Fantasy Versus Reality

Yet another awful day in Mesopotamia--ten Marines killed, eleven injured in Fallujah by, you guessed it, a roadside bomb. I wonder which low-level White House flunky will be charged with delivering this bit of news to the Draft-Dodger in chief...

Oh, and take a look at today's Rude Pundit, if you have the chance. He nicely sums up the stale smell of hypocrisy emanating from the national capital these days: while the boy-king reiterates his litany of memorized syllables--sacrifice, 9/11, Zarqawi, Zawahiri, freedom, blah blah blah, the First Lady blissfully shows off the White House Christmas tree...as the Rude One notes, the decorations "might as well have been plucked from the graves of...American soldiers." No shit.

Paul Krugman tears apart the "Strategy for Victory" document, righly calling it "an embarrassing piece of work," while pointing out the sheer contempt Team Bush have for the media:

The point isn't just that the administration is trying, yet again, to deceive the public. It's the fact that this attempt at deception shows such contempt - contempt for the public, and especially contempt for the news media. And why not? The truth is that the level of misrepresentation in this new document is no worse than that in a typical speech by President Bush or Vice President Dick Cheney. Yet for much of the past five years, many major news organizations failed to provide the public with effective fact-checking.

So Mr. Bush's new public relations offensive on Iraq is a test. Are the news media still too cowed, too addicted to articles that contain little more than dueling quotes to tell the public when the administration is saying things that aren't true? Or has the worm finally turned?

There have been encouraging signs, notably a thorough front-page fact-checking article - which even included charts showing the stagnation of oil production and electricity generation! - in USA Today. But the next few days will tell.

Well, maybe--on the other hand, I half expect the mainstream press to roll the document up and slap THEMSELVES silly with it--while praising the "bold" steps outlined therein. Wankers.

And, I forget where I saw this--if it was on a blog, apologies for lack of citation, but recently I read that Team Bush is so paranoid about genuine analysis of their motives re: Iraq, that they were trying to keep documents related to the Gulf of Tonkin (non) incident from the public--lest further parallels be drawn between the two quagmires.

Well, today's reports confirm what we all knew: yeah, the "attack" by North Vietnam wasn't. However, it provided a pretext to teach "them" a lesson--just like WMD did in Iraq.

Some lesson, eh?