BULLY BOY
PRESS & CEDRIC'S BIG MIX -- THE KOOL-AID
TABLE
AS PRINCESS BARRY GETS READY TO GUT THE SAFETY NET, EVEN SOME OF HIS LONG TIME ENABLERS ARE BEGINNING TO GET ANTSY. LITTLE TA-NEHISI COATES OF THE ATLANTIC EVEN REGISTERS AN ACTUAL COMPLAINT:
Obama and his allies like to deride lefties as a group of softheads who don't understand that negotiation is essential to government. But they don't like to deal with a more stinging left-wing critique: Negotiation is a part of democracy and Barack Obama, whatever his many, many talents, is not very good at it.
NOTICE THAT THERE'S ALWAYS MONEY FOR WEAPONS. (NOTICE TOO THAT PRINCESS IS BACK IN HAWAII.)
FROM THE TCI WIRE:
At the right-wing National Review, Victor Davis Hanson notes
that Bully Boy Bush left office at the start of 2009 with an approval
rating of 34% but it's now up to 46%. He calls out the way Bush was
demonized and notes how Barack Obama can do the same thing or more and
get away with it. That is correct. But he wants to 'explain' how
people were wrong about Bush on the Iraq War. He backs up his opinions
with facts and makes a solid argument from the right. That's what he's
supposed to do. He hasn't done anything 'wrong.' And this is how the
right hopes to win the argument and has had some success in the past.
There
are a ton of reasons to continue focusing on Iraq here in the US. But
if people only care about themselves then maybe now some on the left
who've argued it doesn't matter (including two friends with The Nation
magazine) will wake up? We've gone over what could happen repeatedly
in the last years. We did so at length August 20, 2010 in "The war continues (and watch for the revisionary tactics."
If
you're old enough, you saw it with Vietnam. That illegal war ended
with the government called out for its actions. And some people -- a
lot in fact -- just moved on. The weakest of the left moved on because
it wasn't 'polite' to talk about it or it wasn't 'nice' or 'can't we all
just get along' and other nonsense. Others talked about things because
they didn't care about Vietnam, the Vietnamese or the US service
members. And, after all, they had a peanut farmer from Georgia to
elect, right? And bit by bit, year by year, all these lies about
Vietnam took root. The press turned the people against it! The US
could have won if the military's hands hadn't been tied! All this
nonsense that, back when the public was paying attention in the early to
mid-seventies, would have been rejected outright by the majority of
Americans.
Jane Fonda explains in the amazing documentary Sir! No Sir!,
"You know, people say, 'Well you keep going back, why are you going
back to Vietnam?' We keep going back to Vietnam because, I'll tell you
what, the other side does. They're always going back. And they have to
go back -- the Hawks, you know, the patriarchs. They have to go back
because, and they have to revise the going back, because they can't
allow us to know what the back there really was."
And
if you silence yourself while your opponent digs in on the topic, a
large number of Americans -- including people too young to remember what
actually happened -- here nothing but the revisionary arguments.
Jane's correct, the right-wing always went back to Vietnam. They're at
fork in the road probably because, do they continue to emphasize Vietnam
as much as they have, or do they move on to Iraq. Victor Davis
Hanson's ready to move on to Iraq. He's not the only one on the right.
And on the left we have silence.
And
that is why revisionary tactics work. It's not because revisions are
stronger than facts. It's because one side gives up. And the left --
check The Progressive, The Nation, etc.* -- has long
ago given up on even pretending to care about Iraq -- about the Iraq
War, about the Iraqis, about the US service members. [*But not In These Times -- they've continued to feature Iraq about every six months. Give them credit for that.]
I'm
sure they'll work really hard at electing some center-right Democrats
to Congress in the 2014 elections. I'm sure that will be the focus of
their efforts. But if they'd focus on things that really matter, it
would force the candidates to be stronger. We'd have a better informed
and educated electorate and the candidates would have to rise to that to
get votes. These periodicals (and toss in the Pacifica Radio shows as
well) love to whine about how Democrats used to stand for something and
how they've been watered down and watered down. Yet these same outlets
do an awful job of informing about real issues because they instead
focus on electing Democrats and the occassional cause celebre. When
that's what you do, you automatically cede ground to the other side.
Another
reason to pay attention is because Iraq was a defining moment. And a
number of people have exposed themselves as utter frauds. For example,
many years ago a number of us who are feminists applauded Jill Abramson
and Jane Mayer for their work that culminated with the book Strange Justice: The Selling of Clarence Thomas.
But maybe we were too kind in our praise. In America, we are likely to
treat someone simply doing the job they're supposed to be doing as if
they're a hero. Time has proven that Jane Mayer is an attack dog for
the Democratic Party and not actually a journalist. (A journalist
doesn't stop doing expose pieces because a Democrat is in the White
House.) And Jill? The current Executive Editor of the New York Times appeared at the Commonwealth Club December 6th and, wouldn't you know it, she wanted to talk Iraq.
Jill Abramson:
If there's any one thing I could change it would be, as Washington
bureau chief, not all of the reporters who were covering the WMD issues
and Iraq were part of the Washington bureau. And I just wish -- You
know -- I -- many of those stories didn't come through me but certainly
I was aware of them. And, you know, I wish that I had been paying more
attention because the Times really did brandish on the front
page some very questionable stories that were based on, you know, Iraqi
defectors who had an interest in promoting the toppling of Saddam
Hussein, who were going around to various reporters including reporters
at the Times, peddling the story of this ramped up WMD program
which, of course, didn't exist. That is number one. I wish I had
paid more attention. And journalism isn't a game that you play with
20/20 hindsight vision unfortunately. I'm sure that many people at the
BBC wish -- you know -- 'Gee I wish, you know, I had been paying more
attention to the documentary and what not.' So, number one, I wish I
was paying more attention to the totality of the coverage and some of
the stories that were faulty including the one about the tubes that
suggested -- When the Times published that story on the front
page and was kind of a welcome sign for Dick Cheney and Condi Rice to go
on the Sunday show -- shows -- to talk about mushroom clouds that, of
course, were a fantasy. And there, I think -- and I've done a lot of
thinking about this -- I wish that I had been more tuned in to the
reporters in Washington, a few in the Times bureau, but
especially Knight-Ridder which had -- at the time -- a very, very good
Washington bureau and their major sources on this were skeptics within
the CIA -- CIA analysts who were like, 'Be careful with this WMD
evidence.' They were very skeptical about it.
What
a load of crap. Let me start first by saying, Jill, I don't think you
can be a witness in a perjury trial and then perjure yourself. Jill was
Scooter Libby's witness against Judith Miller, for those who don't
know. Judith Miller wrote some very bad articles for the New York Times
(and co-wrote some as well) in the lead up to the war. We've called
her out repeatedly. We've also noted it was bad reporting and not lying
as evidenced by her actions after the start of the war when she
basically took over a US military squad and had them looking for WMD
that she desparately wanted to find. She based her career on that WMD.
There was none.
Judith Miller stayed in
jail until her source on Valerie Plame (she never wrote about Plame)
gave her permission to name him. Plame-Gate was when the Bush
administration outed a CIA agent to get back at former Ambassdor Joe
Wilson for his column in the New York Times about how there was no
yellow cake in Niger (in response to Bully Boy Bush's claim that Saddam
Hussein had recently sought uranium there). Valerie Plame was an
undercover CIA agent and she was married to Joe Wilson. She was outed
by Scooter Libby (Dick Cheney's chief of staff) as the administration
sought to get back at Joe Wilson.
Once Judith
Miller came forward about her source, that's when Jill enters the
picture and Jill presented herself on the witness stand as completely
involved and an expert on 'bad' Judith Miller. Because of Miller's
lousy reporting on Iraq, some will cheer that. But let's grasp that
what Jill was doing was providing cover for Scooter Libby. That's what
she did in her testimony.
Yet after the
courtroom performance on Scooter Libby's behalf, where Jill was an
expert on what was taking place and who was writing what and who was
talking to whom, Jill now wants to play like she wasn't involved?
She
also wants to ignore that James Risen took stories, skeptical stories,
to her and she shot them down repeatedly. Risen's even spoken publicly
about some of this. Jill knows he has and she wants to lie to everyone
all these years later? For example, from Joe Hagan's "The United States of America vs. Bill Keller" (New York magazine, September 10, 2006):
In
addition, Risen harbored lingering resentment of Abramson over the
paper's WMD coverage. When she was Washington bureau chief under
[Howell] Raines, Risen has claimed to at least two people, he offered
her reporting that cast doubt on the Bush administration's evidence
about Iraq's WMD program. At the time, Miller's reporting was how the
Times, as an extension of Raines, saw the subject. And Abramson felt
powerless to fight Raines over this and other things. When Risen press
his case, she finally told him to "get with the program," these people
say.
It only gets worse.
She
wishes she had followed the other coverage, she says, because if she'd
followed Knight-Ridder, she might have been skeptical too. First, it's
rather pissy of her not to have named the reporters or noted that it's
now McClatchy. The three primary reporters on Iraq in the lead up to
the war were Warren P. Strobel, Jonathan S. Landay and Margaret Talev.
Second, she needed to see other people being skeptical of government
officials? Journalists are supposed to be skeptical. It's a basic of
journalism.
And when you have a source with
an aim (let alone grudge), you are supposed to be very skeptical of
their claims. That's why, for example, when a whistleblower comes
forward, an employer will always try to make it seem like a case of sour
grapes because if they can make the employee look like they've got an
axe to grind, it will make the press take the employee less seriously.
What
I'm talking about here, Jill Abramson knows all that. She's not
stupid. She gave a for-show performance. She never mentioned the
Iraqis that died or the Americans that died. She gave a little
performance taking as little accountability as she thought she could get
away with.
She makes a lot of excuses for
herself but she doesn't appear to have learned a damn thing. In
September 2008, she got praise for 'taking responsibility' on Iraq. She
didn't. It was an aside in a book review. She's still not taking
accountability. People are dead, people are wounded and her, "I wish I
had been more skeptical"? It just doesn't cut it.
You
should pay attention if only to see who, like Jill, changes their
story. Again, it's not just her fault. It's the fault of people like
me, my fault absolutely, for treating her work in the 90s as something
wonderful. She did her job. Nothing more, nothing less. She didn't
earn the praise. And then people rushed to praise her in 2008 for her
aside in the book review (I didn't praise her for that -- at least I had
enough sense then to know better). So now she thinks she can offer
this simplistic revisionary nonsense and get more praise. And she's
probably right because most people don't pay attention.
Prashant Rao
That's Prashant Rao with AFP. "Low-level war" is another reason you'd think the world would be paying attention to what's going on in Iraq.
Iraq Body Count
reports 272 people were killed from violence in Iraq for the month of
December and they count 4,557 deaths from violence in Iraq for 2012. In
a report entitled "Iraqi deaths from violence in 2012," Iraq Body Count explains:
2012 marks the first year since 2009 where the death toll for the year has increased (up from 4,136
in 2011), but 2012 itself has been marked by contrasts. While it seems
December will be the least violent month in the last two years, June was
the most violent in three years, so the improvements in the second half
of the year are from that higher level of violence. It is premature to
predict whether the record low levels of violence in the last quarter of
the year will be sustained. Overall, 2012 has been more consistent with
an entrenched conflict than with any transformation in the security
situation for Iraqis in the first year since the formal withdrawal of US
troops.
In sum the latest evidence suggests that the country remains in a state of low-level war little changed since early 2009, with a "background" level of everyday armed violence punctuated by occasional larger-scale attacks designed to kill many people at once.
Iraq Body Count also notes that March 2013 will mark ten years since the start of the Iraq War and that they "will provide an overview of the known death toll covering the invasion and the first full decade of its aftermath."
In sum the latest evidence suggests that the country remains in a state of low-level war little changed since early 2009, with a "background" level of everyday armed violence punctuated by occasional larger-scale attacks designed to kill many people at once.
Iraq Body Count also notes that March 2013 will mark ten years since the start of the Iraq War and that they "will provide an overview of the known death toll covering the invasion and the first full decade of its aftermath."
Recommended: "Iraq snapshot"
"Nouri blames others for his actions"
"2012 sees increase in violent deaths in Iraq"
"Time to fight back"
"The 'roadmap' for the 'fiscal cliff'"
"Hillary is released from hospital"
"Nuland smears the protesters (C.I.)"
"They better not have lied"
"The disappointing Ani DiFranco"
"Chris Hedges, are you a sexist?"
"Ridiculous Netflix"
"A loser named Medea Benjamin"
"Current TV and Iraq"
"THIS JUST IN! WASTING MORE MONEY!"
"Not very fiscal"
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