Day: May 19, 2005

Media Bistro:

Last night on The O’Reilly Factor, Bill replayed Terry Moran’s question for WH press secretary Scott McClellan:

With respect, who made you the editor of “Newsweek”? Do you think it’s appropriate for you at that podium speaking with the authority of the president of the United States, to tell an American magazine what they should print?

O’Reilly responded: “Now that was an ABC News correspondent. I would have slapped him. If I were McClellan, I would have went down and whacked him. All right? Don’t use that tone with me. O’Reilly says the elite media are “lashing out” because they are “rapidly losing power and influence.” “They’re rallying around a common theme — the Bush administration’s bad for America.”

> Update: 3:48pm: An e-mailer says: “If O’Reilly were a real journalist — which he’s not — he, too, would take umbrage on beating on Newsweek like a straw horse. but, of course, he’s not: he’s blindly defensive and in the pocket of the administration.”

And if O’Reilly could speak English, he would have said, “I would have gone down there…” Not “I would have went down there…”

On the floor of the Senate today, Sen. Rick Sanatorum compared the Democrats’ filibustering of judicial nominees to the Nazi occupation of Paris. Via Raw Story:

Some are suggesting we’re trying to change the law, we’re trying to break the rules. Remarkable. Remarkable hubris. I mean, imagine, the rule has been in place for 214 years that this is the way we confirm judges. Broken by the other side two years ago, and the audacity of some members to stand up and say, how dare you break this rule. It’s the equivalent of Adolf Hitler in 1942 “I’m in Paris. How dare you invade me. How dare you bomb my city? It’s mine.”

TAPPED:

I seem to remember a little criticism of MoveOn for briefly hosting an ad that compared a George W. Bush speech to a Hitler speech, and Robert Byrd receiving a little criticism for comparing Republican consolidation of power to 1930s Nazi consolidation of power. So what is going to happen to a leading Republican senator (and probably a presidential candidate) who compares Democrats to Hitler in the middle of World War II? Anybody want to bet against absolutely nothing?

And let’s not forget the outrage when an official of the German government compared Bush to Hitler during the run up to the Iraq war.

They got us again, kids.

We’re debating “women in combat” while the Bush administration pulls the wool over our eyes and tight around our necks.

First of all, women will continue to be in combat until war changes, which won’t be in our lifetimes. “Insurgents,” “war lords” – and whatever other GOP-speak terms that avoid acknowledging we are fighting in a couple of civil wars – don’t stick to battle fronts, all neat and tidy like in World War II movies. They attack supply vehicles and kill soldiers like Lori Piestewa, who are allegedly safe from so-called “combat” positions.

Second, there are roles only women can fill in the current wars, such as body-searching Iraqi or Afghan women.

So unless we restrict women, ala Frank Capra, to the home front and hospitals across the border, and announce that the military now offers a glass ceiling so low you’ll bump your head if you stand up, we are wasting time debating an option that doesn’t really exist.

Which is exactly what the Bush folks were counting on.

The House bill that offers this so-called protecting of women from combat also includes $442 billion in military spending NOT COUNTING IRAQ OR AFGHANISTAN. Hello? Did you hear that?

CNN:

President Bush requested $442 billion for defense for the budget year that begins October 1, excluding money to pay for wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

But what catches our eye? The bright, shiny object in Karl Rove’s other hand, as usual.

In a nearly 15-hourlong committee hearing, the most contentious issue was the role of women in combat.

At least a couple of Democrats weren’t distracted.

Added Rep. Ike Skelton of Missouri, the committee’s leading Democrat: “There seems to be a solution in search of a problem.”

…Rep. Cynthia McKinney, D-Georgia, cast the lone dissenting vote on the overall bill.

Afghanistan – where, thanks to our side trip into Irrelevant Iraq, things are going south – was where we should have been from the start. How much more money – and how many more men and women – will we put through the shredder that is Iraq?

Dear Friends,

Newsweek finds itself at the center of a firestorm after publishing, defending, apologizing for, and finally retracting their story about interrogators at Guantanamo Bay disposing of the Koran as an intimidation technique. If the truth be told, the Newsweek scandal is just the latest in a long history of the press simply being exceedingly careless with their facts. What most don’t realize is just how long that history really is.

Because conservatives don’t riot and people don’t die when the establishment press gets our stories wrong, very few know how we’ve been libeled for so long. For the over forty years I’ve been in national politics, I’ve come to know that the completely accurate news story is the rare exception, not the rule. My experience is that over 95% of the stories I’ve been involved in – with personal knowledge of the facts and circumstances – have one or more significant errors.

Even worse is the reliance of lazy and/or opinionated journalists on the infamous “Anonymous Source,” making falsehoods and distortions even more difficult to expose and correct. Most of these anonymous sources are people with an agenda and an axe to grind but without the courage to be upfront. Unfortunately far too many journalists know that they don’t need to check their facts because they just don’t have to.

When they get their facts wrong, they know the truth will almost never see the light of day. While news executives bemoan their shrinking market share and establishment journalists sneer at the freewheeling, unregulated blogs – it all comes down to trust, and the mainstream media is fast losing ground.

Americans are demanding more from their news sources, and they have hundreds more options now than they did 40 years ago when conservatives began building an alternative media in this country (direct mail, talk radio, cable TV, and now the internet).

Best, Richard Viguerie

Richard Viguerie is the co-author of America’s Right Turn: How Conservatives Used New & Alternative Media to Take Power (2004, Bonus Books)

Juan Cole, writing in Salon.com:

When Newsweek’s source admitted that he had misidentified the government document in which he had seen an account of Quran desecration at Guantánamo prison, Pentagon spokesman Lawrence Di Rita exploded, “People are dead because of what this son of a bitch said. How could he be credible now?”

Di Rita could have said the same things about his bosses in the Bush administration.

Tens of thousands of people are dead in Iraq, including more than 1,600 U.S. soldiers and Marines, because of false allegations made by President George W. Bush and Di Rita’s more immediate boss, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, about Saddam Hussein’s nonexistent weapons of mass destruction and equally imaginary active nuclear weapons program. Bush, Rumsfeld, Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice repeatedly made unfounded allegations that led to the continuing disaster in Iraq, much of which is now an economic and military no man’s land beset by bombings, assassinations, kidnappings and political gridlock.

And we now know, thanks to a leaked British memo concerning the head of British intelligence, that the Bush administration — contrary to its explicit denials — had already made up its mind to attack Iraq and “fixed” those bogus allegations to support its decision. In short, Bush and his top officials lied about Iraq.

Going to war is the most serious decision a president can make. It should never be approached in a cavalier fashion. American lives, the prestige and influence of the country, international relations, the health of its defenses, and the future of the next generation are at stake. Yet every single piece of evidence we now have confirms that George W. Bush, who was obsessed with unseating Saddam Hussein even before 9/11, recklessly used the opportunity presented by the terror attacks to march the country to war, fixing the intelligence to justify his decision, and lying to the American people about the reasons for the war. In other times, this might have been an impeachable offense.