"Bush Lied! Saddam Was Innocent!"
The conventional news media are hysterical about the prospect of four more years of a Republican administration, and the prospect that the Republicans will control both electoral branches of government, and strongly influence the judiciary, for years to come. That 's the only explanation I can come up with for the daily dose of "Free Saddam!" headlines in every newspaper.
The level of deception has gotten ridiculous. Take this morning's CBS News headline: "Bush Knew Iraq Info Was Dubious." Wow. Sounds like a blockbuster. Drudge linked to it, so millions of people will read it. If you read the article, though, you find that it says nothing whatever about President Bush. What it says is that "CIA officials warned members of the President’s National Security Council staff the intelligence was not good enough to make the flat statement Iraq tried to buy uranium from Africa." The response from the unnamed National Security Council staffers was that the proposed statement in the State of the Union address was attributed to British intelligence, which said then--and says now--that they have evidence of the attempted uranium purchase independent of the documents that the CIA concluded were forgeries. The CIA officials then "dropped their objections."
So the story 1) is no blockbuster, and 2) says nothing at all about what "Bush knew," contrary to the inflammatory headline.
The bottom line is that powerful forces are determined to bring down this President. Those forces include virtually all reporters and editors at almost every major newspaper, every general circulation news magazine, and every broadcast television network. These people have a remarkable ability to mold public perceptions. Bear in mind that most people don't read newspaper stories; they only see the headlines. And all of the headlines say "Bush Lied!"
I think it's going to be a wild ride from here to November 2004.
