NewJerseyRich wrote:philipchevron wrote:NewJerseyRich wrote:The US media has had a love affair with the Dems going back to JFK and it has only come to light really in the last 20 years since the advent of talk radio and more recently Fox news on the telly They have programing with a more conservative point of view. So the majority of the media give glowing praise to a Dem and if a Repub did the same exact thing they would have to find issue with it.
This is just putrid mendacity.
Some of us were yelling in sheer frustration at the US Media as they bought the WMD bullshit hook line and sinker in 2002/2003. Not even the supposedly "liberal" New York Times and Washington Post had the balls to question the Cheney-Rumsfeld-Wolfowitz-Bush bollocks in the pseudo-patriotic wake of September 11, for fear of being found somehow unAmerican for daring to question the President. And that is the part the US media, played in the most misjudged, misfired, mishandled and calamitous piece of Foreign "Policy" in a generation. The Times, indeed, also subscribes to this view, but its wholehearted retrospective apology, to the American people and to the world, came too late to save a million Iraqis, 4000 Americans and any chance the USA had of getting a net gain outcome from the atrocities of 9/11.
Love affair with the Dems, my arse.
Mr C,
"putrid mendacity" I love your grasp of the language. I actually had to look it up just to make sure I was right.
Sir, you point to probably the only time the media didn't side against Bush. I don't want to rehash this again but It was not just a US "thing" about the WMD's. The UN, CIA, MI-6, Mossad and more all agreed there was "evidence" of them. How many countries started off in the coalition? 20-25? It's an old argument i'm sure you'll agree we need not rehash.
I would challenge you to show me 6, Just a half dozen major US policy issues since JFK's Administration that the media was not in the tank and tried to push the Dem's side of the debate. The only one I can think of is Johnson's troop increases in Vietnam.
Or (beside 9-11) when the media pushed a major Republican side of an issue. You asked me not to pull rank yesterday, today I am telling you, with the ut most respect, your completely incorrect to think the major media are not in the Dems backpocket.
Such nonsense. It's easy to forget how much support there was - not least in the media - for Bush after 9/11. The media crucified Bush not because he wasn't a Dem but precisely because he lied to them (doubtless you'll prefer the term "misled them") on a matter of such fundamental importance as the decision to put young Americans in harm's way. Effectively, he asked them to trust him, and when that trust proved to be entirely without foundation, they understandably chose never to trust him again. Though they were, as I have already said, the architects of their own humiliation, they were stung by how casually the Bush administration dismissed and undermined their integrity - remember? "we create our own reality"? Moreover, as the Iraq War went from a bad idea to a terrible human disaster, they saw no reason to give Bush rave reviews for that or indeed anything else he did for the next 6 years. The media found itself having to report an unending succession of shameful acts perpetrated in the name of the United States of America. The media had to watch as America's standing in the world disappeared into the toilet. The media had to suspend its nausea and detail the atrocities of Fallujah, Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay and Sadr City to a scarcely believing public. When Bush piled domestic incompetence - just where was his head during Katrina anyway? - upon international degradation and had his effigy burned in Trafalgar Square, the media closed the book on Bush and offered a "first draft of history" that is unlikely to undergo a revisionist rewrite anytime soon.
Rich, it may suit you to consider the WMD issue dead and buried and in no need of being "rehashed", but it does not suit me, nor indeed does it suit millions of other people around the world who, like me, consider it the defining public moment of their lifetimes, the moment when the planet's inhabitants became hopelessly and helplessly adrift from the people they had elected to serve them, adrift in a manner that ensured the voter/representative relationship would never be the same again, adrift in a fashion that undermined the very fabric of the democratic system generations of our forefathers fought to protect, millions of them losing their lives in the process.
Mendacity, you see. The eighth deadly sin. And on the day when it is announced that Bush crony Tony Blair will be compelled to give evidence in public to a British enquiry into the Iraq War and the events leading up to it, whether he likes it or not [he manouevered in vain to have the inevitable enquiry held not just in private but effectively in secret], this is as good a moment as any to celebrate humanity's refusal to be governed by the forces of the very Military-Industrial Complex an American President - a Republican, to boot - once warned us about.
In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.
- Dwight D Eisenhower, 17 January 1961