The Iraq Memorial War Wall

All Guns Blazing

Dan Froomkin, whose career with the Washington Post has ended under circumstances that bring considerable disgrace to the newspaper, has filed his final WaPo column. He is not, I’m happy to see, going gently into that good night:

When I look back on the Bush years, I think of the lies. There were so many. Lies about the war and lies to cover up the lies about the war. Lies about torture and surveillance. Lies about Valerie Plame. Vice President Dick Cheney’s lies, criminally prosecutable but for his chief of staff Scooter Libby’s lies. I also think about the extraordinary and fundamentally cancerous expansion of executive power that led to violations of our laws and our principles.

And while this wasn’t as readily apparent until President Obama took office, it’s now very clear that the Bush years were all about kicking the can down the road – either ignoring problems or, even worse, creating them and not solving them. This was true of a huge range of issues including the economy, energy, health care, global warming – and of course Iraq and Afghanistan.

How did the media cover it all? Not well. Reading pretty much everything that was written about Bush on a daily basis, as I did, one could certainly see the major themes emerging. But by and large, mainstream-media journalism missed the real Bush story for way too long. The handful of people who did exceptional investigative reporting during this era really deserve our gratitude: People such as Ron Suskind, Seymour Hersh, Jane Mayer, Murray Waas, Michael Massing, Mark Danner, Barton Gellman and Jo Becker, James Risen and Eric Lichtblau (better late than never), Dana Priest, Walter Pincus, Charlie Savage and Philippe Sands; there was also some fine investigative blogging over at Talking Points Memo and by Marcy Wheeler. Notably not on this list: The likes of Bob Woodward and Tim Russert. Hopefully, the next time the nation faces a grave national security crisis, we will listen to the people who were right, not the people who were wrong, and heed those who reported the truth, not those who served as stenographers to liars.

It’s also worth keeping in mind that there is so very much about the Bush era that we still don’t know.

Froomkin says he’ll take some time off before unveiling his next project. Best of luck to him.

The Winger Mindset

Okay, people, somebody walk me through this.

Bill O’Reilly can spend hours of television time denouncing Kansas physician George Tiller as a Nazi, a moral equal to NAMBLA and Al Qaida, and call him “Tiller the Baby Killer” because he performed legal late-term abortions, but nobody can suggest that his words played any part in Tiller’s assassination by an anti-abortion psycho . . .   

. . . but mere words in a novel about a teenaged boy’s coming out are so dangerous to the public that a group of Wisconsin wingnuts not only want it banned from the local library, they want it burned in public.

I mean, the ranks of Wingnuttia are swollen with culture warriors who have built whole careers on the notion that mere video games, movies and TV shows have the power to warp minds and turn innocents into bloodthirsty criminals. The mere existence of Michael Moore was enough to cause the 9/11 disaster, to hear Dinesh D’Souza tell it. But a FreaksNews cable troll can howl against George Tiller night after night and that’s not supposed to have any effect on his viewers? The less stable ones, I mean, assuming that’s a distinction one can make among O’Reilly’s followers. 

While we ponder that question, let’s relax with some highly entertaining video built on O’Reilly’s latest froth-fest against Salon editor Joan Walsh. Good times!

From Batty to Bughouse

I know, I know . . . it’s been way too long since my last post. Here’s the problem: the two biggest issues of the moment are the ongoing financial meltdown caused by the Bush Bust-Out, and the increasingly insane and violent temper of conservative rhetoric. The first I have to avoid commenting on for professional, day-job reasons. The second gets a little monotonous — how many times can somebody write, “Haw haw, lookit the wacky wingers”? So lately I have the feeling that I just don’t have that much to add to the national political conversation.

On the other hand, I read this rant from the reliably zany Andrew Breitbart – proprietor of Big Hollywood, that online wingnut salt lick where washouts like Dirk Benedict go to whine about how Hollywood liberals wrecked their showbiz careers — and it seemed the least I could do would be to highlight the flakiest flake in any given week of flakery. And so, join me in calling on Andrew Breibart to put down his sippy cup, arrange the arms straps on his straitjacket and rise to take a bow as we salute Andrew Breitbart, Flake of the Week.