Of Hitler, Chamberlain, Iraq War I Revisited

[The reference to the "Neville Chamberlain Moment" was made in Keith Olbermann's Special Comment from Wednesday's Countdown on MSNBC available by transcript and video link here. Also, I strongly recommend - if you have the chance - to catch HBO's reshowing of the entry into the first war a Bush (Dubya's dribbling dad)... it's a POWERFUL retrospective compared against this Bush's war. And if you don't know who Neville Chamberlain is, shame on you and get thee to a Wikipedia immediately!] I happened to catch Keith and then flipped the channel to HBO-West which was just starting to show "Live From Baghdad", an HBO film of high quality that recounts CNN's days in Baghdad and Kuwait just as George Bush (the 41st) declared war with Iraq (from a book by Robert Weiner, part of the CNN production team on the ground and getting bombed in Baghdad). I also wrote about Olbermann's piece here and here.]

The degree of retrospective comparisons between THEN and Bush 43rd horrific NOW is astonishing, including:

• how quickly the American public was sold on lies of "dumped incubators" killing babies in Kuwait (disproven as any substantial event)
• how hard the press was bashed for everything from interviews with Saddam Hussein and high Iraqi officers (and we repeated this in March 2003, Dan Rather was hated for interviewing Saddam again and CNN's main war reporter in the Bush 1 Iraq War was hated then and during Bush 2's great adventure, fired from MSNBC for suggesting there might be two sides to the story)
• Bush 41's comparison of Saddam to "Hitler Revisited" (a powerful comparison, given that Bush 43, 41's son, may now be responsible for more deaths of Iraqi civilians than Saddam ever was) when I think a case can be made for seeing Bush 43 as a perpetrator of racial hatred (substituting Muslims for Jews in the terrible old saying, "When all else fails, gather up the Jews") against what Keith said about the Dems' Neville Chamberlain moment
• Just see the difference in the city then as opposed to now, after all those years of sanctions (estimated to have claimed the lives of UP TO one million Iraq children, primarily through incredible restriction on medical care and food that turned one of the most advanced countries in the Middle East into a shell of its former self)
• As Weiner wrote, "When the talking stops, that's when people die. So let's keep talking until we're old men."

Absolute Must Read/Must See: A Probe of the Press and Iraq by PBS' Bill Moyers

Regular readers know of the extremely high esteem in which I hold Greg Mitchell of Editor and Publisher magazine (the journal of the press about the press). While I link to him and the online magazine frequently, I implore you to catch Greg's latest piece about the new Bill Moyers' PBS documentary upcoming about the press and America's war with Iraq labeled "devastating (and then you need to be sure you see this documentary):

The most powerful indictment of the news media for falling down in its duties in the run-up to the war in Iraq will appear next Wednesday, a 90-minute PBS broadcast called "Buying the War," which marks the return of "Bill Moyers Journal." E&P was sent a preview DVD and a draft transcript for the program this week.

While much of the evidence of the media's role as cheerleaders for the war presented here is not new, it is skillfully assembled, with many fresh quotes from interviews (with the likes of Tim Russert and Walter Pincus) along with numerous embarrassing examples of past statements by journalists and pundits that proved grossly misleading or wrong. Several prominent media figures, prodded by Moyers, admit the media failed miserably, though few take personal responsibility.

The war continues today, now in its fifth year, with the death toll for Americans and Iraqis rising again -- yet Moyers points out, "the press has yet to come to terms with its role in enabling the Bush Administration to go to war on false pretenses."

Among the few heroes of this devastating film are reporters with the Knight Ridder/McClatchy bureau in D.C. Tragically late, Walter Isaacson, who headed CNN, observes, "The people at Knight Ridder were calling the colonels and the lieutenants and the people in the CIA and finding out, you know, that the intelligence is not very good. We should've all been doing that."

At the close, Moyers mentions some of the chief proponents of the war who refused to speak to him for this program, including Thomas Friedman, Bill Kristol, Roger Ailes, Charles Krauthammer, Judith Miller, and William Safire.

But Dan Rather, the former CBS anchor, admits, "I don't think there is any excuse for, you know, my performance and the performance of the press in general in the roll up to the war…We didn't dig enough. And we shouldn't have been fooled in this way." Bob Simon, who had strong doubts about evidence for war, was asked by Moyers if he pushed any of the top brass at CBS to "dig deeper," and he replies, "No, in all honesty, with a thousand mea culpas….nope, I don't think we followed up on this."

Matt Drudge And New Online Politico Joined At The Hip

Have you heard much about the new online political "magazine" called Politico? I first saw the links for it several weeks ago; only after that did I begin to read and hear lots of mumbling about Politico being less than fair to those not of the red power tie persuasion (I'm still divided myself; I do think I see more Republican bias though I have seen them mock GOPers, too).

But here's what Glenn Greenwald writes today of Matt Drudge and Politico being joined at the hip (that's GOT to hurt):

The new online political magazine, The Politico, is a pernicious new presence in our media landscape. As I noted the other day, it really is nothing more than the Drudge Report dressed up with the trappings of mainstream media credibility. Today, Will Bunch of the Philadelphia Daily News writes on his blog about what is merely the latest episode (of many) proving how closely coordinated The Politico is with The Drudge Report. It is not hyperbole to say that the former is all but an arm of the latter.

Last night, The Politico's Mike Allen published a petty, trite hit piece on Barack Obama -- entitled Rookie Mistakes Plague Obama -- claiming that Obama "has also shown a tendency toward seemingly minor contradictions and rhetorical slips" and referencing "imprecise or incomplete statements by Obama over the years." As Bunch noticed, Allen's story was "highlighted on the Drudge Report no later than 18 minutes after it was filed by Allen (how does he do it!)." Drudge continues prominently to promote The Politico's story today:

As I noted earlier this week, The Politico has instantaneously become one of the most-linked sites (I would guess the single most-linked) on The Drudge Report. Drudge links produce a volume of traffic unlike any other. Central to the business and political plan of The Politico is, quite transparently, overt courting of Matt Drudge and active cooperation with him.

When we last saw Mike Allen, he was falling all over himself in praise of Drudge on Drudge's radio show. Immediately thereafter, Allen published a story with Drudge-like inaccuracy claiming that "it is now a virtual certainty that Deputy Attorney General Paul J. McNulty . . . will also resign shortly" and that Gonzales' resignation would either occur at the same time or a day before -- a story which The Politico changed the following day (once Bush made clear that Gonzales would not resign) to conceal Allen's inaccuracies without indicating in any way that the story had been changed.

Allen, who was Time's White House correspondent before joining The Politico, has a relationship with the White House and with George Bush so affable that the President actually went out of his way at a recent Press Conference deliberately to plug The Politico while exchanging in giggly chatter with Allen...

The rest is here.

Helen Thomas: There's Petty and Stupid, And Then There's Bush Petty and Stupid

Since Bush rolled into office on the votes of the U.S. Supreme Court rather than the will of the majority of American voters in 2000 - and close to that again in Ohio in 2004 - this administration's biggest threat hasn't been Osama bin Laden, al Qaeda, al Zarqawi, Saddam Hussein, or hell, not even Iran's Ahmedinejad. No, it's a little old lady (just 86 years young) from Hearst Newspapers (probably one of the few good things a Hearst publication ever offered): her name is Helen Thomas.

Having covered the White House for decades, Helen has always commanded a certain degree of respect and even had her own front row seat - the only one with her specific name upon it. But with the same petulance and pettiness that the Bush Administration has showed toward truth, truthtellers, whistleblowers, and too many times, its own soldiers on the ground, the White House is pushing Helen out of her assigned front row seat to the proverbial bleechers.

Of course, the White House press corps won't stand up for her and say this is wrong. For all these years of Bush, they've often sat there cowering like the worst schoolyard bullies-turned-wusses whenever Helen pipes up with a question THEY should have asked themselves and, of course, did not. And when she repeats the question when the liar at the podium like Fleischer, McClellan, and now Tony Snow(job) don't answer it or answer only in 400 rpm spin.

This is patently wrong!

And what is worse is that what this White House does to Helen Thomas it does to us ALL. As Cheney's words yesterday indicate, this White House isn't the least bit interested that the will of the people has spoken very loudly on Iraq - and I daresay on this administration as well.

We need to show the Bushies the door... not just the door out of the White House, or the door INTO a court on treason charges; we need to show them the door into federal prison.

I've had the pleasure of corresponding with Helen a few times. This woman has more integrity in a hangnail than ALL of the Bushies combined. It's time we stopped a dictatorship of thugs masquerading as a democracy.