Inside - ColdType

RUDE AWAKENING
Like eager
employees
laughing
at the boss’s
jokes,
the journalists
applauded
Bush’s own
comedy
routine
14 TheREADER
crimes of state, politeness is not necessarily
a virtue.
So, average Americans are growing
more and more agitated because too
often in the past five years they have
watched the national press act more
like courtiers to a monarch than an
independent, aggressive Fourth
Estate. This fawning style of the
Washington media continued into the
April 29 dinner.
Even as the number of U.S. soldiers
killed in Iraq passed 2,400 and the toll
of Iraqi dead soared into the tens of
thousands, the journalists seemed
more interested in staying in Bush’s
favor than in risking his displeasure.
Like eager employees laughing at the
boss’ jokes, the journalists applauded
Bush’s own comedy routine, which
featured a double who voiced Bush’s
private contempt for the news media
while the real Bush expressed his
insincere respect.
Two years ago, at a similar dinner,
journalists laughed and clapped when
Bush put on a slide show of himself
searching under Oval Office furniture
for Iraq’s non-existent weapons of
mass destruction.
Rather than shock over Bush’s
tasteless humor – as the President
rubbed the media’s noses in the
deceptions about Iraq’s WMD – the
press corps played the part of the
good straight man. Even representatives
of the New York Times and the
Washington Post – the pillars of what
the Right still likes to call the “liberal
media” – sat politely after having
served as little more than conveyor
belts for Bush’s pre-war propaganda.
But the media’s willful blindness
didn’t end even when Bush’s WMD
claims were no longer tenable. Less
than a year ago, as evidence surfaced
in Great Britain proving that Bush
had twisted the WMD intelligence,
major U.S. newspapers averted their
eyes and chastised anyone who didn’t
go along.
The so-called Downing Street
Memo and other official government
papers, which appeared in British
newspapers in late spring 2005, documented
how the White House in 2002
and early 2003 was manipulating
intelligence to justify invading Iraq
and ousting Saddam Hussein.
On July 23, 2002, British intelligence
chief Richard Dearlove told Prime
Minister Tony Blair about discussions
with top Bush advisers in Washington,
according to the meeting minutes.
“Bush wanted to remove Saddam,
through military action, justified
by the conjunction of terrorism and
WMD. But the intelligence and facts
were being fixed around the policy,”
Dearlove said. [See Consortiumnews.com’s
“LMSM – the Lying
Mainstream Media.”]
Despite that dramatic evidence –
emerging in June 2005 – the Washington
Post failed to pay much attention.
When hundreds of Post readers complained,
a lead editorial lectured them
for questioning the Post’s news judgment.
“The memos add not a single fact
to what was previously known about
the administration’s prewar deliberations,”
the Post’s editorial sniffed.
“Not only that: They add nothing to