Duty to Warn

The corporate Democrats who greased Bill Clinton’s path to the White House are now a bit worried. Their influence on the party’s presidential nomination process has slipped. But the Democratic Leadership Council can count on plenty of assistance from mainstream news media.

     For several years leading up to 1992, the DLC curried favor with high-profile political journalists as they repeated the mantra that the Democratic Party needed to be centrist. Co-founded by Clinton in the mid-1980s, the DLC emphasized catering to “middle class” Americans — while the organization filled its coffers with funding from such non-middle-class bastions as the top echelons of corporate outfits like Arco, Prudential-Bache, Dow Chemical, Georgia Pacific and Martin Marietta.

I opposed the war in Iraq because I thought it would lead to the peace from hell, but I’d rather not see my prediction come true and I don’t think we have much time left to avert it. That the occupation is not going well is apparent to everyone but Donald Rumsfeld. If this thing turns into Vietnam simply because that man is too vain and arrogant to admit that Gen. Eric Shinseki was right when he said we would need “several hundred thousand soldiers” over there, I hope Rumsfeld rots in a hell worse than the one he’s making.

Now is not the time to stand back timidly hoping it will work out well in the end. The population of Baghdad is broiling through the 115-degree summer without electricity or water for much of the time. Given the background poverty and generally hideous conditions, the place is a major riot waiting to happen.

While the mainstream media debates whether the President was misinforming, exaggerating or misleading the U.S. public, they miss the bigger story – their obvious complicity with the Bush administration’s Nazi-style propaganda prior to the war.

George W. Bush and his administration deliberately undertook a massive campaign to wage illegal and aggressive war against the people of Iraq. The narrow focus on one fraudulent claim in the State of the Union address regarding Iraq buying uranium from Africa ignores the much broader campaign of falsification used to whip the people into a war frenzy.

     We’re living in an era when news coverage often involves plenty of absurdity.

     That’s the case with routine U.S. media spin about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. So, on the July 29 edition of NPR’s “All Things Considered” program, host Robert Siegel and correspondent Vicky O’Hara each recited scripts referring to a “security barrier” that Israel’s government is building in the West Bank. The next day, many news outlets -- including the Los Angeles Times, Baltimore Sun, New York Times, Chicago Tribune and The Associated Press -- also used the “security barrier” phrase without quotation marks, treating it as an objective description rather than the Israeli government’s preferred characterization.

            AUSTIN, Texas -- Oh great, now we have a bunch of Texas Democrats hiding out in Albuquerque (which is very difficult to spell), and I'm here holding the bag, trying to explain what this particular spate of lunacy in our state is all about. Spare me, Lord.

            OK, if I really have to do this deal ... see if you can think back to when you were a kid -- 5, 6, 7 -- and you were always getting blamed for something one of your siblings had done, or you didn't mean to knock over something but your old man whopped you for it anyway.

            The classic cry from the heart is, "BUT IT'S NOT FAIR!" Naturally, further on down the line, all of us experience some variant of John F. Kennedy's observation that "life is not fair." Exactly when, where and under what circumstances we give up on expecting life to be fair obviously varies from cancer to KIA to divorce to other of life's more malicious surprises.

In the glow of the Iraq war's initial military success, most American peace activists felt profoundly demoralized. Between the war's portrayal as a glamorous spectacle and Bush's seemingly overwhelming support, many who'd recently marched by the millions felt isolated, defensive, and powerless, fearing their voices no longer mattered.

AUSTIN, Texas -- The congressional report by the committees on intelligence about 9-11 partially made public last week reminds me of the recent investigation into the crash of the Columbia shuttle -- months of effort to reconfirm the obvious.

            In the case of the Columbia, we knew from the beginning a piece of insulation had come loose and struck the underside of one wing. So, after much study, it was determined the crash was caused by the piece of insulation that came loose and struck the underside of the wing.

            Likewise in the case of 9-11, all the stuff that has been blindingly obvious for months is now blamed for the fiasco.

It's well past time to say it. Despite the weaseling and finger-pointing--in fact, because of it--the Forged Niger letter is indeed the smoking gun, and the chips have yet to stop falling. Who wrote the damn thing, and on whose orders? Who cares whether Tenet, his job on the line, acquiesced to including a literal truth that actually amounts to one of the great frauds of the century? The sheer audacity and cynicism of this coterie of hacks and hustlers is simply astounding. As a teacher, I won't let six-year-olds get away with such transparent sophistry. The bottom line is that Bush knew the information was bogus, and used it anyway to convince millions to go along with his phony war.

ANCHORAGE -- Many and varied are the wonders, the splendors and the peculiarities of the Other Great State. The funniest thing said by Alaskans is, "Gonna be another scorcher" (means "could get into the 70s").

            In Alaska, God is called Ted Stevens. The senior senator and chairman of the Appropriations Committee is worth an estimated $3 billion a year to the state. One of the oddest things about Alaska is the complete disconnect between its politics and its reality. Alaska is an implacably conservative state, albeit with a lovely libertarian lilt. Consequently, the right-wing radio talk show hosts bash government unmercifully, and Alaskans wander around under the impression that they are all rugged individualists who can take care of themselves and don't need no goldern govamint. That the state is painfully dependent on government is clear only to those who think.

AUSTIN -- Probably because I'm supposed to have a sense of humor, I once wound up on a distinguished panel on the subject of legal ethics, which some people consider a joke to begin with. Dan Rather and I were there as agents provocateurs.

We got to attack legal ethics, but the lawyers couldn't attack media ethics, such as they are, because that wasn't the subject (heh, heh, heh). Naturally, though, a couple of the lawyers kept trying to turn the spotlight on multiple media sins -- a typical lawyer trick.

Several of the lawyers on the panel regularly handle "high-profile" cases -- among others were Bob Bennett, Bill Clinton's lawyer, Richard Beckler, who was John Poindexter's lawyer during the Iran-Contra scandal, and Racehorse Haynes of Houston, who defended former Texas House Speaker Goober Mutscher.