Bring on the facts

BULLY BOY PRESS & CEDRIC'S BIG MIX -- THE KOOL-AID TABLE

SOMEWHERE MELISSA HARRIS LACEWELL PARRY'S HEAD IS EXPLODING -- SENDING CHEAP WEAVE FLYING EVERYWHERE.

BUT COULD IT BE THAT THIS IS THE BEGINNING OF A NEW SENSE OF RESPECT FOR THE FACTS?

IF SO, HALLELUJAH, AND MAY WE ALL LAND GENTLY AS WE RETURN TO TERRA FIRMA.

FROM THE TCI WIRE:  

Let's start with Dan Murphy -- and sadly I don't mean Soul Asylum.  No, we're talking about world class liar Dan Murphy.  The Christian Science Monitor needs to declare him a columnist -- not a good one either -- and he's about as honest as William Safire was.  But on the left we're supposed to cheer because he lies for 'our side.'  He writes crap that reads like, "I have the hots for Campbell Brown but Dan Senor married her so I hate his guts." 

What the election says to nit-wit Dan Murphy is that another Dan (Senor) will have "no more influence in the White House today than he did yesterday."  Dan Senor advised Mitt Romney and Dan Senor is evil, evil, evil.  Dan The Nit Wit Murphy explains, "Mr. Senor was a key political player for the Bush administration in Iraq after the 2003 invasion, advising Paul Bremer on how to run the country in 2003 and 2004."  I would ask, "How does this crap make it into print"  -- but crap like this is why the Christian Science Monitor is no longer a daily paper. 

Dan Senor may be many things.  I casually know Campbell Brown, I do not know Dan Senor.  And I remember being surprised by that pairing and being told that Dan's basically media anyway.  Meaning he's PR.  That's something I heard repeatedly over the years.  Yet Murphy's explaining that Senor was basically running the CPA.  How strange because I spent hours, during the Iraqi Inquiry, pouring over each day's testimony, on the phone with friends who were covering the Inquiry or who were attending it for other reasons, and never did I encounter Dan Senor's name.  Paul Bremer?  Over and over.  Colin Powell, Dick Cheney, Condi Rice, generals, etc and etc.  No Dan Senor.  But Dan Murphy wants us to know that "Senor was a key political player for the Bush administration in Iraq after the 2003 invasion, advising Paul Bremer on how to run the country in 2003 and 2004."

Well I can be wrong and often am.  And were Dan Murphy correct, I would be writing, "Stupid me . . ."  I have no problem owning my mistakes.  But I wasn't wrong.  September 12th, Chris Good and Shushannah Walshe (ABC News) reported:

Senor is the former spokesman for the American government in Iraq (the Coalition Provisional Authority at the beginning of the Iraq war under George W. Bush) and is a particularly close adviser to Romney on the Middle East.

Oh, he was a spokesperson.  Yeah, that jibes with what I was told years ago.  It also goes with what's been reported over and over and over.  Now unless I'm remembering wong -- and I can be wrong and often am --  Dahr Jamail's Beyond The Green Zone: Dispatches From An Unembedded Journalist In Occupied Iraq mentions Dan Senor on exactly one page.  Now I haven't picked up the book in years (not an insult, it's a great book, I recommend it highly) but I believe that's page 68, I'm seeing it in my mental picture as bottom of that page and the sentence starts "Coalition spokesman Dan Senor . . ."

Am I wrong on that?  Could be but don't think so.

So a spokesperson is what we're talking about.  And Dan Murphy's inflated him to what?  Cabinet-level planner of the Iraq War?  He's as nutty as the other partisan Democrats passing talking points off as facts and he's certainly not a journalist.

Dan Murphy refers you to a piece US House Rep Adam Smith wrote for Foreign Policy about how 24 foreign policy advisers to Romney worked in the Bully Boy Bush administration.  That's shocking?  Like it's shocking that so many of the Clinton White House people quickly drifted to Barack or Hillary in 2007 and 2008?

Dan Senor's not mentioned in Adam Smith's article. But Senor's the topic of Murphy's first four paragraphs and a photo of Senor (with Paul Ryan) is used to illustrate the article.  Dan Senor was a spokesperson.  Dan Murphy needs to dial back the crazy.

Dan Murphy's attack and distortion of Dan Senor wouldn't rate inclusion normally were it not that fact that the Christian Science Monitor wants to advise in their little intro to Kurt Shillinger's column on civility that, to bring it back to politics, "It starts with citizens." 

Really?  I kind of think it's starts with reporters or 'reporters' who think they can lie and distort.  What the hell did Dan Senor do to rate him being called out the day after the election?  And that question from someone who doesn't say "The Iraq War was wrong."  Hell no.  I say the Iraq War is a criminal war.  Not wrong, criminal. 

But even more reason for calling out Murphy's crap is Howard LaFranchi's garabage today that's Howard basically saying, 'I jizzed my shorts, I'm so happy!'  Over what?  Over Colin Powell possibly joining the administration in Barack's second term.

Oh.  Okay.  The rag calls out Dan Senor who was a spokesperson but it gets giddy over Collie The Blot Powell?  The man who lied to the United Nations, who helped sell the damn war?  There are no ethics and there are no standards, that is painfully clear.

I realize that when it comes to the press, no one gives head like Colin.  Please, I saw him stab Bush I in the back to journalists in the mid-90s.  He was entertaining three on background two tables over.  No one self-promotes better than Colin Powell.  The term "press whore" was invented to define him. 

But if you're going to call out someone for being a spokesperson for the US government in Iraq then you damn well can't applaud the person who stood before the United Nations spouting one lie after another to justify an illegal war.

And before Dan Murphy whines that he was talking about neocons and how they won't be advising Barack, grab a damn clue with both hands.  From the October 24th snapshot:

Barack's had necons throughout his administration.  We regularly call out Victoria Nuland who is better known as Mrs. Robert Kagan and who is even better known as Dick Cheney's National Security Adivsor (2003 to 2005).   In February 2011, whistle blower Sibel Edmonds (Boiling Frogs) noted some of the many neocons serving in Barack's administration: Marc Grossman, Dennis Ross and Frederick Kagan (that would be Victoria Nuland's brother-in-law).  In 2010,  Kristine Frazao (Russia Today -- link is video and text) thought Kagan's addition was so important, she did a report on just that, opening with, "They're ba-a-a-ck!  The US government may be done with Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld but another neoconservative is returning to the government payroll.  That same year, Allen McDuffee (ThinkTanked) observed, "Because we overinflated the impact of neoconservatives during the Bush administration and paid little attention to them before that, we're missing the fact that neocons are having the same influence in the Obama administration they've always had, according to a report issued by the Brookings Institution." And if we drop back another year, we can land on

Jacob Heilbrunn's Huffington Post report from May of 2009 which opened:

This morning leading neoconservatives such as William Kristol and Robert Kagan held a meeting at the Mayflower Hotel -- in support of President Obama's Afghanistan policy. Kristol and Kagan, as Foreign Policy's Laura Rozen has reported, have formed a successor organization to the Project for the New American Century, which came into disrepute for its advocacy of the Iraq War. The new one is called the Foreign Policy Initiative. Its contention is that America remains, in the words of Madeleine Albright, the "indispensable nation"and, furthermore, that neocons can play a valuable role in coming years in ensuring that it remains one.

So Dan Murphy's thrilled that Barack's administration is pure and protected from the neocons -- the ones who've already made their way in.  But don't tell Dan Murphy.  In the meantime, you can click here for a piece by Campbell Brown at Slate from August on journalism, politics and disclosures. And Dan Murphy can click there too because it's got a great photo of Campbell and he can obsess over her one more time.

While Dan Murphy foolishly believes there will be and has been no necons fluttering around Barack, you can find more honesty at the Libertarian Reason where Ed Krayewski observes:

Is there a charitable interpretation of much of the left's silence about Barack Obama's war policies? Either they don't know about them, they don't care about them or they find building the welfare state a more urgent cause than dismantling the warfare state. Maybe they assume he wouldn't be a Nobel Peace Prize laureate if he weren't a peacemakrer? You can suggest other interpretations in the comments.

Nevertheless, while Barack Obama built a name for himself on his 2002 opposition to the Iraq War (as a state senator out of Hyde Park, Chicago, mind you, where supporting the Iraq War would have been political suicide), he made it clear on the campaign trail he wasn't a non-interventionist. He promised if there was information on Osama bin Laden's whereabouts in Pakistan and the Pakistani government didn't act on it, he would. You couldn't get through the campaign season without hearing at least one Obama booster (or even the president himself) trumpeting that kept promise. Ending the war in Iraq was another promise Obama ran on in 2008. He claims he's kept it and campaigned on ending the Iraq war. Obama, of course, actually tried to renege on the status of forces agreement negotiated under President Bush and extend the war in Iraq.

It's a good commentary but, like too many, he seems unaware of what Tim Arango (New York Times) reported September 26th:

 

Iraq and the United States are negotiating an agreement that could result in the return of small units of American soldiers to Iraq on training missions. At the request of the Iraqi government, according to General Caslen, a unit of Army Special Operations soldiers was recently deployed to Iraq to advise on counterterrorism and help with intelligence. 

On the elections, language warning, Susan (On the Edge) offers her observations of just re-elected US President Barack Obama here.  Via Jane Fonda, you can check out Peggy Simpson's piece for Women's Media Center about how female candidates faired in Tuesday's election.  At Black Agenda Report, Glen Ford and Bruce A. Dixon weigh in on the results of the presidential election and the meaning of the results.  Ruth asked that we note Dennis Loo's World Can't Wait piece about the ongoing Drone War and the

When host Joe Scarborough raised the criticism on his show Scarborough Country on October 23, 2012 that Obama's drone attacks are killing a lot of innocents, including 4 year old children, guest Joe Klein, Time Magazine's political columnist, an ardent Obama partisan, defended the drone attacks with these words:

"the bottom line in the end is - whose 4-year-old get killed? What we're doing is limiting the possibility that 4-year-olds here will get killed by indiscriminate acts of terror."

Whose 4-year-old gets killed? This stunningly naked xenophobic and reactionary statement by Joe Klein topped an earlier comment of his in this same show in which he described the virtue of drone warfare:

KLEIN: It has been remarkably successful" --

SCARBOROUGH: "at killing people" –

KLEIN: "At decimating bad people, taking out a lot of bad people - and saving Americans lives as well, because our troops don't have to do this . . . You don't need pilots any more because you do it with a joystick in California."

This is one of the most prominent political columnists in America speaking, an ardent Democratic supporter: "You don't need pilots anymore because you do it with a joystick in California."

Recommended: "Iraq snapshot"
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"6 men and 3 women"
"Elections and kids"
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"science and comics"
"Benghazi: The investigations continue"
"WSWS and its half-the-truth"
"The day after"
"The idiot Piers needs to go home"
"Thoughts on the election"
"David Lindorff continues to disappoint"
"THIS JUST IN! THE AFTERMATH!"
"What was bought, what was sold"