A blogowar has erupted over U.S. President George W. Bush's speech today.
In what was ostensibly a salute to military veterans, he went political, lacerating critics who have accused his administration of fixing the intelligence and manipulating the media in his zeal to attack Iraq. Here's the money quote:
The stakes in the global war on terror are too high and the national interest is too important for politicians to throw out false charges.
These baseless attacks send the wrong signal to our troops and to an enemy that is questioning America's will.
As our troops fight a ruthless enemy determined to destroy our way of life, they deserve to know that their elected leaders who voted to send them to war continue to stand behind them.
Oh. So speaking truth to power will lose the war that would have never been started if only more critics had spoken truth to power? Those of us waiting for the mainstream media to question his charges will be waiting a long time.
There's more:
While it's perfectly legitimate to criticize my decisions or the conduct of the war, it is deeply irresponsible to rewrite the history of how that war began.
Which revisionism of history would that be? The one that began with 9/11 and WMDs and nuclear threats and then shifted to the liberation of the Iraqi people from a brutal, vicious dictator and then shifted to bringing democracy to the Middle East? That one?
Although some of us have been saying so for years, we all now know that the Iraq war was sold like some shoddy packaged good on the supermarket shelf, only the media gave it a whole lot of freebies while waving the flag.
Those some of us are still waiting for the media to 'fess up to their role in this debacle.
Heroic truth-tellers in the Watergate saga, the established media are now in disrepute, scandalized by unreliable "news" and over-intimate attachments to powerful court insiders. The major media stood too close to the throne, deferred too eagerly to the king's twisted version of reality and his lust for war. The institutions of "news" failed democracy on monumental matters. In fact, the contemporary system looks a lot more like the ancien régime than its practitioners realize. Control is top-down and centralized. Information is shaped (and tainted) by the proximity of leading news-gatherers to the royal court and by their great distance from people and ordinary experience.
Still, even as nearly 60 per cent of Americans say Bush is not honest, the man continues to speak with forked tongue, claiming that ''more than 100 Democrats in the House and the Senate'' who voted for the war "had access to the same intelligence'' as did the administration.
Some Democrats and antiwar critics are now claiming we manipulated the intelligence and misled the American people about why we went to war ... These critics are fully aware that a bipartisan Senate investigation found no evidence of political pressure to change the intelligence community's judgments related to Iraq's weapons programs.
Uh ... not exactly, according to the Columbia Journalism Review, which takes particular exception to how mainstream media outlets reported on that claim.
While it's true that a bipartisan Senate investigation found no evidence that the Bush administration pressured intelligence agents into altering their findings, the president still fudges the issue just a bit here. Yet neither the (New York) Times nor any of the major media outlets we looked at managed to pick up on his sleight of hand.
Fact is, as Harry Reid's "Rule 21" gambit pointed out last week, the initial Senate investigation only looked at how the intelligence community handled the information it collected -- and, as of yet, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence has not investigated exactly what intelligence went to the president, whether all of it was taken into account and what the vetting process was at the executive branch.
Journalism isn't stenography, as Maureen Dowd recently reminded Judy Miller, and pointing out the nuances of a carefully worded political speech should be one of the hallmarks of the craft. So far today, that hasn't been the case.
More from Media Matters here.
Following President Bush's Veterans Day speech at Pennsylvania's Tobyhanna Army Depot, the Associated Press as well as Fox News anchor Bill Hemmer uncritically repeated Bush's misleading claim that the Senate Intelligence Committee disproved Democratic allegations that the Bush administration manipulated intelligence leading up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Neither the AP nor Hemmer noted that the Senate Intelligence Committee has yet to report on its investigation into the Bush administration's use of prewar intelligence and, therefore, has not addressed the Democrats' allegations. Indeed, "phase two" of the Senate Intelligence Committee's report would be the first such investigation into the alleged misuse of intelligence by proponents of the war.
In other words, contrary to what Bush said today, the bipartisan Senate investigation committee results are not yet fully known -- and the media had better make that clear to citizens. (The dirty details of the current load of crap coming from the right about who knew what and when are documented here.)
The Moderate Voice has a great round-up of today's coverage, both MSM and bloggy.
Don't miss some of the reaction from some of the Bushies' most faithful jackblogs, like Instapundit who says
The White House needs to go on the offensive here in a big way -- and Bush needs to be very plain that this is all about Democratic politicans pandering to the antiwar base, that it's deeply dishonest, and that it hurts our troops abroad.
and this comedian
For the longest time we on the right have been wondering when President Bush was going to come out swinging against his critics on the war. As time has progressed and our victory in Iraq become more manifest, the drumbeat of leftwing lies and slanders about the war has merely grown louder and more strident. The endless shriek of leftwing lies have become more and more echoed in the MSM and in the senior leadership of the Democratic Party - to listen to the critics, the liberation of Iraq was begun with no justification whatsoever and has been an unmitigated failure from start to finish.
I'd add a punchline but it hardly seems necessary.
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