Lying Liars and the Lazy Press Who Love Lies

 

The president was handed faulty intelligence

Lundergan Grimes not nearly as disqualified

How many hit parades of quotes and clips does it take to break through the obstinate denial by the fourth estate of its complicity in a chain of lies and its reprehensible trading future access and "exclusives" for backing off tough reporting? Chuck Todd admitted it in so many words on his Sunday program a while back as though he saw nothing wrong with defining himself as a relayer of press releases and an access John.

What a good reporter would want to flesh out for today's reader/viewer/listener is why we've gone into rewrite history mode? At least in some quarters. Is there a phase two looming? What are we spreading this time?
How come those same neo-conservatives who authored and signed the Project for a New American Century are right in the thick of all this knowing now what they did then (their intel was cooked and surrepticiously distributed, not just mistaken) while getting another fluffing in the popular media and not the third degree they so richly deserve.

What part of the Joe Wilson story hasn't yet sunk in? Criminy, Buddha on a pogo stick.

No one else removed the weapons inspectors. It was we. We did that. We told them to vamoose because (duh::obvs) shock and awe. And we knew we were going to war in Iraq even before September, 2001. By we I mean the cabal and all.

So Richard Perle or some other neo-cluck dined in foreign places with disreputable people letting stuff slip, followed by tips from too many foreign intelligence services to take lightly that they had intercepted such and such until it percolated like manna to a warmonger and you know the rest. This manifests itself today as that faulty intelligence which lets too many people off the hook for our national tragedy. 

There is ample documentation in the form of exact words on tape (as it were) which can be thrown back at these zombie-cons. UAV's with nucular (sic) bombs over South Carolina? Reconstituted uranium? War lasts six weeks, tops? Oil revenue will cover costs? What about the lost pallets of cash? Enhanced interrogation? Burn pits? People who wrote at the time of the hubris and the rush to war are still available to recite their facts, but the viewer rarely escapes the he said/she said framing of our modern reportage. Why the deference to people who may return in a Jeb Bush cabinet and never bulleted lists from Frontline? Turns out they knew all along a whole lot more then than today's cozy framing would suggest.

"The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie, deliberate, contrived and dishonest," wrote John F. Kennedy, "but the myth, persistent, persuasive and unrealistic."

What a paradigm: finagling invitations and winning ratings points, or as Chuck Todd refers to it "my exclusive interview with John Boehner." Part deliberate lie, part persuasive myth, and sure to keep the sponsors hard.

 illustrations: Stacey Youdin