Daily Kos: Bushco "Fair & Balanced"
by LincMad
Fri Jul 13, 2007
On yesterday's Countdown with Keith Olbermann (MSNBC), Keith remarked on President Bush's use of the phrase "fair and balanced" to describe the process by which he reached the decision to commute Scooter Libby's prison sentence for perjury and obstruction of justice. Having for so many years heard the Fox Noise Channel mindlessly parroting the rhetoric of the Bush Administration, it was a remarkable shift to hear the river running upstream. A few minutes ago, Ambassador David Satterfield, Senior Advisor to the U.S. Secretary of State and Coordinator for Iraq, appearing on Al Jazeera English's Inside Iraq weekly discussion program, said that in September the Bushies will make a "fair and balanced assessment" of the progress of the "surge" in Iraq.
It's bad enough to have an entire television network that sees its primary role as being a mouthpiece for the current ruling party — Fox Noise is our version of the Soviet-era Pravda — but now we have the President of the United States and his loyal minions using the propaganda channel's own tagline in a desperate effort to hold onto his crumbling "base." President Bush has sunk to near the level of Richard Nixon — the only President in living memory who compares to Bush in corruption and abuse of power — just before he resigned in disgrace. The American people are almost 50/50 on the question of impeaching Bush, and closer to 60/40 on Cheney. At yesterday's press conference, Bush said that he wants to be loved, and so he is making desperate overtures to the dwindling ranks of people who don't already despise him.
Just as the lurching of the Republican Party to the neoconservative right has dragged the Democrat Party — um, I mean, the Democratic Party — to the right, so too the hard-right spin from Fox Noise has dragged the mainstream media into its bizarro world of propaganda and us-and-them. On yesterday's Hardball (MSNBC), the Republican guest was so detached from reality that I had to turn off the television to keep from hurling a brick through the screen. It is clear that the President and Fox Noise are marching in lockstep to promote the fantasy that paradise in Iraq is just around the next corner. If we just tough it out a little longer, Iraq will be a functioning democracy, but if we leave, the storm clouds will turn into mushrooms.
Another consistent talking point for the administration is to speak of "precipitous withdrawal" from Iraq, even though none of the proposals floating around Congress calls for any such thing. A precipitous withdrawal would be a disaster, but the President is making a classic strawman argument to deflect attention from the real question: how do we make an orderly withdrawal from Iraq, with a minimum of further damage to both U.S. and Iraqi interests? It will require careful planning to minimize casualties, since the anti-American factions will undoubtedly attack our forces on their way out of Iraq. It will require careful planning to maximize the degree to which the Iraqis can take over and maintain what little peace and order they have.
Most of all, extricating ourselves from Iraq will require an assessment that is — in reality rather than in rhetoric — "fair and balanced."...
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2007/7/13/14724/6546
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
