The Bush administration, with polls showing the public support for the Iraq war is dropping, is pushing back hard. The latest talking points include an attack on the media, which the Bush administration claims is not reporting the "good" news from Iraq. Groucho Marx Pootie has something to say about that. In his best imitation of Geroge W Bush he says "Who are you going to believe, me or your own eyes?" (That's a Groucho Marx quote, in case you didn't know).
Another person prominent in the news these days is also blaming the media for her woes. Debra Lafave, the school teacher who molested her 14 year old student, adopted the “Bush” defense during an interview with the press. She blamed media attention for psychological problems that her victim is having. In her words: "The media has totally taken it out of proportion and he's suffering even more so by the media's actions."
MSNBC seems to be bowing to pressure from the president. It gave a segment of the program Hardball to Gayle Taylor and her husband, a National Guard soldier who recently returned from duty in Iraq. Taylor made the news recently by repeating one of Bush's talking points to him during a town hall meeting: “It seems that our major media networks don't want to portray the good.” [loud applause and standing ovation]. Her husband said during the MSNBC segment that the media unfairly represents the Iraq war because reporters don’t like Bush and they don’t share his (and our) Christian values. Chris Matthews, the talking head of the show Hardball, didn't question him about this statement. Instead, at the end of the interview he called them both real patriots. Although Matthews has recently been more critical of the president's efforts in Iraq, just a few months ago he was saying: "I was impressed again by the fact that he (the president) was taking a shot at the media, saying you are not going to hear about this economic development progress on the evening news."
Alan Simpson (Former senator, WYO) and other Bush supporters are making the rounds on cable news to repeat the same thing. Simpson on one talk show suggested that Bush wouldn’t be having problems now in Iraq if he had been more honest with the people. Well, it’s not what you think – he doesn’t want him to come clean about lies leading up to the war and the mismanagement of it. Instead, he says that Bush should have let the people know that the job in Iraq is harder than what people were led to believe. This arrogant Bush apologizer sees the problem as a failed media campaign.
On the cable news, one voice stands alone like a shining star in the night. It's Keith Olbermann who continues to report real news. Last night he shared news about a report from the US State Department and Condoleezza Rice that says that conditions in Iraq are WORSE than what is being reported in the news.
From the March 23 edition of MSNBC's Countdown with Keith Olbermann:
OLBERMANN: The report on Iraq consisted entirely of violence, "a climate of extreme violence," the transcript read, "in which people were killed for political and other reasons." The reporter emphasized "bombings, executions, killings, kidnappings, shootings, and intimidation." The chaos there was so bad, the reporter concluded, that his story "could scarcely reflect the broad dimension of the violence there." Our fifth story on the Countdown: the exact kind of biased, bad-news-only, liberal media reporting against which the Bush administration has launched its latest round of attacks? Something from The New York Times or, worse, from Aljazeera? No, those quotes were from the Bush administration itself, in the State Department's official assessment of conditions in Iraq, which suggests, in no uncertain terms, that, if anything, the news media is sugar-coating what is happening there. The study, titled "Country Reports on Human Rights Practices," was released at a news conference earlier this month, with Secretary of State Rice herself delivering the opening remarks, the 23 pages on Iraq stating unequivocally that even a highly selective inventory of the terrorist attacks in that country during the last year could barely begin to catalog all the violence.
Quote, "Bombings, executions, killings, kidnappings, shootings, and intimidation were a daily occurrence throughout all regions and sectors of society. An illustrative list of those attacks, even a highly selective one, could scarcely reflect the broad dimension of the violence," the report also stating that the attacks were being waged by any number of people, not just insurgents, for any number of reasons. Quoting again, "Former regime elements, local and foreign fighters, and terrorists waged guerilla warfare and a terrorist campaign of violence impacting every aspect of life. Killings, kidnappings, torture, and intimidation were fueled by political grievances and ethnic and religious tensions and were supported by parts of the population."
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