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October 17, 2005

Our Media Is Being Led By The Nose and Missing the Big Picture

Stanley sums up some good points about Judy Miller and the media in a comment on Huffington Post:

"I did the best I could" and "We tried our best" are often the victim postures of an abuser begging for understanding. Okay, we know she is not a victim and we know she abused her position, but why? It wasn't really because she was a covert agent for the right planted in the left wing NYT. Her track record shows Judy as a hefty lefty. So the conspiracy theory is misguided. What Judy obviously is egotistical. She talks of her top secret clearance as if she was better loved by the journalism angels and preens about it like a child ranting "I got a secret, I got a secret." Her self-importance got in the way of her job and obligation as a journalist. Her problem was she was in as much risk of prosecution for revealing "top secret information" like the identity of Valerie Plame as anyone else being scutinized in government. She is in bed with Scooter and Karl because she was just as much at risk of going to the big house. Like the Ethel Rosenberg of the New Millenium, Judy saw the political football and she was gettin kicked in the teeth and going through the goalposts. She didn't tell any managing editor because she couldn't. She didn't write the story and got scooped by Novak because she couldn't. She didn't reveal her conversations with Skooter because she was waiting for a waiver from him but because she was waiting for a waiver from Fitzgerald, because she couldn't without being in the same boat. Judy is a victim of her own conflict of interest and her egotistical notion of having securtiy clearance as a position of journalistic superiority led her down the path to report the false WMD information verbatim from the disinformation masters at WHIG and the CIA. Why would they convince the world that it was real and then convince the world that it wasn't? Where is the CIA on this now that they are either fools or liars? According to the White House we were all mislead by bad intelligence which is a pardonable offense. But being mislead by purposely bad intelligence is co-opting the Constitution and seperation of powers that require public agreemnet on declarations of war. Harriet Miers isn't on the court to help Roe vs. Wade but is positioned as damage control to basic Constitutional questions that loom in the not to distant future. Judy isn't a conspirator but a preening egotist who got in the middle of the worst mess in a very long time. The misleading of the country to get into war leaves questions open that are without end. Did the anthrax terrorist attack that occurred days after 9/11 which was traced to domestic labs occur as part of a WMD bio/nuclear scare to initiate the connection between terrorists, WMD's and Iraq? Did the CIA take part in this plot or not? What about this forged Niger letter that provoked this controversy...who really wrote it? Why would this administration have such a passion about war with Iraq? Who benefits from such an effort? Let's see so far it's Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, American oil companies, military suppliers and weapons companies, and let's not forget the big drug companies and their huge contracts for Anthrax vaccines and now bird flu. Now lets not jump on the conspiracy theory bandwagon but let's get reasonable. Follow the money and find the reasons for everything. This administration whether knowingly or not has a tremendous talent for communicating fear and having knee jerk reactions that cost huge amounts of money. Their tremendous competence turns into tremendous incompetence, but only after we spend a trillion dollars on stuff we didn't really need. We now have more "boogey men" than I've ever seen. Osama, Anthrax, Terror Alerts, WMDs, Saddam, Al Quaida, Zarquawi, Social Security Insolvency, Insurgents, Katrina, Oil shortages, Bird Flu, etc. All the while the major public debate is on gay marriage, Scott Peterson, ten commandments in public spaces, Michael Jackson, Runaway Bride, intelligent design, etc.

Posted by timothompson at October 17, 2005 12:20 PM