June 2nd, 2009
Love how the snark oozes just a hair below the surface:
(CNN) — It appears President Obama has to step up his reading pace if he wants to beat his predecessor in one particular measure: how many books a president can polish off a year.
In an interview with the BBC Tuesday, Obama said he is currently reading Joseph O’Neill’s 270-page novel “Netherland,” a book Obama first said he began back in April.
If Obama is close to finishing the novel, that puts him on less than a 10 book-a-year pace, far less than the close to 100 books President Bush was reportedly able to finish in the same amount of time.
[...]
In 2006, Bush read 95 books to Roves 110: a Herculean pace of nearly two books a week — in an election year to boot — for the ex-president. But, according to Rove, Bush’s reading slowed a bit in the final years of his presidency, finishing a not-too-shabby 51 books in 2007 and at least 40 in 2008.
And if that’s not impressive enough, Rove also said Bush found time to read the Bible “from cover to cover” every year.
What can one say, except, Yeah, right!? One hundred books per year my [blip]!
I wish he had read the August 6, 2001, President’s Daily Brief: Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in US.
May 28th, 2008
A lot has been written about Scott McClellan’s — the Bush loyalist and former White House spokesperson — tell all book. Of course, conservative apologists and Bush supporters are already gunning for their former colleague. Bush apologists don’t particular like this claim by the former White House spokesperson:
“If anything, the national press corps was probably too deferential to the White House and to the administration in regard to the most important decision facing the nation during my years in Washington, the choice over whether to go to war in Iraq.
“The collapse of the administration’s rationales for war, which became apparent months after our invasion, should never have come as such a surprise. … In this case, the ‘liberal media’ didn’t live up to its reputation. If it had, the country would have been better served.”
Writing in The Corner, a blog from the conservative National Review magazine, Seth Leibsohn takes issue with McClellan’s claim:
The evidence I’ve seen does in fact show that the administration had different justifications for the liberation of Iraq — but we saw them plainly and in the open before as well as after the invasion. The president, the secretary of state, the VP, and many others gave lots of reasons for the invasion of Iraq. There were international legal cases, there were public policy cases, there were national security cases all to be made. And they were. The idea that the press didn’t do its job and was too soft on the president — as McClellan writes — is, frankly, laughable. Raise your hand if you have any evidence that the press was too soft on the administration.
Conservatives have long labored to caricature the press as liberal — which has served conservatives well, as they use this now conventional wisdom as bludgeon against submissive journalists if they don’t parrot conservative memes and talking points. Therefore, conservatives are not about to concede that, if anything, during the run up to the war, the media did as they were expected: they unquestionably parroted the Bush administration’s talking points, and claims about the threat that Iraq posed to our national security.
David Kurtz, over at TPM media, will be taking Seth’s challenge. However, I here offer Judith Miller and the New York Times subsequen apology as exhibits A and B, in response to Seth.
May 18th, 2008
I was concerned that Sen. Obama’s conciliatory tone earlier in the campaign signified that he would be reluctant to throw a punch. However, if this is any indication of how he’ll respond to republican attacks, well, then, I say Bring it! Because Sen. Obama is showing that he can counter punch, and that he’s not afraid to get bruised:
ABC News Sunlen Miller reports: Sen. Barack Obama went one step further today in his pushback against presumptive GOP presidential nominee Sen. John McCain and President Bush on appeasement, suggesting that both Republicans have a problem with presidents past who have engaged in direct diplomacy.
“If George Bush and John McCain have a problem with direct diplomacy, led by the president of the United States, then they can explain why they have a problem with John F. Kennedy because that’s what he did with [Soviet leader Nikita] Khrushchev, or Ronald Reagan, ’cause that’s what he did with [Soviet leader Mikhail] Gorbachev, or Richard Nixon ’cause that’s what they did with [Chinese leader Mao Tse-tung],” Obama said in Roseburg, Ore. “That’s exactly the kind of diplomacy we need to keep us safe.”
April 26th, 2008
As I previously posted, last week the NY Times reported that the Pentagon and Bush administration used domestic propaganda, in the form of so-called retired generals with direct ties to the Pentagon and to military contractors, to sell the invasion of Iraq to the American public.
Since then, and it should come as no surprise, the networks have refused to come clean on their use of, and participation in the Pentagon’s domestic propaganda program during the lead up to the war. And when the subject is finally covered by a minor network, PBS, an apologists of domestic propaganda — with ties to the Pentagon and to corporate media — is prominently featured in the segment.
The take away of the segment for me is that the networks refuse to acknowledge their responsibility for the war, and that they will simply ignore the NY Time’s report all together. Thus, again, the vast majority of the public, which still gets their news from the networks, will remain in the dark about this on going manipulation of the public discourse by the Pentagon and by the Bush administration.
For the record, as Judy Woodruff mentions in the segment:
And for the record, we invited Fox News, CNN, MSNBC, CBS, ABC and NBC to participate, but they declined our offer or did not respond. [Emphasis added.]
Let’s see how long the networks go on ignoring their complicity in this fiasco that’s the Iraq war. I bet it’ll be a long while before a word is uttered.
April 20th, 2008
“In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex.”
President Eisenhower, Farewell Address,
Jan. 17, 1961
These are some of the generals that the Pentagon and Bush administration deployed into our living rooms, courtesy of CNN, ABC, Fox News, NBC, CBS and the other usual suspects that make up our traditional media — yes, that unrepentant bastion of America-hating liberalism.
The New York Times reports on just how well the Pentagon and the Bush administration coordinated their efforts to manipulate the American Public as they duped us into the invasion of Iraq:
To the public, these men are members of a familiar fraternity, presented tens of thousands of times on television and radio as “military analysts” whose long service has equipped them to give authoritative and unfettered judgments about the most pressing issues of the post-Sept. 11 world.
Hidden behind that appearance of objectivity, though, is a Pentagon information apparatus that has used those analysts in a campaign to generate favorable news coverage of the administration’s wartime performance, an examination by The New York Times has found.
The effort, which began with the buildup to the Iraq war and continues to this day, has sought to exploit ideological and military allegiances, and also a powerful financial dynamic: Most of the analysts have ties to military contractors vested in the very war policies they are asked to assess on air.
Those business relationships are hardly ever disclosed to the viewers, and sometimes not even to the networks themselves. But collectively, the men on the plane and several dozen other military analysts represent more than 150 military contractors either as lobbyists, senior executives, board members or consultants. The companies include defense heavyweights, but also scores of smaller companies, all part of a vast assemblage of contractors scrambling for hundreds of billions in military business generated by the administration’s war on terror.
[...]
Records and interviews show how the Bush administration has used its control over access and information in an effort to transform the analysts into a kind of media Trojan horse — an instrument intended to shape terrorism coverage from inside the major TV and radio networks.
[...]
In turn, members of this group have echoed administration talking points, sometimes even when they suspected the information was false or inflated. Some analysts acknowledge they suppressed doubts because they feared jeopardizing their access.
[...]
The Pentagon paid a private contractor, Omnitec Solutions, hundreds of thousands of dollars to scour databases for any trace of the analysts, be it a segment on “The O’Reilly Factor” or an interview with The Daily Inter Lake in Montana, circulation 20,000.
Omnitec evaluated their appearances using the same tools as corporate branding experts. One report, assessing the impact of several trips to Iraq in 2005, offered example after example of analysts echoing Pentagon themes on all the networks.
Of course, as the New York Times goes on to point out, the manipulation of the American public by these very sources and tactics, continues:
Two weeks ago General Petraeus took time out from testifying before Congress about Iraq for a conference call with military analysts.
Mr. Garrett, the Fox analyst and Patton Boggs lobbyist, said he told General Petraeus during the call to “keep up the great work.”
“Hey,” Mr. Garrett said in an interview, “anything we can do to help.”
