Washington Post is calling us "Wing nuts"

[orleans]

this is a snip from f.a.i.r.

"After over a month of scant media attention, mainstream U.S. outlets have begun to report more seriously about the "Downing Street Memo," the minutes of a July 2002 meeting of British government officials that indicate the White House had already made up its mind to invade Iraq at that early date, and that "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy" of invading rather than seeking a peaceful solution.

A June 7 White House press conference with George W. Bush and Tony Blair offered the first public response from Bush to the memo, and with that came an upswing in U.S. media attention. But some in the media took it as a chance to lash out at the activists who have been bringing attention to the story all along. On June 8, Washington Post reporter Dana Milbank referred to Downing Street Memo activists--some of whom were offering a cash reward for the first journalist to ask Bush about the memo--as "wing nuts." He also offered an illogical explanation for the memo's low media profile:


"In part, the memo never gained traction here because, unlike in Britain, it wasn't election season, and the war is not as unpopular here. In part, it's also because the notion that Bush was intent on military action in Iraq had been widely reported here before, in accounts from Paul O'Neill and Bob Woodward, among others. The memo was also more newsworthy across the Atlantic because it reinforced the notion there that Blair has been acting as Bush's 'poodle.'"

Contact the Washington Post ombudsman Michael Getler and ask him if it is appropriate to label media activists "wing nuts" in a news story."

Washington Post
Ombudsman
Michael Getler
Phone: [phone]
[e-mail]

http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=2545

and besides:
"Wingnut," a mildly derogatory term for a person who holds right-wing political beliefs, especially in the context of Internet forums, blogs, electronic mailing lists, or newsgroups. The term is most likely a truncation of "right-wing nut."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wingnut_%28disambiguation%29

i believe dana meant to say "moonbat"!!!

[Erika]

1. Does anyone read the Washington Post?

Just curious. I've heard they are to the right of Rush Limbaugh.

[high density]

5. Maybe you're thinking of the Washington Times? (NM)

[grasswire]

2. trivia

I believe the term "wingnut" (as defined by wikipedia) was first coined by users of the old ACLU chat room/forum on AOL, and extended from there to the AOL message boards. I recall pushing the term pretty hard. And that was about eight years ago. Dana is so behind the times.

[Just Me]

3. So, what? Does WP SERVE the interests of "the people"?

Are they advancing lives beyond their own zone?

Okay. Whose interests does WP serve? HUH???? }(

[Imagevision]

4. Obviously The Washington Post has a need to attempt to discredit

The corporate media will jump on the DSM band-wagon when they see momentum gaining -- no investigative reporting, just playing the Limbaugh-hannity game lie-deny-deceive bullsh*t whatever it takes,

McClellan says he doesn't rehash old news? ha! - they're getting quite concerned as this thing continues to snowball.

[NVMojo]

6. Ah, screw that old tight ass paper!

[ngGale]

7. They all lied about the build up to the Iraq war...

and are complicit in the cover up. Therefore, discredit, discredit, discredit the messenger. Circling the wagons, again.

[Nikki Stone 1]

8. It is clear that the M$M wants this war to continue at all costs

Even at the cost of the truth.

Dana Milbank is not original or unique in this regard.

[Skittles]

10. see my post below, Ms. Nikki

yes INDEED!

[Skittles]

9. LOL -we are getting to them

Milbank's reasoning is laughable. People supported the war because they didn't know the facts - yet now he purports to use said ignorance as a reason for not reporting the facts? OMG, he must be dizzy from so much spinning. :D

[quaoar]

11. The WaPo ombudsman has already criticized the paper once for not covering

the DSM. So he's probably receptive to other emails about this.

[DoYouEverWonder]

12. Dana Milbanks is going off the deep end

he has totally lost it. It's so said to watch people goes nuts in public.

[DemBones DemBones]

13. Before I e-mail the WaPo ombudsman, I'd like to know

if Milbanks made his comments in print or on TV.

I'd like a link to his exact comments, too, either the article he wrote or the transcript of the show he was on.

The more we give the ombudsman, the easier his job is (and the more we show we're paying attention!)

So, if you've been paying enough attention to know the answer to my questions, please post! ;-)

[orleans]

14. here's milbank's blabla from june 8

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/06/07/AR2005060701935.html

Seldom-Discussed Elephant Moves Into Public's View

By Dana Milbank
Post
Wednesday, June 8, 2005; A14

Yesterday's East Room meeting of President Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair was worth a cool $1,000 to Steve Holland, Reuters' chief White House correspondent, if he cares to collect it.

Earlier in the day, Democrats.com, a group of left-wing activists, sent out an e-mail offering a "reward" to anyone who could get an answer from Bush about whether a recently leaked British government memo from 2002 was correct in saying the Bush administration had "fixed" the intelligence about Iraq's weapons to justify war.

The issue caused quite a fuss in Britain when the Times of London published the memo last month on the eve of Blair's reelection. Here at home, the memo provoked outrage from liberals but did not become a major news event -- until yesterday, when Holland, the third of four questioners, put it on the agenda.

"The so-called Downing Street memo from July 2002 says intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy of removing Saddam through military action," Holland mused to both leaders. "Is this an accurate reflection of what happened?"

Blair, as he has done on a full range of issues over the past four years, leaped to Bush's defense. "Well, I can respond to that very easily," he said, before Bush could open his mouth. "No, the facts were not being fixed, in any shape or form at all."

Bush started out by suggesting that the memo wasn't credible because British media had "dropped it out in the middle of his race." Skipping any discussion of the intelligence, Bush said he had not settled on war from the start. "There's nothing farther from the truth," he asserted. "My conversations with the prime minister was, how can we do this peacefully?"

Holland, a consummate professional, wasn't trying to satisfy the wing nuts -- "good grief," he said when told later about the prize money -- and won't be collecting. But his query ended a slightly strange episode in the American media in which the potentially explosive report out of London had become a seldom acknowledged elephant in the room.

The Times report was intriguing: It showed that the head of British foreign intelligence told Blair seven months before the invasion of Iraq that Bush saw military action against Saddam Hussein as "inevitable" and that intelligence in Washington was "being fixed around the policy." In part, the memo never gained traction here because, unlike in Britain, it wasn't election season, and the war is not as unpopular here. In part, it's also because the notion that Bush was intent on military action in Iraq had been widely reported here before, in accounts from Paul O'Neill and Bob Woodward, among others.

The memo was also more newsworthy across the Atlantic because it reinforced the notion there that Blair has been acting as Bush's "poodle." While the Briton gave Bush crucial support on Iraq, Bush has gone against Blair in rejecting the Kyoto global warming treaty, imposing steel tariffs and declining to embrace Blair's more expansive African aid effort.

On Monday, London's Telegraph reported that "there are some in Downing Street who would like the prime minister to have what they describe as a 'Love Actually' moment." That refers to the 2003 film in which Hugh Grant, playing the British prime minister, tells off an American president, played by Billy Bob Thornton, at a news conference.

But, the Telegraph reported, Blair "is not about to behave in a way that could be characterized as the poodle biting back. 'In private, he gets very angry with Bush about these things but it's not his style to humiliate him in public,' one ally said."

Blair didn't even nibble at the president yesterday. Rather than let Bush take the bullet over the Downing Street memo -- the question was, after all, about U.S. war intentions -- he insisted on blocking the projectile himself. "No one knows more intimately the discussions that we were conducting as two countries at the time than me," he testified on Bush's behalf. "And the fact is, we decided to go to the United Nations."

Rather than repay Blair for his generosity, Bush made clear he would not support Blair's plan to double international aid to Africa and said "our country is taking the lead in Africa."

At the end of the news conference, Blair called on a British journalist, who asked about Africa and climate change. Bush jumped in with a lengthy answer, then ended the session before Blair could put in a word. "Thank you for your question; good to see you all," he declared. Blair gamely took Bush's extended hand.

[orleans]

15. and here's milbanks dribble from june 17

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/06/16/AR2005061601570_pf.html

Democrats Play House To Rally Against the War

By Dana Milbank
Post
Friday, June 17, 2005; A06



In the Capitol basement yesterday, long-suffering House Democrats took a trip to the land of make-believe.

They pretended a small conference room was the Judiciary Committee hearing room, draping white linens over folding tables to make them look like witness tables and bringing in cardboard name tags and extra flags to make the whole thing look official.

Rep. John Conyers Jr. (D-Mich.) banged a large wooden gavel and got the other lawmakers to call him "Mr. Chairman." He liked that so much that he started calling himself "the chairman" and spouted other chairmanly phrases, such as "unanimous consent" and "without objection so ordered." The dress-up game looked realistic enough on C-SPAN, so two dozen more Democrats came downstairs to play along.

The session was a mock impeachment inquiry over the Iraq war. As luck would have it, all four of the witnesses agreed that President Bush lied to the nation and was guilty of high crimes -- and that a British memo on "fixed" intelligence that surfaced last month was the smoking gun equivalent to the Watergate tapes. Conyers was having so much fun that he ignored aides' entreaties to end the session.

"At the next hearing," he told his colleagues, "we could use a little subpoena power." That brought the house down.

As Conyers and his hearty band of playmates know, subpoena power and other perks of a real committee are but a fantasy unless Democrats can regain the majority in the House. But that's only one of the obstacles they're up against as they try to convince America that the "Downing Street Memo" is important.

A search of the congressional record yesterday found that of the 535 members of Congress, only one -- Conyers -- had mentioned the memo on the floor of either chamber. House Democratic leaders did not join in Conyers's session, and Senate Democrats, who have the power to hold such events in real committee rooms, have not troubled themselves.

The hearing was only nominally about the Downing Street Memo and its assertion that in the summer of 2002 Bush was already determined to go to war and was making the intelligence fit his case. Joseph C. Wilson IV, a former ambassador whose wife was outed as a CIA operative, barely mentioned the memo in his opening statement. Cindy Sheehan, who lost a son in Iraq, said the memo "only confirms what I already suspected."

No matter: The lawmakers and the witnesses saw this as a chance to rally against the war. Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) proclaimed it "one of the biggest scandals in the history of this country." Conyers said the memos "establish a prima facie case of going to war under false pretenses." Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) concluded that "the time has come to get out" of Iraq.

The session took an awkward turn when witness Ray McGovern, a former intelligence analyst, declared that the United States went to war in Iraq for oil, Israel and military bases craved by administration "neocons" so "the United States and Israel could dominate that part of the world." He said that Israel should not be considered an ally and that Bush was doing the bidding of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.

"Israel is not allowed to be brought up in polite conversation," McGovern said. "The last time I did this, the previous director of Central Intelligence called me anti-Semitic."

Rep. James P. Moran Jr. (D-Va.), who prompted the question by wondering whether the true war motive was Iraq's threat to Israel, thanked McGovern for his "candid answer."

At Democratic headquarters, where an overflow crowd watched the hearing on television, activists handed out documents repeating two accusations -- that an Israeli company had warning of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and that there was an "insider trading scam" on 9/11 -- that previously has been used to suggest Israel was behind the attacks.

The event organizer, Democrats.com, distributed stickers saying "Bush lied/100,000 people died." One man's T-shirt proclaimed, "Whether you like Bush or not, he's still an incompetent liar," while a large poster of Uncle Sam announced: "Got kids? I want yours for cannon fodder."

Conyers's firm hand on the gavel could not prevent something of a free-for-all; at one point, a former State Department worker rose from the audience to propose criminal charges against Bush officials. Early in the hearing, somebody accidentally turned off the lights; later, a witness knocked down a flag. Matters were even worse at Democratic headquarters, where the C-SPAN feed ended after just an hour, causing the activists to groan and one to shout "Conspiracy!"

The glitches and the antiwar theatrics proved something of a distraction from the message the organizers aimed to deliver: that for the Bush White House, as lawyer John C. Bonifaz put it, the British memo is "the equivalent to the revelation that there was a taping system in the Nixon White House."

Of course, Democrats controlled the real committees back then -- though Conyers was not deterred. "We have a lot of work to do as a result of this first panel," he told his colleagues. " 'Tis the beginning of our work."

[CityDem]

16. Wash Post

The post is nothing more than the propaganda wing of the AWOL administration. Goes to show how the corporatists can ruin a good thing.

[gratuitous]

17. "The war is not as unpopular here" as it is in Britain?

What circular logic! Gee, the media don't cover anything with any depth or seriousness, parrot the blast faxes out of the White House, discount any opposing voices as "wing nuts" or worse, and yet they have the gall to excuse it all by saying that the Iraq invasion is not as unpopular as it is in Britain!

You know something, Dana? You're wrong on this. You're as wrong as you can be. And what's worse, I think you know you're wrong. But rather than suck it up like a man, admit your mistake, and resolve to do better, you're peeved at the people who are trying to set you straight. Grow up, sonny.