------------------
And we here at MediaWhoresUSA.blogspot.com APOLOGIZE to the "working ladies of the evening" (as, for example, Jamie Lee Curtis portraying 'the working gal' who saves Dan Akroyd's character on a bet in the Dan Akroyd - Eddie Murphy movie "Trading Places"). For these women perform a valuable service to society (just imagine a military base, ANYWHERE in the world, that didn't have 'working ladies' in close proximity), and many, as the character portrayed by Jamie Lee, work long and hard to pay their bills, save a little money, or even raise their children.
Unlike our paid professional Media Whore liars, who get paid huge salaries to pimp, primp, and blather on the little screen or (like Judy Miller of the nyt) in the pages of the nation's 'news' papers.
Jeff Cohen: Sick Puppy Meets Media Beast
Submitted by BuzzFlash on Tue, 08/29/2006 - 9:49am. Guest Contribution
by Jeff Cohen
http://www.buzzflash.com/articles/contributors/383
John Mark Karr is one sick puppy –- a school teacher who fantasized that he’d engaged in consensual sex so passionately with six-year-old JonBenet Ramsey that he accidentally killed her.
And television news in our country is one ravenous beast -– abandoning any notion of journalism, proportion or decency to again prey upon JonBenet’s corpse for ratings and profit.
God only knows what combination of hurt and mental illness went into producing the sick puppy. On the other hand, there’s no mystery about what created the media beast: corrupt government policies combined with corporate greed.
Make no mistake: The media beast is every bit as compulsive and out of control as Karr, who may yet end up behind bars for child pornography. But the beast is free to maul again and again.
For 10 days, TV news has fixated on this imposter-culprit as if he were a world-historical figure –- like Nelson Mandela emerging from prison, only bigger. TV tracked Karr’s travels across the globe, telling us what he ate for dinner, analyzing his attire.
To extend Karr’s allotted 15-minutes of fame into a 10-day ordeal, TV news ignored important stories of war, environmental degradation, corruption, citizen activism. Instead, TV viewers were offered hundreds of hours of single-minded examination and debate on one burning question: did Karr do it? The inquiry was relentless and aired all sides.
If only we’d had such in-depth, full-spectrum debate when the Bush team was dragging our country into war based on pretense.
I worked in cable news just prior to the Iraq war. As I describe in my book Cable News Confidential: My Misadventures in Corporate Media, journalists at MSNBC got into trouble with management for questioning Team Bush too strongly, for insisting on genuine debate.
By contrast, no one will get into trouble for this embarrassing 10-day spasm of overwrought Karr coverage. . .as long as ratings were good and coverage was cheap. If so, news producers can expect congratulations for a job well done.
Tabloid stories involving sex, crime or celebrity are preferred by TV news management today. These stories are inexpensive to cover, since speculation by alleged experts can fill fill up hours of airtime. And tabloid stories typically don’t offend anyone in political or economic power, including corporate sponsors and media owners.
But aggressively covering an administration bent on war can cause all sorts of problems. Especially for a media conglomerate that has business pending before the Federal Communications Commission. Especially when that media titan is lobbying the FCC to allow it to grow even more titanic –- as was happening in 2003 exactly at the time the Bush White House was launching its invasion of Iraq.
During the run-up to war, I was a senior producer on Phil Donahue’s primetime MSNBC show, the most watched program on the channel, until it was terminated three weeks before the war began. An internal NBC memo soon leaked out, complaining that Donahue was "a difficult public face for NBC in a time of war. . .He seems to delight in presenting guests who are antiwar, anti-Bush and skeptical of the administration’s motives."
Stick to tabloid stories and your TV career will flourish. Be skeptical about officialdom’s war motives and they’ll show you the door.
I’ll never forget my first day of work at MSNBC headquarters in the spring of 2002. As I entered the building's central corridor, I saw a number of framed posters celebrating highpoints of the channel's early history. The first one: "The Funeral of Princess Diana." Then: "Death of JFK, Jr." On the opposite wall, I saw "Columbine Shootings, Live Coverage" and "The Concorde Crash."
I remember thinking: If these are what MSNBC considers its highlights, what were its lowlights?
TV news owners and management love stories that keep viewers passive, on the sidelines -- as spectators. They fear the ones that might motivate us to take action, on the field -- as citizens.
Active, informed citizens seek out (and build) independent media. They’re the kind of pesky activists who intervene in FCC decisions and fight to diversify a mainstream media system that's been surrendered corruptly to a half-dozen conglomerates.
TV news is trying desperately to hold onto its audience of passive consumers: those who know everything about John Mark Karr's dinner of pate and chardonnay, and next to nothing about the court ruling that Bush's warrantless wiretapping is unconstitutional.
Last night, with cable news anchors looking ridiculous over their 10-day JonBenet binge, one MSNBC host seemed to need a scapegoat. If not murder, she asked a legal expert, couldn’t Karr at least be charged with "conspiracy to set off a media frenzy"?
You see, the 10-day hijacking of the airwaves was not her fault, or her bosses' fault. It was Karr's fault. . .TV's version of "the sick puppy ate my homework" excuse.
Buzzflash Guest Contributor
Jeff Cohen is the founder of the media watch group FAIR, and author of the new book, Cable News Confidential: My Misadventures in Corporate Media.
Monday, August 28, 2006
Media whores CENSOR the story, former FEMA Director Mike "Heckuva Job Brownie" Brown claims Bush ASKED HIM TO LIE about Katrina response....!
In yet another indication of how COWARDLY, CRAVEN, CORRUPT, and COMPLICIT the 'major media' whores are, an American reader must go to.. THE INDIA TIMES - !! to learn that fomer FEMA Director Mike Brown is now claiming that President Bush ASKED HIM TO LIE to cover the awful failures of FEMA in preventing the unecessary deaths of almost 2,000 New Orleans drowning victims, days after Hurricane Katrina had left the area under blue skies.
The Cowardly Washington Post and the Lying New York Times will tell American readers ALL ABOUT the Clinton's OVERNIGHT GUEST 'SCANDAL!" (aka "the Lincoln Bedroom scandal!"), but these corrupt whores don't give two hoots about American citizens dying of neglect as President Bush, #1. strummed guitar, and #2. ate a slice of John McCain's birthday cake as those Americans died of thirst, rising flood waters, and in conditions of squalor and neglect in the national landmark New Orleans Superdome, which (more courageous) media reporters had NO TROUBLE driving their media trucks right up to.
Brown says White House wanted him to lie
DailyIndia.com
Aug. 28, 2006
http://www.dailyindia.com/show/55052.php/Brown-says-White-House-wanted-him-to-lie
WASHINGTON, Aug. 27 (UPI) -- The ousted head of the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency says the White House wanted him to lie about the response to Hurricane Katrina.
Former Director Michael Brown told ABC News' "This Week with George Stephanopoulos" Sunday he stood by comments in a Playboy interview, and President Bush wanted him to take the heat for the bungling.
"The lie was that we were ready and that everything was working as a team. Behind the scenes, it wasn't working at all," Brown said. "There were political considerations going into all the discussions. There was the fact that New Orleans did not evacuate and the mayor (Ray Nagin) had no plan."
Brown said it was natural to "want to put the spin on that things are working the way they're supposed to do. And behind the scenes, they're not. Again, my biggest mistake was just not leveling with the American public and saying, 'Folks, this isn't working.'"
The former FEMA chief cited what he called an e-mail "from a very high source in the White House that says the president at a Cabinet meeting said, 'Thank goodness Brown's taking all the heat because it's better that he takes the heat than I do.'"
Also on "This Week," U.S. Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., said the administration still doesn't understand the magnitude of the reconstruction problem; but the president's Gulf Coast coordinator, Don Powell, said the federal government's No. 1 priority is to rebuild the area in a businesslike way.
Copyright 2006 by United Press International
The Cowardly Washington Post and the Lying New York Times will tell American readers ALL ABOUT the Clinton's OVERNIGHT GUEST 'SCANDAL!" (aka "the Lincoln Bedroom scandal!"), but these corrupt whores don't give two hoots about American citizens dying of neglect as President Bush, #1. strummed guitar, and #2. ate a slice of John McCain's birthday cake as those Americans died of thirst, rising flood waters, and in conditions of squalor and neglect in the national landmark New Orleans Superdome, which (more courageous) media reporters had NO TROUBLE driving their media trucks right up to.
Brown says White House wanted him to lie
DailyIndia.com
Aug. 28, 2006
http://www.dailyindia.com/show/55052.php/Brown-says-White-House-wanted-him-to-lie
WASHINGTON, Aug. 27 (UPI) -- The ousted head of the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency says the White House wanted him to lie about the response to Hurricane Katrina.
Former Director Michael Brown told ABC News' "This Week with George Stephanopoulos" Sunday he stood by comments in a Playboy interview, and President Bush wanted him to take the heat for the bungling.
"The lie was that we were ready and that everything was working as a team. Behind the scenes, it wasn't working at all," Brown said. "There were political considerations going into all the discussions. There was the fact that New Orleans did not evacuate and the mayor (Ray Nagin) had no plan."
Brown said it was natural to "want to put the spin on that things are working the way they're supposed to do. And behind the scenes, they're not. Again, my biggest mistake was just not leveling with the American public and saying, 'Folks, this isn't working.'"
The former FEMA chief cited what he called an e-mail "from a very high source in the White House that says the president at a Cabinet meeting said, 'Thank goodness Brown's taking all the heat because it's better that he takes the heat than I do.'"
Also on "This Week," U.S. Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., said the administration still doesn't understand the magnitude of the reconstruction problem; but the president's Gulf Coast coordinator, Don Powell, said the federal government's No. 1 priority is to rebuild the area in a businesslike way.
Copyright 2006 by United Press International
Media whores should be flogged for their Jon Benet ghoulishness....
Bob Geiger at HuffingtonPost.com details just how awful, atrocious, inane, ghoulish, and unforgivably crass our "mainstream media" aka "corporate media" truly are.
WHY is the JONBENET RAMSEY story - a 12 years past unsolved murder case - more important than the DOZENS of Iraqi children who die every week as a result of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Don Rumsfeld's war of "flowers and cheers" in Iraq?
Oops! Discussing Iraqi children killed as a result of the American occupation/invasion of Iraq is a forbidden subject, so, let's try again:
"Why is the 12 years gone JonBenet Ramsey story MORE IMPORTANT than the corruption and fraud inherent in the 'PRIVATIZATION' of America's voting process, a process that is the very heart and soul of American democracy?" (We ARE 'fighting to spread democracy' aren't we?)
WHY is the Jon Benet Ramsey case MORE IMPORTANT than the ENRON extortion of California rate-payers, or the NO BID, NO OVERSIGHT, MASSIVE OVERBILLING contracts of HALLIBURTON corporation... a company that IS STILL PAYING DICK CHENEY compensation for past and future performance, compensation that GOES UP as Mr. Cheney directs BILLIONS of taxpayer dollars towards his former company??
WHY is the Jon Benet Ramsey case MORE IMPORTANT than how Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld PROMOTE THE TORTURE GENERALS, after those two authority figures of the US government had the United States military run KANGAROO COURTS to try, convict, and imprison FEMALE VOLUNTEER PRIVATES, accused of "abuse" for FOLLOWING ORDERS?
The answer to all the above and much more is that America's corporate media are now craven, paid professional liars. EVERY STATE that permits slot machines demands RIGOROUS INSPECTIONS of the computer-code that runs those machines, because the potential to insert a line or two of code which diverts even a small fraction of the waged money put through the machine ('skimming') is just so great.
YET, ON THE VOTING MACHINES that ultimately determine WHO CONTROLS THE MULTI-BILLION DOLLAR tax-and-spend power of the entire United States federal government, the media whores are AWOL, COMPLICIT, CRAVENLY DISINTERESTED in whether or not votes are being "skimmed," "flipped," diverted, or plain old obstructed.
What they, the corporate media news whores, ARE interested in selling America is SEX, CELEBRITY, VIOLENCE, and DEATH.
And that includes the dean of America's media yakkers, Larry King, who spent at least one entire show, and possibly more, discussing NOTHING BUT the Jon Benet case.
Sort of like the Roman gladiator games spectators cheering as lions devoured hapless, bound and tied Christian martyrs.
By talking about JonBenet's celebrity death, Larry King and the other media ho's DO NOT have to talk about the tens of millions of American children DEPRIVED of funding for pre-school, after-school, HEALTH CARE, and higher education by Republican budget slashings.
Well, DON HENLEY's landmark song (written when the media pursued stories that he was having an affair with an under-age-of-consent fan) is still the operative description of America's ghoulish media, enclosed one stanza (the rest at the cited site).
<< We got the bubble-headed-bleach-blonde who
Comes on at five
She can tell you bout the plane crash with a gleam
In her eye
Its interesting when people die-
Give us dirty laundry >>
http://www.lyricsfreak.com/d/don+henley/dirty+laundry_20042033.html
Media's Embarrassing Treatment of Ramsey Case Reaches Its Apex
Bob Geiger
08.28.2006
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bob-geiger/medias-embarrassing-trea_b_28204.html
There should be a lot of very red faces in newsrooms all over the United States right about now -- there should be, but I doubt there will be.
As many legal experts had theorized might happen, Boulder, Colorado prosecutors today dropped their case against John Mark Karr in the slaying of JonBenet Ramsey. It appears that a DNA sample taken from Karr simply does not match DNA from JonBenet Ramsey's body, making it likely that Karr was just an attention-seeker trying to get a quick 15 minutes of fame and dupe a scandal-hungry media into playing along.
Mission accomplished.
It remains unclear whether Karr will be released or extradited to California to face child pornography charges there.
Samples of Karr's DNA had been taken upon his arrival in Boulder on Thursday and they were tested at the Denver Police Department's crime lab over the weekend. Despite his insistence that he killed Ramsey -- and the 10-day media frenzy that has followed -- the tests have failed to put him at the scene of the crime and he may be released entirely by the end of the week.
What is amazing to me is the media circus that has followed this "case" for almost two weeks now without really a shred of proof that anything had truly developed in the 10-year-old mystery. And we're not just talking about an informational mention on page six or seven of the local newspaper, or a 90-second story buried in the second half of a one-hour newscast.
We're talking about hour upon hour of coverage, with some cable news networks devoting the entire hour of a 60-minute newscast to a developing story that could very well have turned out to be a lot of noise about nothing. We're talking about alleged journalists and editors whose judgment made them decide that John Mark Karr's plane ride from Thailand to the United States, where he sat, who he talked to, what he ate and even what procedure was used to allow him to use the bathroom was their very top story.
All of this without the most basic elements of proof that freshman journalism students taking Reporting 100 are taught to look for.
Unbelievable.
And this giant waste of time and resources, occurred at the expense of real news affecting real lives: A major crisis in the Middle East, a civil war in Iraq that's killing an average of 100 Iraqis a day and with our troops stuck smack-dab in the middle of it. We have a major portion of our population without the means to get a simple medical check-up because they have no health insurance, more Americans in poverty, a devastating budget deficit and hurricane season upon us with FEMA in no better shape than it was a year ago when it bungled Hurricane Katrina.
Oh, and those people whose lives were sidelined by Katrina a year ago, tomorrow? Most of them still haven't received any help.
But none of that -- not one bit of it -- was more important to the corporate media over the last 10 days than a specious confession, to a murder long ago and with very little in the way of proof to go along with it.
We should read, see and hear some major mea culpas across every spectrum of the American media for wasting everyone's time over the last two weeks and, if there's a price to pay for total journalistic incompetence, more than a few editors should be fired. That should happen -- but it won't.
The best we can hope for is that the media will take a good, long, collective look in the mirror and hopefully feel some shame over what buffoons they have been over this non-story and how much they have let the American people down.
I'm sure a few will feel that guilt -- at least until the next blonde chick goes missing in the Caribbean.
You can read more from Bob at BobGeiger.com.
WHY is the JONBENET RAMSEY story - a 12 years past unsolved murder case - more important than the DOZENS of Iraqi children who die every week as a result of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Don Rumsfeld's war of "flowers and cheers" in Iraq?
Oops! Discussing Iraqi children killed as a result of the American occupation/invasion of Iraq is a forbidden subject, so, let's try again:
"Why is the 12 years gone JonBenet Ramsey story MORE IMPORTANT than the corruption and fraud inherent in the 'PRIVATIZATION' of America's voting process, a process that is the very heart and soul of American democracy?" (We ARE 'fighting to spread democracy' aren't we?)
WHY is the Jon Benet Ramsey case MORE IMPORTANT than the ENRON extortion of California rate-payers, or the NO BID, NO OVERSIGHT, MASSIVE OVERBILLING contracts of HALLIBURTON corporation... a company that IS STILL PAYING DICK CHENEY compensation for past and future performance, compensation that GOES UP as Mr. Cheney directs BILLIONS of taxpayer dollars towards his former company??
WHY is the Jon Benet Ramsey case MORE IMPORTANT than how Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld PROMOTE THE TORTURE GENERALS, after those two authority figures of the US government had the United States military run KANGAROO COURTS to try, convict, and imprison FEMALE VOLUNTEER PRIVATES, accused of "abuse" for FOLLOWING ORDERS?
The answer to all the above and much more is that America's corporate media are now craven, paid professional liars. EVERY STATE that permits slot machines demands RIGOROUS INSPECTIONS of the computer-code that runs those machines, because the potential to insert a line or two of code which diverts even a small fraction of the waged money put through the machine ('skimming') is just so great.
YET, ON THE VOTING MACHINES that ultimately determine WHO CONTROLS THE MULTI-BILLION DOLLAR tax-and-spend power of the entire United States federal government, the media whores are AWOL, COMPLICIT, CRAVENLY DISINTERESTED in whether or not votes are being "skimmed," "flipped," diverted, or plain old obstructed.
What they, the corporate media news whores, ARE interested in selling America is SEX, CELEBRITY, VIOLENCE, and DEATH.
And that includes the dean of America's media yakkers, Larry King, who spent at least one entire show, and possibly more, discussing NOTHING BUT the Jon Benet case.
Sort of like the Roman gladiator games spectators cheering as lions devoured hapless, bound and tied Christian martyrs.
By talking about JonBenet's celebrity death, Larry King and the other media ho's DO NOT have to talk about the tens of millions of American children DEPRIVED of funding for pre-school, after-school, HEALTH CARE, and higher education by Republican budget slashings.
Well, DON HENLEY's landmark song (written when the media pursued stories that he was having an affair with an under-age-of-consent fan) is still the operative description of America's ghoulish media, enclosed one stanza (the rest at the cited site).
<< We got the bubble-headed-bleach-blonde who
Comes on at five
She can tell you bout the plane crash with a gleam
In her eye
Its interesting when people die-
Give us dirty laundry >>
http://www.lyricsfreak.com/d/don+henley/dirty+laundry_20042033.html
Media's Embarrassing Treatment of Ramsey Case Reaches Its Apex
Bob Geiger
08.28.2006
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bob-geiger/medias-embarrassing-trea_b_28204.html
There should be a lot of very red faces in newsrooms all over the United States right about now -- there should be, but I doubt there will be.
As many legal experts had theorized might happen, Boulder, Colorado prosecutors today dropped their case against John Mark Karr in the slaying of JonBenet Ramsey. It appears that a DNA sample taken from Karr simply does not match DNA from JonBenet Ramsey's body, making it likely that Karr was just an attention-seeker trying to get a quick 15 minutes of fame and dupe a scandal-hungry media into playing along.
Mission accomplished.
It remains unclear whether Karr will be released or extradited to California to face child pornography charges there.
Samples of Karr's DNA had been taken upon his arrival in Boulder on Thursday and they were tested at the Denver Police Department's crime lab over the weekend. Despite his insistence that he killed Ramsey -- and the 10-day media frenzy that has followed -- the tests have failed to put him at the scene of the crime and he may be released entirely by the end of the week.
What is amazing to me is the media circus that has followed this "case" for almost two weeks now without really a shred of proof that anything had truly developed in the 10-year-old mystery. And we're not just talking about an informational mention on page six or seven of the local newspaper, or a 90-second story buried in the second half of a one-hour newscast.
We're talking about hour upon hour of coverage, with some cable news networks devoting the entire hour of a 60-minute newscast to a developing story that could very well have turned out to be a lot of noise about nothing. We're talking about alleged journalists and editors whose judgment made them decide that John Mark Karr's plane ride from Thailand to the United States, where he sat, who he talked to, what he ate and even what procedure was used to allow him to use the bathroom was their very top story.
All of this without the most basic elements of proof that freshman journalism students taking Reporting 100 are taught to look for.
Unbelievable.
And this giant waste of time and resources, occurred at the expense of real news affecting real lives: A major crisis in the Middle East, a civil war in Iraq that's killing an average of 100 Iraqis a day and with our troops stuck smack-dab in the middle of it. We have a major portion of our population without the means to get a simple medical check-up because they have no health insurance, more Americans in poverty, a devastating budget deficit and hurricane season upon us with FEMA in no better shape than it was a year ago when it bungled Hurricane Katrina.
Oh, and those people whose lives were sidelined by Katrina a year ago, tomorrow? Most of them still haven't received any help.
But none of that -- not one bit of it -- was more important to the corporate media over the last 10 days than a specious confession, to a murder long ago and with very little in the way of proof to go along with it.
We should read, see and hear some major mea culpas across every spectrum of the American media for wasting everyone's time over the last two weeks and, if there's a price to pay for total journalistic incompetence, more than a few editors should be fired. That should happen -- but it won't.
The best we can hope for is that the media will take a good, long, collective look in the mirror and hopefully feel some shame over what buffoons they have been over this non-story and how much they have let the American people down.
I'm sure a few will feel that guilt -- at least until the next blonde chick goes missing in the Caribbean.
You can read more from Bob at BobGeiger.com.
Sunday, August 27, 2006
Cowardly Washington Post PAID PROFESSIONAL LIARS, shine Bush's boots re Katrina.
If anyone is looking for a TEXT BOOK example of the Washington Post whoring for BushCo... the Washington Post doing a STALINESQUE propaganda-lie job aimed at polishing the boots of George W. "It would be a hell of a lot easier if this was a dictatorship, so long as I was the dictator" Bush, one need look no further than this aricle by Jonathan Weisman and Michael Abramowitz, two Whore Post staff writers.
A "kudos" to AmericaBlog for catching this text-book Post whoring article.
Pointing out that Weisman and Abramof are probably charter members of the AIPAC - Israel first, last and forever - lobby, is probably overkill, even if true - yet another example of American democracy being destroyed by the cancer of big biz Rethuglicans, corporate media propaganda, and an AWOL (which is to say, bought out, corrupted, complicit, and owned-by-AIPAC) Democrat Party.
Wash. Post examines Bush and Katrina -- only through eyes of the GOP
by Joe in DC - 8/26/2006 08:48:00 PM
Saturday, August 26, 2006
http://americablog.blogspot.com/2006/08/wash-post-examines-bush-and-katrina.html
Today the Washington Post took a look at the political damage Bush suffered because of Katrina. Funny thing, most of the people they talked to thought Bush has recovered quite well and that a lot of the criticism was unfair. Well, it's not that funny. They ONLY talked to Republicans -- not one Democrat. The reporters did talk to two pollsters, one historian -- but the rest of their interviews were with a who's who of GOPers including:
White House Aide Dan Bartlett
White House spokeswoman Dana Perino
Republican Congressman Patrick McHenry from North Carolina
Republican Congressman Jim McCrery from Louisiana
Republican Congressman Jack Kingston from Georgia, and
Republican Congressman Tom Feeney from Florida.
We expect the White House and the GOP to spin Katrina....do Washington Post reporters have to do all their work?
======================================
Katrina's Damage Lingers For Bush
Many See Storm as President's Undoing
By Jonathan Weisman and Michael Abramowitz
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, August 26, 2006; A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/08/25/AR2006082501481.html
For Rep. Patrick T. McHenry (R-N.C.), three images define George W. Bush's presidency: Bush throwing out the first pitch of the 2001 World Series at Yankee Stadium, Bush with a megaphone atop the rubble of the World Trade Center -- and Bush staring out the window as Air Force One traversed the Gulf Coast thousands of feet above the devastation of Hurricane Katrina.
The first two images epitomize strength and resolution, the image the Bush White House likes to cultivate. But in one year's time, the last one -- of the president as aloof, out of touch, even befuddled -- all but erased the memory of the others, according to pollsters, pundits and Republican politicians who say they have suffered in the wake of the president's decline.
From the demise of his Social Security overhaul to the war in Iraq, many factors have contributed to Bush's slide in popularity in the past year. But the winds of Katrina may have been the force that finally wrenched the Bush presidency off its moorings, these observers said.
"That has always been the driving [attribute] of Bush -- his ability to lead -- and Katrina undermined it badly," McHenry said. "He has rebounded in one year's time from what he lost in one week's time." But, he added, "it was a long and arduous climb" -- and it is not complete.
The president will appear Monday and Tuesday on the Gulf Coast to mark the first anniversary of the hurricane. To the White House, the president has a strong story to tell: approval of more than $110 billion in resources for the Gulf region, 12 previous visits to the region by Bush and 82 by members of his Cabinet, the restoration of more than 220 miles of New Orleans's flood walls and levees, the floodproofing of pumping stations, and the addition of floodgates to protect against storm surges.
Bush aides said the president will accept responsibility for the botched federal response while stressing that the government has learned from the Katrina mistakes and promising to see through the reconstruction of the Gulf Coast.
White House counselor Dan Bartlett said it is difficult to separate the impact of Katrina from the Iraq war and the other problems that have pulled down Bush's approval rating. "It was a setback at the time, but it was recoverable and has been," Bartlett said.
In Louisiana and other Gulf Coast states, Bush's efforts have made a difference, both in rebuilding the region and in restoring his credibility, said Rep. Jim McCrery (R-La.).
But McCrery and several other Republicans said the year-old images of Bush's overflight aboard Air Force One, his good-natured joshing amid the devastation about college party days on Bourbon Street, and his "heck of a job" commendation of Michael D. Brown, then the director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, still linger.
"Outside the real storm, it was a political storm that we all suffered a little damage from," said Rep. Jack Kingston (Ga.), a member of the House Republican leadership. "Katrina was not just a break in the levee of the great Crescent City, but it was a break in the levee of political goodwill and the Teflon coating that the administration had been enjoying up to then."
In the weeks after Katrina, Bush's disapproval rating rose from 48 percent to 52 percent, while the proportion of those who approved of the job he was doing as president fell from 44 percent to 40 percent, according to the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press.
The proportion of people who saw Bush as a strong and decisive leader stood at 60 percent in late August 2005, according to a Gallup poll. One week and a hurricane later, it was down to 52 percent. By mid-September, it had fallen to 49 percent.
About 63 percent of Americans disapproved of Bush's handling of Katrina, according to a Washington Post-ABC News poll conducted this March.
"This is an event that calcified the criticisms people were having about Bush, made it more personal and had a big impact on how people look at him," said Andrew Kohut, the Pew Center's director.
Frank Newport, the editor in chief of the Gallup Poll, is more skeptical that there was much of an enduring "Katrina effect" on the president, saying Bush's ratings recovered by the end of 2005 before sliding again in 2006.
Katrina was clearly not the only problem facing Bush in 2005. Bush's full-throated push to add private investment accounts to a slimmed-down Social Security system had been rebuffed by his own party. That August, as Bush vacationed in Texas, the administration appeared to cede the debate on Iraq to antiwar activist Cindy Sheehan as she camped outside the president's ranch.
But those events only made Katrina's impact that much more powerful, historians and Republican lawmakers say. "The sort of limited commitment that this president has to using federal power to ameliorate domestic problems registered powerfully in this Katrina episode," said presidential historian Robert Dallek. "It triggered Bush's downturn."
It was not only the slow, ineffectual response to the initial devastation that was responsible for the decline, critics and supporters say, but also the policy initiatives that came later. Urban Democrats and minorities, already prone to dislike Bush, focused on FEMA's botched relief efforts in the early days. But as the White House moved to placate those critics with a shower of financial support, the administration began alienating many Republicans, who wanted to use the disaster to turn the Gulf Coast into a showcase for conservative ideas.
Bush did push through legislation creating tax-favored Gulf Opportunity Zones that offered lucrative tax incentives for businesses to invest and rebuild. But more ambitious tax plans never got off the ground. The most far-reaching school-choice plans were scaled back. The most visible housing program came in the form of hundreds of thousands of government-bought trailers and mobile homes, which former House speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) predicted would create "ghettos of despair."
And the highest-profile attack on a government regulation -- Bush's suspension of the Davis-Bacon Act's rules on wage rates for federal contractors -- was quickly scrapped in the face of union and Democratic protests.
"Crises create opportunities," said Rep. Tom Feeney (R-Fla.). "This could have been an opportunity to redo the school systems with free-market principles. It was an opportunity to not just hand over contracts to unions at whatever cost. Now, that's spilt water over the levees."
White House aides suggest that this criticism is unfair, noting that millions of dollars have been spent on school vouchers and on helping homeowners rebuild their property. "The city of New Orleans will see their schools come back stronger, and in fact there will be an explosion of charter schools that can help the region come back quickly," said White House spokeswoman Dana Perino. "Of course we would have liked to do more in many areas, but the president believes the American taxpayer has been generous."
In the political realm, the White House showed an uncharacteristic reluctance to strike back at Democrats and liberal groups that were attacking the administration for its handling of Katrina. Kingston said many conservatives were ready to attack New Orleans Mayor C. Ray Nagin and Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco, both Democrats, whom they saw as the embodiment of years of incompetence, corruption and cronyism. But the signal from the White House was to hold their fire.
Kingston said all Republicans continue to pay the price for the approach Bush took in the weeks after the hurricane.
"What you ended up with was a lot of people who did not like the administration from the beginning now with the tangible reason they had been looking for for five years," Kingston said. "And on the other side you had his friends, who wanted to circle the wagon, defend the president and take a stand, and instead they were asked just to keep passing the bills."
The Washington cowardly, lying, whore Post Company
A "kudos" to AmericaBlog for catching this text-book Post whoring article.
Pointing out that Weisman and Abramof are probably charter members of the AIPAC - Israel first, last and forever - lobby, is probably overkill, even if true - yet another example of American democracy being destroyed by the cancer of big biz Rethuglicans, corporate media propaganda, and an AWOL (which is to say, bought out, corrupted, complicit, and owned-by-AIPAC) Democrat Party.
Wash. Post examines Bush and Katrina -- only through eyes of the GOP
by Joe in DC - 8/26/2006 08:48:00 PM
Saturday, August 26, 2006
http://americablog.blogspot.com/2006/08/wash-post-examines-bush-and-katrina.html
Today the Washington Post took a look at the political damage Bush suffered because of Katrina. Funny thing, most of the people they talked to thought Bush has recovered quite well and that a lot of the criticism was unfair. Well, it's not that funny. They ONLY talked to Republicans -- not one Democrat. The reporters did talk to two pollsters, one historian -- but the rest of their interviews were with a who's who of GOPers including:
White House Aide Dan Bartlett
White House spokeswoman Dana Perino
Republican Congressman Patrick McHenry from North Carolina
Republican Congressman Jim McCrery from Louisiana
Republican Congressman Jack Kingston from Georgia, and
Republican Congressman Tom Feeney from Florida.
We expect the White House and the GOP to spin Katrina....do Washington Post reporters have to do all their work?
======================================
Katrina's Damage Lingers For Bush
Many See Storm as President's Undoing
By Jonathan Weisman and Michael Abramowitz
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, August 26, 2006; A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/08/25/AR2006082501481.html
For Rep. Patrick T. McHenry (R-N.C.), three images define George W. Bush's presidency: Bush throwing out the first pitch of the 2001 World Series at Yankee Stadium, Bush with a megaphone atop the rubble of the World Trade Center -- and Bush staring out the window as Air Force One traversed the Gulf Coast thousands of feet above the devastation of Hurricane Katrina.
The first two images epitomize strength and resolution, the image the Bush White House likes to cultivate. But in one year's time, the last one -- of the president as aloof, out of touch, even befuddled -- all but erased the memory of the others, according to pollsters, pundits and Republican politicians who say they have suffered in the wake of the president's decline.
From the demise of his Social Security overhaul to the war in Iraq, many factors have contributed to Bush's slide in popularity in the past year. But the winds of Katrina may have been the force that finally wrenched the Bush presidency off its moorings, these observers said.
"That has always been the driving [attribute] of Bush -- his ability to lead -- and Katrina undermined it badly," McHenry said. "He has rebounded in one year's time from what he lost in one week's time." But, he added, "it was a long and arduous climb" -- and it is not complete.
The president will appear Monday and Tuesday on the Gulf Coast to mark the first anniversary of the hurricane. To the White House, the president has a strong story to tell: approval of more than $110 billion in resources for the Gulf region, 12 previous visits to the region by Bush and 82 by members of his Cabinet, the restoration of more than 220 miles of New Orleans's flood walls and levees, the floodproofing of pumping stations, and the addition of floodgates to protect against storm surges.
Bush aides said the president will accept responsibility for the botched federal response while stressing that the government has learned from the Katrina mistakes and promising to see through the reconstruction of the Gulf Coast.
White House counselor Dan Bartlett said it is difficult to separate the impact of Katrina from the Iraq war and the other problems that have pulled down Bush's approval rating. "It was a setback at the time, but it was recoverable and has been," Bartlett said.
In Louisiana and other Gulf Coast states, Bush's efforts have made a difference, both in rebuilding the region and in restoring his credibility, said Rep. Jim McCrery (R-La.).
But McCrery and several other Republicans said the year-old images of Bush's overflight aboard Air Force One, his good-natured joshing amid the devastation about college party days on Bourbon Street, and his "heck of a job" commendation of Michael D. Brown, then the director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, still linger.
"Outside the real storm, it was a political storm that we all suffered a little damage from," said Rep. Jack Kingston (Ga.), a member of the House Republican leadership. "Katrina was not just a break in the levee of the great Crescent City, but it was a break in the levee of political goodwill and the Teflon coating that the administration had been enjoying up to then."
In the weeks after Katrina, Bush's disapproval rating rose from 48 percent to 52 percent, while the proportion of those who approved of the job he was doing as president fell from 44 percent to 40 percent, according to the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press.
The proportion of people who saw Bush as a strong and decisive leader stood at 60 percent in late August 2005, according to a Gallup poll. One week and a hurricane later, it was down to 52 percent. By mid-September, it had fallen to 49 percent.
About 63 percent of Americans disapproved of Bush's handling of Katrina, according to a Washington Post-ABC News poll conducted this March.
"This is an event that calcified the criticisms people were having about Bush, made it more personal and had a big impact on how people look at him," said Andrew Kohut, the Pew Center's director.
Frank Newport, the editor in chief of the Gallup Poll, is more skeptical that there was much of an enduring "Katrina effect" on the president, saying Bush's ratings recovered by the end of 2005 before sliding again in 2006.
Katrina was clearly not the only problem facing Bush in 2005. Bush's full-throated push to add private investment accounts to a slimmed-down Social Security system had been rebuffed by his own party. That August, as Bush vacationed in Texas, the administration appeared to cede the debate on Iraq to antiwar activist Cindy Sheehan as she camped outside the president's ranch.
But those events only made Katrina's impact that much more powerful, historians and Republican lawmakers say. "The sort of limited commitment that this president has to using federal power to ameliorate domestic problems registered powerfully in this Katrina episode," said presidential historian Robert Dallek. "It triggered Bush's downturn."
It was not only the slow, ineffectual response to the initial devastation that was responsible for the decline, critics and supporters say, but also the policy initiatives that came later. Urban Democrats and minorities, already prone to dislike Bush, focused on FEMA's botched relief efforts in the early days. But as the White House moved to placate those critics with a shower of financial support, the administration began alienating many Republicans, who wanted to use the disaster to turn the Gulf Coast into a showcase for conservative ideas.
Bush did push through legislation creating tax-favored Gulf Opportunity Zones that offered lucrative tax incentives for businesses to invest and rebuild. But more ambitious tax plans never got off the ground. The most far-reaching school-choice plans were scaled back. The most visible housing program came in the form of hundreds of thousands of government-bought trailers and mobile homes, which former House speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) predicted would create "ghettos of despair."
And the highest-profile attack on a government regulation -- Bush's suspension of the Davis-Bacon Act's rules on wage rates for federal contractors -- was quickly scrapped in the face of union and Democratic protests.
"Crises create opportunities," said Rep. Tom Feeney (R-Fla.). "This could have been an opportunity to redo the school systems with free-market principles. It was an opportunity to not just hand over contracts to unions at whatever cost. Now, that's spilt water over the levees."
White House aides suggest that this criticism is unfair, noting that millions of dollars have been spent on school vouchers and on helping homeowners rebuild their property. "The city of New Orleans will see their schools come back stronger, and in fact there will be an explosion of charter schools that can help the region come back quickly," said White House spokeswoman Dana Perino. "Of course we would have liked to do more in many areas, but the president believes the American taxpayer has been generous."
In the political realm, the White House showed an uncharacteristic reluctance to strike back at Democrats and liberal groups that were attacking the administration for its handling of Katrina. Kingston said many conservatives were ready to attack New Orleans Mayor C. Ray Nagin and Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco, both Democrats, whom they saw as the embodiment of years of incompetence, corruption and cronyism. But the signal from the White House was to hold their fire.
Kingston said all Republicans continue to pay the price for the approach Bush took in the weeks after the hurricane.
"What you ended up with was a lot of people who did not like the administration from the beginning now with the tangible reason they had been looking for for five years," Kingston said. "And on the other side you had his friends, who wanted to circle the wagon, defend the president and take a stand, and instead they were asked just to keep passing the bills."
The Washington cowardly, lying, whore Post Company
Tuesday, August 22, 2006
NY Times quashed, CENSORED, stories in order to boost Bush election 2004 prospects
CENSORED: Eric Boehlert compiles a LIST of stories... STORIES, plural... that the New York Times SAT ON, QUASHED, withheld, denied publication, CENSORED, in order to boost the 2004 re-election prospects of President George W. Bush and Dick Cheney.
This at a time when, amazingly ALMOST HALF of the editors and papers that had endorsed George W. Bush for president in 2000, REVERSED themselves, and either endorsed the opposing candidate (clueless John Kerry), or withheld endorsement of either candidate. (The latter precisely because Kerry's pathetic, wishy-washy, clueless, and indecisive campaign made him clearly unequal to the task of being president in such hazardous times.)
(The Economist captures this dilemma with their headline: "America's next president: the incompetent or incoherent."
http://www.economist.com/research/articlesBySubject/displayStory.cfm?story_id=3329802&subject=LA
Here's the IndependentsForKerry.org compilation of newpaper endorsements for Kerry, which actually includes the New York Times.
http://www.independentsforkerry.org/info/index.php?category_id=791&subcategory_id=1565
But in a text-book example of "ACTIONS SPEAK LOUDER THAN WORDS," the NY Times WITHOLDING PUBLICATION of stories DAMAGING TO the Bush campaign, was FAR MORE VALUABLE to Bush's reelection prospects, than the few paragraphs buried deep in the editorial pages' official presidential candidate endorsement.
Here is an excellent compilation by Brendan Nyhan of Mr. Bush's in-your-face lies, "Wiretaps require a court order," at a time that Mr. Bush's administration was aggressively pursing the Holy Grail of wiretapping, a complete data-mine crawl of ALL phone conversations and business transactions recorded electronically in America.
http://www.brendan-nyhan.com/blog/2005/12/bush_on_wiretap.html
Certainly the Kerry campaign, AND THE NEW YORK TIMES, could have made hay and some election-season HEADLINES by posting these comment
<< You see, what that meant is if you got a wire tap by court order -- and, by the way, everything you hear about requires court order, requires there to be permission from a FISA court, for example.>> (Bush, April 19, 2004)
or << Now, by the way, any time you hear the United States government talking about wiretap, it requires -- a wiretap requires a court order. Nothing has changed, by the way. When we're talking about chasing down terrorists, we're talking about getting a court order before we do so. >> (from the next day, both highlighted at Nyhan's site).
Instead, what we have is a SEGREGATED SOCIETY, thanks to the New York Times: The Times put any and all scandal ACCUSATIONS, no matter how trivial, non-criminal, or unfounded, againt the Bill Clinton White House in blaring headlines on the front page ("President invited friends and supporters to sleepover at the White House! Lincoln Bedroom 'SCANDAL' infuriates god-fearing Republicans!") while issues, policies, inconsistencies, and the possibility of OUTRIGHT CRIMES from the Bush White House are CENSORED, quashed, buried, suppressed, and short-sheeted at the Times.
The explanation for this bizarre behavoir is simplicity itself: Like Joe Lieberman, the Times has signed on to the PNAC/AIPAC/neo-con agenda, "War is Good," and the Times would rather hang the Clinton White House for having guests spend the night, than give the American public an honest and forceful investigation of massive government spying on American citizens as ordered by the Bush White House - in an election year where such a story would almost certainly have depressed Bush's national voter turnout by 1%, 2%, 3% or more.
This story - of the NY Times SITTING ON a critical story all through election 2004 - demonstrates how poweful a media presence the New York Times is in American politics, and indeed in American life. (What with goverment programs for middle-class, working-class and poor Americans being slashed everywhere as the Republicans reward America's hyper-wealthy with huge tax cuts.)
Unfortunately, the Times wields this influence in an appalling manner, COVERING UP stories voters and citizens have EVERY RIGHT TO hear about, stories COVERED UP by that old grey bucket of muck that once billed itself as the nation's paper of record.
---------------------------------------------------------
New York Times' Eavesdropping Story Wasn't The Only One Squashed For Bush During 2004 Campaign
by Eric Boehlert
8-22-2006
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/eric-boehlert/new-york-times-_b_27741.html
This Sunday the New York Times' Bill Keller got dressed down on the paper's letters page, with scores of readers taking the executive editor to task for being evasive in his previous explanation regarding why--and for how long--the Times held back publishing its December 2005, Pulitzer Prize-winning scoop about the National Security Agency's warrantless eavesdropping program under president Bush. A program recently deemed unconstitutional by a federal judge. At the time of publication in 2005 readers were told the story, which the White House pleaded the Times not to publish, had been delayed for "a year." But last week Times public editor, Byron Calame, confirmed the story had been held for 14 months, which, as many had suspected, meant the Times could have published the scoop during the height of the 2004 presidential campaign.
When Calame asked Keller why the paper had reported (vaguely and inaccurately) that the story had been held "a year", Keller conceded, "It was probably inelegant wording." Adding, "I don't know what was in my head at the time." When Calame pressed Keller whether the inelegant wording ("a year") and the sensitivity of the election-day timing issue had been discussed internally, Keller responded improbably, "I don't remember."
That was too much for some Times readers.
"It is depressing to think that the executive editor of The Times would even be able to speak this way," wrote Holly Ketron from Princeton, N.J., just one of many who lectured Keller in print about the proper role of journalists in a democracy.
Depressing, indeed. But even more depressing is the fact the eavesdropping story was just one of several legitimate news stories during the closing weeks of the 2004 campaign that were ignored by mainstream press outlets; stories that would have clearly hurt the Bush campaign. Stories such as the on-going Valerie Plame leak investigation, the tale of Saddam Hussein's hunt for yellowcake uranium, the looming military battle for Fallujah inside Iraq, and Bush's mysterious bulge spotted during the televised debates. I detail the media's disturbing, look-the-other-way approach from 2004 in Lapdogs: How the Press Rolled Over for Bush.
• Time and Valeria Plame
In 2004 Time magazine's Matthew Cooper got caught up in the special prosecutor's CIA leak investigation. Patrick Fitzgerald's grand jury subpoenaed Cooper to find out who leaked the Plame identity to him. He and Time initially refused to cooperate. Eventually Cooper agreed to testify during the summer of 2005 after receiving a waiver from his source Karl Rove assuring him it was okay to disclose their confidential conversation. Of course, Cooper could have asked for that same waiver in 2004 which would have quickened the pace of the investigation significantly. But Cooper did not, according to a Los Angeles Times report, because "Time editors were concerned about becoming part of such an explosive story in an election year."
• NBC and Fallujah
On Nov. 4, two days after the nationwide presidential vote, NBC Nightly News anchor Tom Brokaw reported, "In Iraq, the American forces have been poised to make a major assault on Fallujah. We all anticipate that could happen at any moment." He asked Pentagon correspondent Jim Miklaszewski, "What about other strategic and tactical changes in Iraq now that the election is over?" (Emphasis added.) Said Miklaszewski, "U.S. military officials have said for some time that they were putting off any kind of major offensive operation in [Fallujah] until after the U.S. elections, for obvious political reasons."
So according to NBC, military planners had been telling reporters "for some time" that, in what appeared to be a blatant attempt to boost Bush's domestic fortunes, the bloody offensive to try to retake Fallujah was going to be postponed "for obvious political reason" until after the U.S. Election Day. The problem was that prior to Nov. 2, nobody at NBC--not Brokaw, not Miklaszewski--actually reported that fact to viewers as they pondered their presidential pick. (The go-slow approach to Fallujah proved to be a wise public relations move for Republicans since November 2004 became the single deadliest month for U.S. servicemen and women serving in Iraq; 137 died.)
•CBS and Saddam's hunt for yellowcake uranium
Inn the wake of the embarrassing 2004 Memogate scandal, the network announced a 30-minute report by veteran correspondent Ed Bradley examining the administration's faulty claims about Saddam Hussein's nuclear weapons capabilities was being pushed back until after the election. CBS News president Andrew Hayward, under fire from conservative critics for the network's allegedly liberal ways, announced it would have been "inappropriate to broadcast the WMD report so close to the presidential election." [Emphasis added.] The election was six weeks away at the time of the unusual announcement.
•The New York Times and the Bush Bulge
The story was hatched when some careful viewers went back and watched the first presidential debate again and noticed, with the aid of a video freeze frame, the outlines of a bulge protruding out of the back of Bush's suit jacket, between his shoulder blades. Suspicious observers noted Bush's debate advance team had insisted that no cameras be positioned behind Bush or Kerry during the debate. But Fox News ignored the request and one of its cameras caught an image of Bush as he stood at the debate lectern, capturing the clear bulge under his jacket.
When Bush aides were pressed for a serious response to the bulge question (the TV image did not lie, a shadowy bulge was obvious), aides alternatively insisted the controversial image had been "doctored," then that it was merely a "badly tailored suit," a "poorly tailored shirt", and the presidential tailor responsible had been fired. Asked specifically by the New York Times whether the bulge was a bullet proof vest, a Bush aide insisted it was not; the president was not wearing one the night of the debate. It turned out none of those public pronouncements were true. (The bulge was later confirmed to be a bullet proof vest.)
Intrigued by the unfolding unfolding, Robert Nelson, a 30-year Jet Propulsion Laboratory scientist who works on photo imaging for NASA's various space probes and is an international authority on image analysis, began to do some at-home research on the bulge image. Nelson, with no partisan ax to grind, took a video image of Bush's back captured from the first debate and, using the same methods used to analyze images taken from spacecrafts, greatly sharpened the details, and specifically the shadows.
Nelson quickly concluded the bulge was real. And the enhanced image of Bush from the debate Nelson created ended any speculation. It was irrefutable that Bush was wearing some sort of device across his back, complete with that liked like a wire snaking down Bush's back. Disturbed by the misleading explanations he had read from Bush aides in the press, Nelson forwarded his information to a New York Times science reporter, who was interested. Eventually, three reporters were assigned to the story.
According to the reporting of David Lindorff, writing for Fairness and Accuracy in Report's Extra!, Nelson was told by a Times reporters that the bulge article, complete with his compelling imagery, would run Oct. 28, five days before the election. Instead, on the night of Oct. 27 the story was killed. In an email the next day, one of the Times reporters apologized to Nelson: "Sorry to have been a source of disappointment and frustration to you." Two months later, executive editor Keller explained, "In the end, nobody, including the scientist who brought it up, could take the story beyond speculation. In the crush of election-finale stories, it died a quiet, unlamented death." In other words, the Times article would have easily proven there was a bulge underneath Bush's jacket during the debates, which would have undercut all his campaign's public denials and thereby raised questions about Bush's credibility. But because the story could not authoritatively say what the bulge was (and because Bush aides still refused to acknowledge its existence), the article was not worth printing.
As for Keller's insistence the story died a "quiet, unlamented death," that was not true. At least one of the reporters assigned to the article, Andrew Revkin, publicly expressed his frustration with the decision to kill the story, noting the oddity of accepting the Bush campaign's flimsy explanation about a tailor's mistake over the word of an esteemed scientist who produced images that were impossible to ignore. The Times' public editor later said he also thought the paper should have run the bulge story.
Meanwhile, can anyone think of a single bad-news-for-Kerry story that news outlets politely sat on during the 2004 campaign
This at a time when, amazingly ALMOST HALF of the editors and papers that had endorsed George W. Bush for president in 2000, REVERSED themselves, and either endorsed the opposing candidate (clueless John Kerry), or withheld endorsement of either candidate. (The latter precisely because Kerry's pathetic, wishy-washy, clueless, and indecisive campaign made him clearly unequal to the task of being president in such hazardous times.)
(The Economist captures this dilemma with their headline: "America's next president: the incompetent or incoherent."
http://www.economist.com/research/articlesBySubject/displayStory.cfm?story_id=3329802&subject=LA
Here's the IndependentsForKerry.org compilation of newpaper endorsements for Kerry, which actually includes the New York Times.
http://www.independentsforkerry.org/info/index.php?category_id=791&subcategory_id=1565
But in a text-book example of "ACTIONS SPEAK LOUDER THAN WORDS," the NY Times WITHOLDING PUBLICATION of stories DAMAGING TO the Bush campaign, was FAR MORE VALUABLE to Bush's reelection prospects, than the few paragraphs buried deep in the editorial pages' official presidential candidate endorsement.
Here is an excellent compilation by Brendan Nyhan of Mr. Bush's in-your-face lies, "Wiretaps require a court order," at a time that Mr. Bush's administration was aggressively pursing the Holy Grail of wiretapping, a complete data-mine crawl of ALL phone conversations and business transactions recorded electronically in America.
http://www.brendan-nyhan.com/blog/2005/12/bush_on_wiretap.html
Certainly the Kerry campaign, AND THE NEW YORK TIMES, could have made hay and some election-season HEADLINES by posting these comment
<< You see, what that meant is if you got a wire tap by court order -- and, by the way, everything you hear about requires court order, requires there to be permission from a FISA court, for example.>> (Bush, April 19, 2004)
or << Now, by the way, any time you hear the United States government talking about wiretap, it requires -- a wiretap requires a court order. Nothing has changed, by the way. When we're talking about chasing down terrorists, we're talking about getting a court order before we do so. >> (from the next day, both highlighted at Nyhan's site).
Instead, what we have is a SEGREGATED SOCIETY, thanks to the New York Times: The Times put any and all scandal ACCUSATIONS, no matter how trivial, non-criminal, or unfounded, againt the Bill Clinton White House in blaring headlines on the front page ("President invited friends and supporters to sleepover at the White House! Lincoln Bedroom 'SCANDAL' infuriates god-fearing Republicans!") while issues, policies, inconsistencies, and the possibility of OUTRIGHT CRIMES from the Bush White House are CENSORED, quashed, buried, suppressed, and short-sheeted at the Times.
The explanation for this bizarre behavoir is simplicity itself: Like Joe Lieberman, the Times has signed on to the PNAC/AIPAC/neo-con agenda, "War is Good," and the Times would rather hang the Clinton White House for having guests spend the night, than give the American public an honest and forceful investigation of massive government spying on American citizens as ordered by the Bush White House - in an election year where such a story would almost certainly have depressed Bush's national voter turnout by 1%, 2%, 3% or more.
This story - of the NY Times SITTING ON a critical story all through election 2004 - demonstrates how poweful a media presence the New York Times is in American politics, and indeed in American life. (What with goverment programs for middle-class, working-class and poor Americans being slashed everywhere as the Republicans reward America's hyper-wealthy with huge tax cuts.)
Unfortunately, the Times wields this influence in an appalling manner, COVERING UP stories voters and citizens have EVERY RIGHT TO hear about, stories COVERED UP by that old grey bucket of muck that once billed itself as the nation's paper of record.
---------------------------------------------------------
New York Times' Eavesdropping Story Wasn't The Only One Squashed For Bush During 2004 Campaign
by Eric Boehlert
8-22-2006
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/eric-boehlert/new-york-times-_b_27741.html
This Sunday the New York Times' Bill Keller got dressed down on the paper's letters page, with scores of readers taking the executive editor to task for being evasive in his previous explanation regarding why--and for how long--the Times held back publishing its December 2005, Pulitzer Prize-winning scoop about the National Security Agency's warrantless eavesdropping program under president Bush. A program recently deemed unconstitutional by a federal judge. At the time of publication in 2005 readers were told the story, which the White House pleaded the Times not to publish, had been delayed for "a year." But last week Times public editor, Byron Calame, confirmed the story had been held for 14 months, which, as many had suspected, meant the Times could have published the scoop during the height of the 2004 presidential campaign.
When Calame asked Keller why the paper had reported (vaguely and inaccurately) that the story had been held "a year", Keller conceded, "It was probably inelegant wording." Adding, "I don't know what was in my head at the time." When Calame pressed Keller whether the inelegant wording ("a year") and the sensitivity of the election-day timing issue had been discussed internally, Keller responded improbably, "I don't remember."
That was too much for some Times readers.
"It is depressing to think that the executive editor of The Times would even be able to speak this way," wrote Holly Ketron from Princeton, N.J., just one of many who lectured Keller in print about the proper role of journalists in a democracy.
Depressing, indeed. But even more depressing is the fact the eavesdropping story was just one of several legitimate news stories during the closing weeks of the 2004 campaign that were ignored by mainstream press outlets; stories that would have clearly hurt the Bush campaign. Stories such as the on-going Valerie Plame leak investigation, the tale of Saddam Hussein's hunt for yellowcake uranium, the looming military battle for Fallujah inside Iraq, and Bush's mysterious bulge spotted during the televised debates. I detail the media's disturbing, look-the-other-way approach from 2004 in Lapdogs: How the Press Rolled Over for Bush.
• Time and Valeria Plame
In 2004 Time magazine's Matthew Cooper got caught up in the special prosecutor's CIA leak investigation. Patrick Fitzgerald's grand jury subpoenaed Cooper to find out who leaked the Plame identity to him. He and Time initially refused to cooperate. Eventually Cooper agreed to testify during the summer of 2005 after receiving a waiver from his source Karl Rove assuring him it was okay to disclose their confidential conversation. Of course, Cooper could have asked for that same waiver in 2004 which would have quickened the pace of the investigation significantly. But Cooper did not, according to a Los Angeles Times report, because "Time editors were concerned about becoming part of such an explosive story in an election year."
• NBC and Fallujah
On Nov. 4, two days after the nationwide presidential vote, NBC Nightly News anchor Tom Brokaw reported, "In Iraq, the American forces have been poised to make a major assault on Fallujah. We all anticipate that could happen at any moment." He asked Pentagon correspondent Jim Miklaszewski, "What about other strategic and tactical changes in Iraq now that the election is over?" (Emphasis added.) Said Miklaszewski, "U.S. military officials have said for some time that they were putting off any kind of major offensive operation in [Fallujah] until after the U.S. elections, for obvious political reasons."
So according to NBC, military planners had been telling reporters "for some time" that, in what appeared to be a blatant attempt to boost Bush's domestic fortunes, the bloody offensive to try to retake Fallujah was going to be postponed "for obvious political reason" until after the U.S. Election Day. The problem was that prior to Nov. 2, nobody at NBC--not Brokaw, not Miklaszewski--actually reported that fact to viewers as they pondered their presidential pick. (The go-slow approach to Fallujah proved to be a wise public relations move for Republicans since November 2004 became the single deadliest month for U.S. servicemen and women serving in Iraq; 137 died.)
•CBS and Saddam's hunt for yellowcake uranium
Inn the wake of the embarrassing 2004 Memogate scandal, the network announced a 30-minute report by veteran correspondent Ed Bradley examining the administration's faulty claims about Saddam Hussein's nuclear weapons capabilities was being pushed back until after the election. CBS News president Andrew Hayward, under fire from conservative critics for the network's allegedly liberal ways, announced it would have been "inappropriate to broadcast the WMD report so close to the presidential election." [Emphasis added.] The election was six weeks away at the time of the unusual announcement.
•The New York Times and the Bush Bulge
The story was hatched when some careful viewers went back and watched the first presidential debate again and noticed, with the aid of a video freeze frame, the outlines of a bulge protruding out of the back of Bush's suit jacket, between his shoulder blades. Suspicious observers noted Bush's debate advance team had insisted that no cameras be positioned behind Bush or Kerry during the debate. But Fox News ignored the request and one of its cameras caught an image of Bush as he stood at the debate lectern, capturing the clear bulge under his jacket.
When Bush aides were pressed for a serious response to the bulge question (the TV image did not lie, a shadowy bulge was obvious), aides alternatively insisted the controversial image had been "doctored," then that it was merely a "badly tailored suit," a "poorly tailored shirt", and the presidential tailor responsible had been fired. Asked specifically by the New York Times whether the bulge was a bullet proof vest, a Bush aide insisted it was not; the president was not wearing one the night of the debate. It turned out none of those public pronouncements were true. (The bulge was later confirmed to be a bullet proof vest.)
Intrigued by the unfolding unfolding, Robert Nelson, a 30-year Jet Propulsion Laboratory scientist who works on photo imaging for NASA's various space probes and is an international authority on image analysis, began to do some at-home research on the bulge image. Nelson, with no partisan ax to grind, took a video image of Bush's back captured from the first debate and, using the same methods used to analyze images taken from spacecrafts, greatly sharpened the details, and specifically the shadows.
Nelson quickly concluded the bulge was real. And the enhanced image of Bush from the debate Nelson created ended any speculation. It was irrefutable that Bush was wearing some sort of device across his back, complete with that liked like a wire snaking down Bush's back. Disturbed by the misleading explanations he had read from Bush aides in the press, Nelson forwarded his information to a New York Times science reporter, who was interested. Eventually, three reporters were assigned to the story.
According to the reporting of David Lindorff, writing for Fairness and Accuracy in Report's Extra!, Nelson was told by a Times reporters that the bulge article, complete with his compelling imagery, would run Oct. 28, five days before the election. Instead, on the night of Oct. 27 the story was killed. In an email the next day, one of the Times reporters apologized to Nelson: "Sorry to have been a source of disappointment and frustration to you." Two months later, executive editor Keller explained, "In the end, nobody, including the scientist who brought it up, could take the story beyond speculation. In the crush of election-finale stories, it died a quiet, unlamented death." In other words, the Times article would have easily proven there was a bulge underneath Bush's jacket during the debates, which would have undercut all his campaign's public denials and thereby raised questions about Bush's credibility. But because the story could not authoritatively say what the bulge was (and because Bush aides still refused to acknowledge its existence), the article was not worth printing.
As for Keller's insistence the story died a "quiet, unlamented death," that was not true. At least one of the reporters assigned to the article, Andrew Revkin, publicly expressed his frustration with the decision to kill the story, noting the oddity of accepting the Bush campaign's flimsy explanation about a tailor's mistake over the word of an esteemed scientist who produced images that were impossible to ignore. The Times' public editor later said he also thought the paper should have run the bulge story.
Meanwhile, can anyone think of a single bad-news-for-Kerry story that news outlets politely sat on during the 2004 campaign
Monday, August 21, 2006
Robert Parry catches NY Time's Thomas Friedman being a hypocritical shill who scorns American voters...
The Great Robert Parry was one of the handful of American journalists who investigated and unraveled the Iran-Contra story. He details (in his book "Secrecy and Privilege" at his great website ConsortiumNews.com) how, while working for Newsweek as an investigative reporter, he doggedly and steadfastly pursued leads and sources that revealed an amazing story: that the US government was secretly funding an army, and running a secret war, in Central America, without the knowledge or oversight of Congress. At every turn the Republican White House (Reagan and Bush Sr.) denied the story, and even the Washington media derided the story as fanciful. Until the Nicaraguan forces shot down a US "secret" supply flight aircraft, and brought the sole survivor in front of TV cameras where he told the full story of an entire secret air force supplying the Contra rebel US-backed army in Nicaragua.
Even when this story was vindicated, Newsweek continued to downgrade Parry's reporting and downplay the Republican administration's above-the-law tactics, and Parry was eventually forced to resign. He has not been offered a prominent job as an investigative reporter in the US corporate "major media" since, which serves as yet another example of how "liberals," or more specifically Repuglican exposing journalists, are EXILED or PURGED from the American media.
The New York Times, on the other hand, exhibits the complete OPPOSITE behavior of the courageous Mr. Parry: The Times has, over the past decade or two, become an institution of PAID PROFESSIONAL LIARS, as this post will try to illustrate, often PATHOGICALLY so. The Times is so bad that, even as their own home city reeled from the coordinated attack of 9-11 suicide bombing hijackers, as the smoke and ashes of burned bodies of their fellow New Yorkers floated in the air around the NY Times building, the Times STILL adhered to the Bush admin.'s insane defense of their 9-11 incompetence, as for example then Nat. Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice saying "NO ONE COULD HAVE ANTICIPATED the use of airliners as flying bombs." Not only was Ms. Rice lying, but she was transparently, flagrantly doing so. After all, the ITALIAN POLICE stationed surface-to-air missiles around the city of Genoa, Italy, during the G8 summit there, specifically to ward off the prospect of Al Qaida hijacking an airliner and using it as a flying bomb to attack the assembled G8 presidents.
---------------------------------------------------
CNN mentions anti-aircraft missiles as security precautions at Genoa G8 summit:
http://archives.cnn.com/2001/WORLD/europe/07/20/genoa.protests/index.html
and
Missiles to protect summit leaders
Rory Carroll in Rome, The Guardian
Wednesday July 11, 2001
http://www.guardian.co.uk/globalisation/story/0,7369,519925,00.html
Italy has installed a missile defence system at Genoa's airport to deter airborne attacks during next week's G8 summit, fuelling hysteria about looming violence.
A land-based battery of rockets with a range of nine miles and an altitude of 5,000 feet has been positioned in the latest security measure against perceived threats from terrorists and protesters.
--------------------------------------------------------
You would THINK that it would be the NEW YORK TIMES' job, and duty, to highlight such a clear and appalling lie on the part of such an important official of the US government.
Yet there was the Times, not only giving the nation's NATIONAL SECURITY ADVISOR a "free pass" whitewash for gross incompetence before 9-11, but hell, the Times
#1. joined the Bush admin. in STONEWALLING a 9-11 commission until the 9-11 widows demanded it,
#2. didn't express any vocal or thorough opposition to PROMOTING Condoleeza Rice to Secretary of State despite her gross incompetence as National Security Advisor; and
#3. the NY Times JOINED the administration in successfully turning the 9-11 commission into a whitewash, with Bush and Cheney farcically testifying TOGETHER, neither of them under oath!
So much for the ashes of 9-11 victims, still floating in the air. (And today, the NY Times JOINS the Administration's PROPAGANDA EFFORTS to portray the admin. as "LEADING the war on Terror, even though the 9-11 Commission Final Report gave the Bush White House "D" and "F" - FAILING! - grades for post 9-11 security and counter-terror preparations to America's STILL vulnerable infrastructure.
http://www.9-11pdp.org/press/2005-12-05_summary.pdf
Clearly, the NEW YORK TIMES is JOINED AT THE HIP with the Bush administration - daily BETRAYING AMERICA'S SECURITY in pursuit of a "WAR UBER ALLES" agenda, the "war on terror" as license to drop bombs anywhere in the Muslim world as the first resort for America's beserk Jewish neo-cons and Southern Neo-confederates.
Mr. Parry's call on THOMAS FRIEDMAN to RESIGN may not range as far and wide as our indictment of the New York Times (above), nor does Mr. Parry try to list all of the lies, distortions, omissions, and disinformation that the Times has produced (spewed) over the past decade.
But Mr. Parry certainly does captures the ARROGANCE and HYPOCRISY of Mr. Friedman's scorn and derision for those MILLIONS of American citizens and voters - a MAJORITY OF US - who oppose Mr. Bush's negligent, incompetent, and fraud-centered occupation of Iraq, a war based on abject lies and raw demogogue media manipulation.
Also, don't miss our previous post, David Sirota catching the NY Times' David Brooks contempt for American voters and democracy.
http://mediawhoresusa.blogspot.com/2006/08/media-whores-despise-democracy-david.html
<< In other words, according to Friedman, Americans who were right about the ill-fated invasion of Iraq are still airheads when it comes to the bigger picture, while the pundits and politicians who were dead wrong on Iraq deserve pats on the back for their wise analyses of the larger problem. >>
<< As for Friedman, despite botching the biggest foreign-policy story in the post-Cold War era, he retains his prized space on the New York Times Op-Ed page, which, in turn, guarantees that his books, even ones with obvious and pedantic themes such as The World Is Flat, jump to the top of the bestseller lists.
Friedman, who once liked to call himself a “Tony Blair Democrat” (before the British prime minister was unmasked as one of Bush’s chief enablers), now positions himself closer to formerly pro-war Democrats who have triangulated their way to positions critical of Bush’s execution of the Iraq War but not the invasion itself.
In other words, Friedman has re-branded himself what might be called a “Hillary Clinton Democrat.” He also has begun promoting as a favorite new theme something that was obvious to many Bush critics years ago: that one pillar of a sane Middle East policy would be to aggressively confront America’s addiction to oil. >>
***************************************************************
NYT's Friedman Should Resign
By Robert Parry
August 21, 2006
http://www.consortiumnews.com/2006/082106.html
New York Times foreign policy analyst Thomas L. Friedman finally has come to the conclusion that George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq – which Friedman enthusiastically supported with the clever slogan “give war a chance” – wasn’t such a good idea after all.
Noting that “it is now obvious that we are not midwifing democracy in Iraq. We are babysitting a civil war,” Friedman wrote, “that means ‘staying the course’ is pointless, and it’s time to start thinking about Plan B – how we might disengage with the least damage possible.” [NYT, Aug. 4, 2006]
Yet, despite this implicit admission that the war has unnecessarily killed tens of thousands of Iraqis and more than 2,600 U.S. soldiers, Friedman continues to slight Americans who resisted the rush to war in the first place.
Twelve days after his shift in position, Friedman demeaned Americans who opposed the Iraq War as “antiwar activists who haven’t thought a whit about the larger struggle we’re in,” presumably a reference to the threat from Islamic extremism. [NYT, Aug. 16, 2006]
In other words, according to Friedman, Americans who were right about the ill-fated invasion of Iraq are still airheads when it comes to the bigger picture, while the pundits and politicians who were dead wrong on Iraq deserve pats on the back for their wise analyses of the larger problem.
The Rabbit Hole
At times, it’s as if Official Washington has become a sinister version of Alice in Wonderland. Under the bizarre rules of Washington’s pundit society, the foreign policy “experts,” who acted like Cheshire Cats pointing the United States in wrong directions, get rewarded for their judgment and Americans who opposed going down the rabbit hole in the first place earn only derision.
As for Friedman, despite botching the biggest foreign-policy story in the post-Cold War era, he retains his prized space on the New York Times Op-Ed page, which, in turn, guarantees that his books, even ones with obvious and pedantic themes such as The World Is Flat, jump to the top of the bestseller lists.
Friedman, who once liked to call himself a “Tony Blair Democrat” (before the British prime minister was unmasked as one of Bush’s chief enablers), now positions himself closer to formerly pro-war Democrats who have triangulated their way to positions critical of Bush’s execution of the Iraq War but not the invasion itself.
In other words, Friedman has re-branded himself what might be called a “Hillary Clinton Democrat.” He also has begun promoting as a favorite new theme something that was obvious to many Bush critics years ago: that one pillar of a sane Middle East policy would be to aggressively confront America’s addiction to oil.
Some readers might praise Friedman for his belated second thoughts on Iraq and for his new enthusiasm for energy independence. But is it fair for Friedman to keep disparaging Americans who were prescient about the Iraq fiasco – and who have urged a less violent approach to the Islamic world?
Many Iraq War critics, from former Vice President Al Gore to the hundreds of thousands of Americans who took to the streets in early 2003, proved they had a more reasonable strategy on Iraq – letting United Nations inspectors finish their search for Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction – than did Bush’s war council and his cheerleaders in the U.S. news media. [For an early warning of the Iraq disaster, see Consortiumnews.com’s “Bay of Pigs Meets Black Hawk Down.”]
As for the larger concern about reducing Islamic extremism, many Bush critics point to the traditional advice of counterinsurgency experts who warn against an over-reliance on force to quell unrest because excessive violence tends to alienate a country’s population and drives them toward rebellion, rather than toward peace.
To win hearts and minds, more subtle strategies are required, targeting the root causes of popular resentments, offering realistic options for a better life, and then systematically isolating die-hard extremist elements.
In the Middle East, such a strategy would demand an equitable settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, steady support for political reform, and expanded economic opportunities for the region’s common people, not just the wealthy elites. A sensible U.S. energy policy – less desperate for oil – would help, too.
Violent Outbursts
Given the bitterness felt by many Arabs over what they see as their decades of humiliation by the West and for the corruption of U.S.-backed Arab leaders, there also must be some forbearance for outbursts of violence.
Overreaction to provocations by small bands of Islamic extremists may be understandable from an emotional viewpoint, but tit-for-tat violence can be counterproductive in stopping the region’s cycles of violence. Indiscriminate counterterrorism plays into the hands of the terrorists.
Many Americans understood this reality in 2001-2002 supporting targeted attacks against al-Qaeda in retaliation for 9/11 while opposing Bush’s strategy of using military force to remake the Middle East.
These Americans recognized that Bush’s vision of a countries either “with us or with the terrorists” was simplistic and dangerous; his one-sided approach to backing all Israeli policies was harmful both to Arabs and Israelis by eliminating the key U.S. role as “honest broker”; and his crypto-racist rounding up and imprisoning of Muslims on the flimsiest of evidence was destructive to America’s reputation for justice and equality.
In this view, Bush’s black-and-white reaction to a world of grays was a recipe for disaster. But this reasonable opinion was largely excluded from the national debate.
Yet, while major news outlets turned mostly a deaf ear to these voices, influential pundits like Friedman preached the glorious benefits of war, from the Op-Ed pages to the TV studios. Indeed, Friedman has been among the highest-profile foreign-policy analysts who have advocated the use of U.S. air power, especially against Iraq.
'Give War a Chance'
As media critic Norman Solomon wrote in March 2002, Friedman’s pro-bombing influence stretched from his Times Op-Ed column to regular segments on PBS news programs, not to mention appearances on “Meet the Press,” “Face the Nation” and even the David Letterman show.
Solomon wrote: “Friedman has been a zealous advocate of ‘bombing Iraq, over and over and over again’ (in the words of a January 1998 column). Three years ago, when he offered a pithy list of prescriptions for Washington’s policymakers, it included: ‘Blow up a different power station in Iraq every week, so no one knows when the lights will go off or who’s in charge.’”
Solomon continued: “In an introduction to the book Iraq Under Siege, editor Anthony Arnove points out: ‘Every power station that is targeted means more food and medicine that will not be refrigerated, hospitals that will lack electricity, water that will be contaminated, and people who will die.’
“But Friedman-style bravado goes over big with editors and network producers who share his disinterest in counting the human costs. Many journalists seem eager to fawn over their stratospheric colleague. ‘Nobody understands the world the way he [Friedman] does,’ NBC’s Tim Russert claims.
“Sometimes, Friedman fixates on four words in particular. ‘My motto is very simple: Give war a chance,’ he told Diane Sawyer” on “Good Morning America.” [For the full Solomon column, see Consortiumnews.com’s “Giving War a Chance.”]
Seeking Vindication
Though the disastrous consequences of these cavalier recommendations became apparent fairly soon after the March 2003 invasion of Iraq, Friedman instead searched for slivers of vindication amid the carnage.
Finally, in early 2005, he penned a column entitled “A Day to Remember,” calling himself “unreservedly happy” about the Iraqi national election and declared “you should be, too.” [NYT, Feb. 3, 2005]
A few weeks later, Friedman was adding tentative progress in Israeli-Palestinian negotiations and Lebanese demands for a full Syrian withdrawal as further evidence of the wisdom of invading Iraq. Friedman hailed the three developments as historical “tipping points” possibly foreshadowing “incredible” changes in the Middle East. [NYT, Feb. 27, 2005]
Four days later, Friedman added a touch of self-pity to his sense of vindication. “The last couple of years have not been easy for anyone, myself included, who hoped that the Iraq war would produce a decent, democratizing outcome,” he wrote. [NYT, March 3, 2005]
But the reality was never as Friedman presented it. The Iraqi election was a means for pro-Iranian Shiite parties to consolidate their dominance over the previously powerful Sunni minority, setting the stage for more sectarian violence, not some democratic national reconciliation.
The tentative progress in the Israeli-Palestinian talks resulted from the death of long-time Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat, not as a consequence of the Iraq War. Indeed, a post-Arafat election in the Palestinian territories led to a Hamas victory and to the latest round of Israeli violence against Palestinians in Gaza, now including Israel’s arrest of deputy prime minister Nasser al-Shaer and more than two dozen Hamas cabinet members and legislators. [NYT, Aug. 20, 2006]
As for Lebanon, Bush’s encouragement of Israel to launch a heavy assault against Hezbollah strongholds in south Lebanon – echoing his “shock and awe” strategy in Iraq – has left much of Lebanon’s economic infrastructure in ruins and has elevated the status of Hezbollah guerrillas in the eyes of many Lebanese and across the Middle East.
Catching the Wave
In other words, few of Friedman’s assessments have turned out to be either thoughtful or accurate. Rather than anchoring his work in objective fact and unbiased analysis, he seems instead to have mastered the skill of catching the wave of Washington’s latest “conventional wisdom.”
While that ability has proven very profitable for Friedman, it has hurt U.S. foreign policy and contributed to the deaths of 2,600 U.S. soldiers and tens of thousands of civilians in the Middle East.
But Friedman is not alone. Many major news organizations fill their opinion columns and their on-air commentary with well-paid pundits who also cheered on the Iraq War.
The Washington Post’s editorial section offers up nearly the same line-up of columnists who ran with the pro-war herd from 2002 through 2005. Some, like David Ignatius, have slowly begun to retreat from their enthusiasm for invading Iraq; others, like Charles Krauthammer, remain true believers in the neoconservative cause.
Editorial Page Editor Fred Hiatt stays ensconced, too, despite admitting that his pre-war editorials shouldn’t have treated the alleged threat from Iraq’s WMD as a “flat fact” instead of an allegation.
Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen – who like Friedman presents himself as a slightly left-of-center thinker – is another pundit who admitted misjudgments on Iraq without really accepting blame or showing remorse.
“Those of us who once advocated this war [in Iraq] are humbled,” Cohen wrote in a column on April 4, 2006. “It’s not just that we grossly underestimated the enemy. We vastly overestimated the Bush administration. …
“Victory in Iraq is now three years or so overdue and a bit over budget,” Cohen wrote. “Lives have been lost for no good reason – never mind the money – and now Bush suggests that his successor may still have to keep troops in Iraq.”
It may be positive news that the likes of Friedman and Cohen have finally acknowledged realities long apparent to many other Americans. Still, the halfhearted mea culpas – often combined with continued slights against those who were right – fall far short of the accountability that the deaths and maiming of so many people would seem to justify.
Under principles of international law applied from Nuremberg to Rwanda, propagandists who contribute to war crimes or encourage crimes against humanity can be put in the dock alongside the actual killers.
Though such a fate may not await America’s pro-war pundits, Friedman and other commentators who helped ease the way to Bush’s unprovoked invasion of Iraq and thus contributed to the ongoing slaughters in the Middle East might at least have the decency to admit their incompetence and resign.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq, can be ordered at secrecyandprivilege.com. It's also available at Amazon.com, as is his 1999 book, Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & 'Project Truth.
Even when this story was vindicated, Newsweek continued to downgrade Parry's reporting and downplay the Republican administration's above-the-law tactics, and Parry was eventually forced to resign. He has not been offered a prominent job as an investigative reporter in the US corporate "major media" since, which serves as yet another example of how "liberals," or more specifically Repuglican exposing journalists, are EXILED or PURGED from the American media.
The New York Times, on the other hand, exhibits the complete OPPOSITE behavior of the courageous Mr. Parry: The Times has, over the past decade or two, become an institution of PAID PROFESSIONAL LIARS, as this post will try to illustrate, often PATHOGICALLY so. The Times is so bad that, even as their own home city reeled from the coordinated attack of 9-11 suicide bombing hijackers, as the smoke and ashes of burned bodies of their fellow New Yorkers floated in the air around the NY Times building, the Times STILL adhered to the Bush admin.'s insane defense of their 9-11 incompetence, as for example then Nat. Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice saying "NO ONE COULD HAVE ANTICIPATED the use of airliners as flying bombs." Not only was Ms. Rice lying, but she was transparently, flagrantly doing so. After all, the ITALIAN POLICE stationed surface-to-air missiles around the city of Genoa, Italy, during the G8 summit there, specifically to ward off the prospect of Al Qaida hijacking an airliner and using it as a flying bomb to attack the assembled G8 presidents.
---------------------------------------------------
CNN mentions anti-aircraft missiles as security precautions at Genoa G8 summit:
http://archives.cnn.com/2001/WORLD/europe/07/20/genoa.protests/index.html
and
Missiles to protect summit leaders
Rory Carroll in Rome, The Guardian
Wednesday July 11, 2001
http://www.guardian.co.uk/globalisation/story/0,7369,519925,00.html
Italy has installed a missile defence system at Genoa's airport to deter airborne attacks during next week's G8 summit, fuelling hysteria about looming violence.
A land-based battery of rockets with a range of nine miles and an altitude of 5,000 feet has been positioned in the latest security measure against perceived threats from terrorists and protesters.
--------------------------------------------------------
You would THINK that it would be the NEW YORK TIMES' job, and duty, to highlight such a clear and appalling lie on the part of such an important official of the US government.
Yet there was the Times, not only giving the nation's NATIONAL SECURITY ADVISOR a "free pass" whitewash for gross incompetence before 9-11, but hell, the Times
#1. joined the Bush admin. in STONEWALLING a 9-11 commission until the 9-11 widows demanded it,
#2. didn't express any vocal or thorough opposition to PROMOTING Condoleeza Rice to Secretary of State despite her gross incompetence as National Security Advisor; and
#3. the NY Times JOINED the administration in successfully turning the 9-11 commission into a whitewash, with Bush and Cheney farcically testifying TOGETHER, neither of them under oath!
So much for the ashes of 9-11 victims, still floating in the air. (And today, the NY Times JOINS the Administration's PROPAGANDA EFFORTS to portray the admin. as "LEADING the war on Terror, even though the 9-11 Commission Final Report gave the Bush White House "D" and "F" - FAILING! - grades for post 9-11 security and counter-terror preparations to America's STILL vulnerable infrastructure.
http://www.9-11pdp.org/press/2005-12-05_summary.pdf
Clearly, the NEW YORK TIMES is JOINED AT THE HIP with the Bush administration - daily BETRAYING AMERICA'S SECURITY in pursuit of a "WAR UBER ALLES" agenda, the "war on terror" as license to drop bombs anywhere in the Muslim world as the first resort for America's beserk Jewish neo-cons and Southern Neo-confederates.
Mr. Parry's call on THOMAS FRIEDMAN to RESIGN may not range as far and wide as our indictment of the New York Times (above), nor does Mr. Parry try to list all of the lies, distortions, omissions, and disinformation that the Times has produced (spewed) over the past decade.
But Mr. Parry certainly does captures the ARROGANCE and HYPOCRISY of Mr. Friedman's scorn and derision for those MILLIONS of American citizens and voters - a MAJORITY OF US - who oppose Mr. Bush's negligent, incompetent, and fraud-centered occupation of Iraq, a war based on abject lies and raw demogogue media manipulation.
Also, don't miss our previous post, David Sirota catching the NY Times' David Brooks contempt for American voters and democracy.
http://mediawhoresusa.blogspot.com/2006/08/media-whores-despise-democracy-david.html
<< In other words, according to Friedman, Americans who were right about the ill-fated invasion of Iraq are still airheads when it comes to the bigger picture, while the pundits and politicians who were dead wrong on Iraq deserve pats on the back for their wise analyses of the larger problem. >>
<< As for Friedman, despite botching the biggest foreign-policy story in the post-Cold War era, he retains his prized space on the New York Times Op-Ed page, which, in turn, guarantees that his books, even ones with obvious and pedantic themes such as The World Is Flat, jump to the top of the bestseller lists.
Friedman, who once liked to call himself a “Tony Blair Democrat” (before the British prime minister was unmasked as one of Bush’s chief enablers), now positions himself closer to formerly pro-war Democrats who have triangulated their way to positions critical of Bush’s execution of the Iraq War but not the invasion itself.
In other words, Friedman has re-branded himself what might be called a “Hillary Clinton Democrat.” He also has begun promoting as a favorite new theme something that was obvious to many Bush critics years ago: that one pillar of a sane Middle East policy would be to aggressively confront America’s addiction to oil. >>
***************************************************************
NYT's Friedman Should Resign
By Robert Parry
August 21, 2006
http://www.consortiumnews.com/2006/082106.html
New York Times foreign policy analyst Thomas L. Friedman finally has come to the conclusion that George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq – which Friedman enthusiastically supported with the clever slogan “give war a chance” – wasn’t such a good idea after all.
Noting that “it is now obvious that we are not midwifing democracy in Iraq. We are babysitting a civil war,” Friedman wrote, “that means ‘staying the course’ is pointless, and it’s time to start thinking about Plan B – how we might disengage with the least damage possible.” [NYT, Aug. 4, 2006]
Yet, despite this implicit admission that the war has unnecessarily killed tens of thousands of Iraqis and more than 2,600 U.S. soldiers, Friedman continues to slight Americans who resisted the rush to war in the first place.
Twelve days after his shift in position, Friedman demeaned Americans who opposed the Iraq War as “antiwar activists who haven’t thought a whit about the larger struggle we’re in,” presumably a reference to the threat from Islamic extremism. [NYT, Aug. 16, 2006]
In other words, according to Friedman, Americans who were right about the ill-fated invasion of Iraq are still airheads when it comes to the bigger picture, while the pundits and politicians who were dead wrong on Iraq deserve pats on the back for their wise analyses of the larger problem.
The Rabbit Hole
At times, it’s as if Official Washington has become a sinister version of Alice in Wonderland. Under the bizarre rules of Washington’s pundit society, the foreign policy “experts,” who acted like Cheshire Cats pointing the United States in wrong directions, get rewarded for their judgment and Americans who opposed going down the rabbit hole in the first place earn only derision.
As for Friedman, despite botching the biggest foreign-policy story in the post-Cold War era, he retains his prized space on the New York Times Op-Ed page, which, in turn, guarantees that his books, even ones with obvious and pedantic themes such as The World Is Flat, jump to the top of the bestseller lists.
Friedman, who once liked to call himself a “Tony Blair Democrat” (before the British prime minister was unmasked as one of Bush’s chief enablers), now positions himself closer to formerly pro-war Democrats who have triangulated their way to positions critical of Bush’s execution of the Iraq War but not the invasion itself.
In other words, Friedman has re-branded himself what might be called a “Hillary Clinton Democrat.” He also has begun promoting as a favorite new theme something that was obvious to many Bush critics years ago: that one pillar of a sane Middle East policy would be to aggressively confront America’s addiction to oil.
Some readers might praise Friedman for his belated second thoughts on Iraq and for his new enthusiasm for energy independence. But is it fair for Friedman to keep disparaging Americans who were prescient about the Iraq fiasco – and who have urged a less violent approach to the Islamic world?
Many Iraq War critics, from former Vice President Al Gore to the hundreds of thousands of Americans who took to the streets in early 2003, proved they had a more reasonable strategy on Iraq – letting United Nations inspectors finish their search for Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction – than did Bush’s war council and his cheerleaders in the U.S. news media. [For an early warning of the Iraq disaster, see Consortiumnews.com’s “Bay of Pigs Meets Black Hawk Down.”]
As for the larger concern about reducing Islamic extremism, many Bush critics point to the traditional advice of counterinsurgency experts who warn against an over-reliance on force to quell unrest because excessive violence tends to alienate a country’s population and drives them toward rebellion, rather than toward peace.
To win hearts and minds, more subtle strategies are required, targeting the root causes of popular resentments, offering realistic options for a better life, and then systematically isolating die-hard extremist elements.
In the Middle East, such a strategy would demand an equitable settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, steady support for political reform, and expanded economic opportunities for the region’s common people, not just the wealthy elites. A sensible U.S. energy policy – less desperate for oil – would help, too.
Violent Outbursts
Given the bitterness felt by many Arabs over what they see as their decades of humiliation by the West and for the corruption of U.S.-backed Arab leaders, there also must be some forbearance for outbursts of violence.
Overreaction to provocations by small bands of Islamic extremists may be understandable from an emotional viewpoint, but tit-for-tat violence can be counterproductive in stopping the region’s cycles of violence. Indiscriminate counterterrorism plays into the hands of the terrorists.
Many Americans understood this reality in 2001-2002 supporting targeted attacks against al-Qaeda in retaliation for 9/11 while opposing Bush’s strategy of using military force to remake the Middle East.
These Americans recognized that Bush’s vision of a countries either “with us or with the terrorists” was simplistic and dangerous; his one-sided approach to backing all Israeli policies was harmful both to Arabs and Israelis by eliminating the key U.S. role as “honest broker”; and his crypto-racist rounding up and imprisoning of Muslims on the flimsiest of evidence was destructive to America’s reputation for justice and equality.
In this view, Bush’s black-and-white reaction to a world of grays was a recipe for disaster. But this reasonable opinion was largely excluded from the national debate.
Yet, while major news outlets turned mostly a deaf ear to these voices, influential pundits like Friedman preached the glorious benefits of war, from the Op-Ed pages to the TV studios. Indeed, Friedman has been among the highest-profile foreign-policy analysts who have advocated the use of U.S. air power, especially against Iraq.
'Give War a Chance'
As media critic Norman Solomon wrote in March 2002, Friedman’s pro-bombing influence stretched from his Times Op-Ed column to regular segments on PBS news programs, not to mention appearances on “Meet the Press,” “Face the Nation” and even the David Letterman show.
Solomon wrote: “Friedman has been a zealous advocate of ‘bombing Iraq, over and over and over again’ (in the words of a January 1998 column). Three years ago, when he offered a pithy list of prescriptions for Washington’s policymakers, it included: ‘Blow up a different power station in Iraq every week, so no one knows when the lights will go off or who’s in charge.’”
Solomon continued: “In an introduction to the book Iraq Under Siege, editor Anthony Arnove points out: ‘Every power station that is targeted means more food and medicine that will not be refrigerated, hospitals that will lack electricity, water that will be contaminated, and people who will die.’
“But Friedman-style bravado goes over big with editors and network producers who share his disinterest in counting the human costs. Many journalists seem eager to fawn over their stratospheric colleague. ‘Nobody understands the world the way he [Friedman] does,’ NBC’s Tim Russert claims.
“Sometimes, Friedman fixates on four words in particular. ‘My motto is very simple: Give war a chance,’ he told Diane Sawyer” on “Good Morning America.” [For the full Solomon column, see Consortiumnews.com’s “Giving War a Chance.”]
Seeking Vindication
Though the disastrous consequences of these cavalier recommendations became apparent fairly soon after the March 2003 invasion of Iraq, Friedman instead searched for slivers of vindication amid the carnage.
Finally, in early 2005, he penned a column entitled “A Day to Remember,” calling himself “unreservedly happy” about the Iraqi national election and declared “you should be, too.” [NYT, Feb. 3, 2005]
A few weeks later, Friedman was adding tentative progress in Israeli-Palestinian negotiations and Lebanese demands for a full Syrian withdrawal as further evidence of the wisdom of invading Iraq. Friedman hailed the three developments as historical “tipping points” possibly foreshadowing “incredible” changes in the Middle East. [NYT, Feb. 27, 2005]
Four days later, Friedman added a touch of self-pity to his sense of vindication. “The last couple of years have not been easy for anyone, myself included, who hoped that the Iraq war would produce a decent, democratizing outcome,” he wrote. [NYT, March 3, 2005]
But the reality was never as Friedman presented it. The Iraqi election was a means for pro-Iranian Shiite parties to consolidate their dominance over the previously powerful Sunni minority, setting the stage for more sectarian violence, not some democratic national reconciliation.
The tentative progress in the Israeli-Palestinian talks resulted from the death of long-time Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat, not as a consequence of the Iraq War. Indeed, a post-Arafat election in the Palestinian territories led to a Hamas victory and to the latest round of Israeli violence against Palestinians in Gaza, now including Israel’s arrest of deputy prime minister Nasser al-Shaer and more than two dozen Hamas cabinet members and legislators. [NYT, Aug. 20, 2006]
As for Lebanon, Bush’s encouragement of Israel to launch a heavy assault against Hezbollah strongholds in south Lebanon – echoing his “shock and awe” strategy in Iraq – has left much of Lebanon’s economic infrastructure in ruins and has elevated the status of Hezbollah guerrillas in the eyes of many Lebanese and across the Middle East.
Catching the Wave
In other words, few of Friedman’s assessments have turned out to be either thoughtful or accurate. Rather than anchoring his work in objective fact and unbiased analysis, he seems instead to have mastered the skill of catching the wave of Washington’s latest “conventional wisdom.”
While that ability has proven very profitable for Friedman, it has hurt U.S. foreign policy and contributed to the deaths of 2,600 U.S. soldiers and tens of thousands of civilians in the Middle East.
But Friedman is not alone. Many major news organizations fill their opinion columns and their on-air commentary with well-paid pundits who also cheered on the Iraq War.
The Washington Post’s editorial section offers up nearly the same line-up of columnists who ran with the pro-war herd from 2002 through 2005. Some, like David Ignatius, have slowly begun to retreat from their enthusiasm for invading Iraq; others, like Charles Krauthammer, remain true believers in the neoconservative cause.
Editorial Page Editor Fred Hiatt stays ensconced, too, despite admitting that his pre-war editorials shouldn’t have treated the alleged threat from Iraq’s WMD as a “flat fact” instead of an allegation.
Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen – who like Friedman presents himself as a slightly left-of-center thinker – is another pundit who admitted misjudgments on Iraq without really accepting blame or showing remorse.
“Those of us who once advocated this war [in Iraq] are humbled,” Cohen wrote in a column on April 4, 2006. “It’s not just that we grossly underestimated the enemy. We vastly overestimated the Bush administration. …
“Victory in Iraq is now three years or so overdue and a bit over budget,” Cohen wrote. “Lives have been lost for no good reason – never mind the money – and now Bush suggests that his successor may still have to keep troops in Iraq.”
It may be positive news that the likes of Friedman and Cohen have finally acknowledged realities long apparent to many other Americans. Still, the halfhearted mea culpas – often combined with continued slights against those who were right – fall far short of the accountability that the deaths and maiming of so many people would seem to justify.
Under principles of international law applied from Nuremberg to Rwanda, propagandists who contribute to war crimes or encourage crimes against humanity can be put in the dock alongside the actual killers.
Though such a fate may not await America’s pro-war pundits, Friedman and other commentators who helped ease the way to Bush’s unprovoked invasion of Iraq and thus contributed to the ongoing slaughters in the Middle East might at least have the decency to admit their incompetence and resign.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq, can be ordered at secrecyandprivilege.com. It's also available at Amazon.com, as is his 1999 book, Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & 'Project Truth.
Media Whores BETRAY America's security. Textbook example, Pakistan:
American servicemen and women are bleeding and dying in the hell-hole that Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld have made of Iraq, and STILL our cowardly, lying, corporate media pushes on American viewers and news-consumers a superficial, distorted and disinformative portrayal of America's relations with other countries.
Fun Facts About Afghanistan
Ankush Khardori
20 August 2006
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ankush-khardori/fun-facts-about-pakistan_b_27654.html
It's not often that one's jaw actually drops while reading the newspaper, but I had that experience Sunday afternoon as I read a piece on The New York Times op-ed page by Richard Armitage and Kara Bue about how we must, as the title says, "Keep Pakistan on Our Side." Armitage has the distinction of being one of the few competent officials to have worked on foreign policy for the Bush administration, but he and Bue have turned out one of the most transparent pieces of nonsense I've ever had the displeasure of seeing on the Times' op-ed page -- and this comes from someone who's read most of what Stanley Fish has penned for the paper.
Referring to connections between Pakistan and the alleged participants in the terror plot in London, Armitage and Bue write, "While the arrests may serve as proof to some that the country cannot be relied on as an ally in our fight against Islamic extremism, we would argue that the recent events should harden our resolve to support it." They go on to emphasize some of Pakistan's supposed assistance in the war on terror; to downplay the ways in which Pakistan has acted directly counter to our strategic interests; and to completely ignore or misrepresent a number of facts crucial to understanding and assessing the merits of continuing, in its current form, our relationship with the country.
For starters, nowhere do Armitage and Bue mention that Pakistan's President, General Pervez Musharraf, came to power in a military coup in 1999. After trying to hold elections that pretty much everyone acknowledged were rigged, Musharraf finally managed to engineer a constitutional amendment retroactively legalizing his transparently illegal rise to power. The closest Armitage and Bue come to acknowledging these facts is by writing, in one of the grossest understatements I've ever seen in print, that "much remains to be accomplished [in Pakistan], particularly in terms of democratization." That's it.
Meanwhile, President Bush -- who insists that the spread of democracy is at the heart of his foreign policy -- has given Pakistan status as a major non-NATO ally and called it a "key ally in the war on terror," despite the fact that Freedom House, widely considered one of the best sources for data on democracy in the world, gives Pakistan lower scores in political freedom than -- wait for it -- Iran. While it's often said that the democratic cure for the Musharraf regime would be worse than the disease -- that Islamist parties would quickly rise to power -- a number of scholars vigorously dispute that claim. Frederic Grare, writing recently for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, convincingly argues that the Pakistani Army has deliberately exaggerated the threat from Islamist elements -- which, violent and otherwise, it has nurtured and frequently controlled -- in order to maintain political power and support from countries like ... ours. Husain Haqqani, of Boston University, has been saying much the same thing for years.
Armitage and Bue also focus on Pakistan's aid in the war on terror, but they fail to mention -- startlingly -- that Osama bin Laden is believed to be hiding out (hanging out, really) in northwest Pakistan, with the aid of extremists who Musharraf allowed to roam freely even years after 9/11. Not to worry, Musharraf has helpfully told us; even if were to capture the men who killed nearly 3,000 American citizens, we "will have achieved nothing." Nor do Armitage and Bue mention that Musharraf was one of the Taliban's key allies, or that he continues to tolerate the presence of remnants of that regime -- which threaten to throw Afghanistan into chaos once again -- on the Afghan-Pakistani border. This is no accident. As Steve Coll, probably the most well-informed American journalist on Pakistan, said recently, "the infrastructure that radical Islamist groups have developed in Pakistan is considerable. It includes political parties, social networks, charities, and even businesses. It's not a matter of just a few terrorists hiding in the hills."
As to the plotters in London, Armitage and Bue write as if Pakistan could have used more help in order to deal with the terrorists tied to the British Muslims. The facts suggest otherwise. As Alyssa Ayres wrote in The Wall Street Journal, the "common thread" between the airline bombers is a group in Pakistan known as Jama'at ud-Dawa, which previously went under the name Lashkar-e-Taiba. As Ayres writes, this group "has battled India since 1997, when it began sending suicide-jihadists into Indian Kashmir to 'free' the population. In effect this has meant butchering those who don't subscribe to their seventh-century worldview -- Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims alike -- a program to which the group brings flourishes such as slicing off the noses and ears of those deemed insufficiently pious." In 2002, Musharraf banned Lashkar, in addition to a number of other terrorist organizations. So how did the group manage to reincarnate itself and outwit the Pakistani authorities, which were supposedly determined to rid themselves of these violent elements? By changing its name. Jama'at ud-Dawa then "continued to churn out jihad recruitment material, under the same titles, and to convene massive jihad jamborees to call more of the faithful to arms." Had Musharraf truly wanted to put Lashkar's terrorists out of business, one suspects a name change would not have been sufficient for them to elude his grasp.
I'll wrap things up by noting, with equal parts amusement and shock, Armitage and Bue's statement that "given the exposure of the arms bazaar run by [Pakistan's] top nuclear scientist, Abdul Qadeer Khan, it must prove itself a reliable partner on technology transfer and nuclear proliferation." Indeed. Not pardoning Khan -- who has done more than anyone else in recent history to spread the threat of nuclear weapons technology to our declared enemies, including Iran and North Korea -- would have been a nice start. (He now resides under house arrest in a palatial home in Islamabad.) Or perhaps Pakistan could have been so kind as to allow international weapons inspectors simply to question Khan in order to obtain information about everything he did and who was involved -- facts about which there remain large, dangerous questions. Alas, Pakistan refused to permit the IAEA to interview him.
Like Armitage and Bue, I'm all for reevaluating America's relationship with Pakistan, though I would generally oppose further cozying up to an authoritarian regime that harbors and supports terrorists, as it has also done with the mastermind of the world's greatest black market in nuclear weapons technology. But one thing's certain: If we are to have the discussion that Armitage and Bue seek to start, we had better get our facts straight first.
Fun Facts About Afghanistan
Ankush Khardori
20 August 2006
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ankush-khardori/fun-facts-about-pakistan_b_27654.html
It's not often that one's jaw actually drops while reading the newspaper, but I had that experience Sunday afternoon as I read a piece on The New York Times op-ed page by Richard Armitage and Kara Bue about how we must, as the title says, "Keep Pakistan on Our Side." Armitage has the distinction of being one of the few competent officials to have worked on foreign policy for the Bush administration, but he and Bue have turned out one of the most transparent pieces of nonsense I've ever had the displeasure of seeing on the Times' op-ed page -- and this comes from someone who's read most of what Stanley Fish has penned for the paper.
Referring to connections between Pakistan and the alleged participants in the terror plot in London, Armitage and Bue write, "While the arrests may serve as proof to some that the country cannot be relied on as an ally in our fight against Islamic extremism, we would argue that the recent events should harden our resolve to support it." They go on to emphasize some of Pakistan's supposed assistance in the war on terror; to downplay the ways in which Pakistan has acted directly counter to our strategic interests; and to completely ignore or misrepresent a number of facts crucial to understanding and assessing the merits of continuing, in its current form, our relationship with the country.
For starters, nowhere do Armitage and Bue mention that Pakistan's President, General Pervez Musharraf, came to power in a military coup in 1999. After trying to hold elections that pretty much everyone acknowledged were rigged, Musharraf finally managed to engineer a constitutional amendment retroactively legalizing his transparently illegal rise to power. The closest Armitage and Bue come to acknowledging these facts is by writing, in one of the grossest understatements I've ever seen in print, that "much remains to be accomplished [in Pakistan], particularly in terms of democratization." That's it.
Meanwhile, President Bush -- who insists that the spread of democracy is at the heart of his foreign policy -- has given Pakistan status as a major non-NATO ally and called it a "key ally in the war on terror," despite the fact that Freedom House, widely considered one of the best sources for data on democracy in the world, gives Pakistan lower scores in political freedom than -- wait for it -- Iran. While it's often said that the democratic cure for the Musharraf regime would be worse than the disease -- that Islamist parties would quickly rise to power -- a number of scholars vigorously dispute that claim. Frederic Grare, writing recently for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, convincingly argues that the Pakistani Army has deliberately exaggerated the threat from Islamist elements -- which, violent and otherwise, it has nurtured and frequently controlled -- in order to maintain political power and support from countries like ... ours. Husain Haqqani, of Boston University, has been saying much the same thing for years.
Armitage and Bue also focus on Pakistan's aid in the war on terror, but they fail to mention -- startlingly -- that Osama bin Laden is believed to be hiding out (hanging out, really) in northwest Pakistan, with the aid of extremists who Musharraf allowed to roam freely even years after 9/11. Not to worry, Musharraf has helpfully told us; even if were to capture the men who killed nearly 3,000 American citizens, we "will have achieved nothing." Nor do Armitage and Bue mention that Musharraf was one of the Taliban's key allies, or that he continues to tolerate the presence of remnants of that regime -- which threaten to throw Afghanistan into chaos once again -- on the Afghan-Pakistani border. This is no accident. As Steve Coll, probably the most well-informed American journalist on Pakistan, said recently, "the infrastructure that radical Islamist groups have developed in Pakistan is considerable. It includes political parties, social networks, charities, and even businesses. It's not a matter of just a few terrorists hiding in the hills."
As to the plotters in London, Armitage and Bue write as if Pakistan could have used more help in order to deal with the terrorists tied to the British Muslims. The facts suggest otherwise. As Alyssa Ayres wrote in The Wall Street Journal, the "common thread" between the airline bombers is a group in Pakistan known as Jama'at ud-Dawa, which previously went under the name Lashkar-e-Taiba. As Ayres writes, this group "has battled India since 1997, when it began sending suicide-jihadists into Indian Kashmir to 'free' the population. In effect this has meant butchering those who don't subscribe to their seventh-century worldview -- Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims alike -- a program to which the group brings flourishes such as slicing off the noses and ears of those deemed insufficiently pious." In 2002, Musharraf banned Lashkar, in addition to a number of other terrorist organizations. So how did the group manage to reincarnate itself and outwit the Pakistani authorities, which were supposedly determined to rid themselves of these violent elements? By changing its name. Jama'at ud-Dawa then "continued to churn out jihad recruitment material, under the same titles, and to convene massive jihad jamborees to call more of the faithful to arms." Had Musharraf truly wanted to put Lashkar's terrorists out of business, one suspects a name change would not have been sufficient for them to elude his grasp.
I'll wrap things up by noting, with equal parts amusement and shock, Armitage and Bue's statement that "given the exposure of the arms bazaar run by [Pakistan's] top nuclear scientist, Abdul Qadeer Khan, it must prove itself a reliable partner on technology transfer and nuclear proliferation." Indeed. Not pardoning Khan -- who has done more than anyone else in recent history to spread the threat of nuclear weapons technology to our declared enemies, including Iran and North Korea -- would have been a nice start. (He now resides under house arrest in a palatial home in Islamabad.) Or perhaps Pakistan could have been so kind as to allow international weapons inspectors simply to question Khan in order to obtain information about everything he did and who was involved -- facts about which there remain large, dangerous questions. Alas, Pakistan refused to permit the IAEA to interview him.
Like Armitage and Bue, I'm all for reevaluating America's relationship with Pakistan, though I would generally oppose further cozying up to an authoritarian regime that harbors and supports terrorists, as it has also done with the mastermind of the world's greatest black market in nuclear weapons technology. But one thing's certain: If we are to have the discussion that Armitage and Bue seek to start, we had better get our facts straight first.
Media Whores SHOVE JonBenet story down our throats....
As we all learned in elementary school, there are costs and consequences for our actions. Yet the American corporate mediatocracy only continues to PROFIT from selling us garbage, trash, and misinformation, as they take their cut from the Bush kleptocracy's "loot American taxpayers to enrich our cronies" agenda - billions in tax cuts for major media corporations
that, as our previous post pointed out, prefers to sell us CONSUMERISM, IGNORANCE, and celebrity news, to the EXCLUSION of information that is vital to our existance as a nation.
(For example, 'the media' REFUSES to make a front-page issue of VOTE FRAUD and HACKABLE computerized vote counting equipment... nor do they spend much time on the time-bomb in the making of America's returning PTSD Iraq war veterans - remember, both Timmy McVeigh and the DC sniper were combat traumatized veterans, and their actions would kill dozens of Americans and cost tens of millions of dollars in damages.)
All JonBenet, All The Time
08.20.2006
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bob-geiger/all-jonbenet-all-the-tim_b_27626.html
In the news this morning we have yet another bloodbath in Iraq, as gunmen shoot up a Shiite religious procession in Baghdad, killing at least 16 people and injuring 230. More American troops have been killed in Afghanistan by Taliban insurgents -- guess we didn't really get rid of the Taliban before George W. Bush's Iraq disaster was started -- and there's renewed trouble in the tenuous Middle East cease-fire.
And what's the top story on all the cable news channels this Sunday morning?
The JonBenet Ramsey case and the gripping fact that newly-discovered suspect John Mark Karr is on a plane and coming back to the United States.
Are you kidding me? Really. Are you freaking kidding me?
Don't get me wrong: I'm the father of a nine-year-old boy and I can appreciate the horror of any child being murdered. But this case is one child, it's over a decade old and, at this point, there are serious questions over whether Karr will even turn out to be a viable suspect in the killings.
This may be an important regional story in Colorado, where the killing occurred and, perhaps, the seventh or eighth story told to a national audience. But considering everything else of real importance, that truly affects the stability of our planet and real peoples' lives, this is nowhere near the top story on our national news.
Adding to what will continue to be an ongoing media obsession with this case -- in which our single-threaded Corporate Media finds this to be the only story they can cover -- is the fact that it's now been revealed that Karr was a patient at a Bangkok clinic that specializes in... sex-change operations! And it looks like Karr went there for treatments.
Oh, boy. The only way this gets knocked out of the news now is if some winsome blonde chick goes missing in the Caribbean.
So here's a chicken-and-egg question: Have the American people become so dumbed-down because this is the kind of non-story that the Corporate Media beats into the ground for hours on end and for days at a time? Or does the media do it because we have become so vacant and disinterested in real news that this kind of stuff is all we really care about?
There's a lot of speculation going on about whether Karr's story even makes sense and a friend of mine who is both a lawyer and a writer said he would not report more than a one-liner about this until DNA evidence or other indisputable proof verifies that Karr caused this little girl's death.
For the sake of our national awareness and intellect, I hope DNA testing is done quickly and whoever should be caring so intensely gets to the bottom of this case. Even if Karr does turn out to be the killer, this is not the top story in the world right now. It's not even close.
And what if it's discovered that he's just an attention-seeking nutcase that had nothing to do with it?
At this point, the media has pushed this as the story we should all care about to the exclusion of all others. They've made the decision that a suspect in a 10-year-old murder case and the fact that he is getting on an airplane is more important than the incendiary situation in the Middle East, a civil war in Iraq that's killing an average of 100 people a day and the way our own involvement in that quagmire drags our country further into the toilet every day. And even if they did focus on those real stories, they should still find time to talk about 46 million Americans with no health insurance and a looming oil crisis that will have a severe impact on people as winter approaches. That's what journalists are supposed to do for a living.
But in defiance of all of that, we are now assaulted with all JonBenet, all the time.
In their warped news judgment, the media is deciding for all of us that we should be more concerned about the minute-by-minute developments with John Mark Karr than the fact that our brave men and women continue to be lost in Iraq and Afghanistan. They are making a decision every hour that a story of such incredibly specious importance, is more relevant than the deaths of our men and women serving in uniform overseas.
And, for that alone, they should be profoundly ashamed.
You can reach Bob at geiger.bob@gmail.com and read more from him at BobGeiger.com.
that, as our previous post pointed out, prefers to sell us CONSUMERISM, IGNORANCE, and celebrity news, to the EXCLUSION of information that is vital to our existance as a nation.
(For example, 'the media' REFUSES to make a front-page issue of VOTE FRAUD and HACKABLE computerized vote counting equipment... nor do they spend much time on the time-bomb in the making of America's returning PTSD Iraq war veterans - remember, both Timmy McVeigh and the DC sniper were combat traumatized veterans, and their actions would kill dozens of Americans and cost tens of millions of dollars in damages.)
All JonBenet, All The Time
08.20.2006
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bob-geiger/all-jonbenet-all-the-tim_b_27626.html
In the news this morning we have yet another bloodbath in Iraq, as gunmen shoot up a Shiite religious procession in Baghdad, killing at least 16 people and injuring 230. More American troops have been killed in Afghanistan by Taliban insurgents -- guess we didn't really get rid of the Taliban before George W. Bush's Iraq disaster was started -- and there's renewed trouble in the tenuous Middle East cease-fire.
And what's the top story on all the cable news channels this Sunday morning?
The JonBenet Ramsey case and the gripping fact that newly-discovered suspect John Mark Karr is on a plane and coming back to the United States.
Are you kidding me? Really. Are you freaking kidding me?
Don't get me wrong: I'm the father of a nine-year-old boy and I can appreciate the horror of any child being murdered. But this case is one child, it's over a decade old and, at this point, there are serious questions over whether Karr will even turn out to be a viable suspect in the killings.
This may be an important regional story in Colorado, where the killing occurred and, perhaps, the seventh or eighth story told to a national audience. But considering everything else of real importance, that truly affects the stability of our planet and real peoples' lives, this is nowhere near the top story on our national news.
Adding to what will continue to be an ongoing media obsession with this case -- in which our single-threaded Corporate Media finds this to be the only story they can cover -- is the fact that it's now been revealed that Karr was a patient at a Bangkok clinic that specializes in... sex-change operations! And it looks like Karr went there for treatments.
Oh, boy. The only way this gets knocked out of the news now is if some winsome blonde chick goes missing in the Caribbean.
So here's a chicken-and-egg question: Have the American people become so dumbed-down because this is the kind of non-story that the Corporate Media beats into the ground for hours on end and for days at a time? Or does the media do it because we have become so vacant and disinterested in real news that this kind of stuff is all we really care about?
There's a lot of speculation going on about whether Karr's story even makes sense and a friend of mine who is both a lawyer and a writer said he would not report more than a one-liner about this until DNA evidence or other indisputable proof verifies that Karr caused this little girl's death.
For the sake of our national awareness and intellect, I hope DNA testing is done quickly and whoever should be caring so intensely gets to the bottom of this case. Even if Karr does turn out to be the killer, this is not the top story in the world right now. It's not even close.
And what if it's discovered that he's just an attention-seeking nutcase that had nothing to do with it?
At this point, the media has pushed this as the story we should all care about to the exclusion of all others. They've made the decision that a suspect in a 10-year-old murder case and the fact that he is getting on an airplane is more important than the incendiary situation in the Middle East, a civil war in Iraq that's killing an average of 100 people a day and the way our own involvement in that quagmire drags our country further into the toilet every day. And even if they did focus on those real stories, they should still find time to talk about 46 million Americans with no health insurance and a looming oil crisis that will have a severe impact on people as winter approaches. That's what journalists are supposed to do for a living.
But in defiance of all of that, we are now assaulted with all JonBenet, all the time.
In their warped news judgment, the media is deciding for all of us that we should be more concerned about the minute-by-minute developments with John Mark Karr than the fact that our brave men and women continue to be lost in Iraq and Afghanistan. They are making a decision every hour that a story of such incredibly specious importance, is more relevant than the deaths of our men and women serving in uniform overseas.
And, for that alone, they should be profoundly ashamed.
You can reach Bob at geiger.bob@gmail.com and read more from him at BobGeiger.com.
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