The anti-Bush bonfire in American media began on the very day that Al Gore failed to convince his own home state to elect him President.
It’s been a daily contest in the exempt media since then to see who can pile the largest amount of dung on their sworn enemy: the Bush Administration. 9/11, the response, the investigation and Iraq have all been distorted to add more fuel to that fire. Examples abound of malfeasance, relentless bias, illegal leaks and outright lies used to do this – and yet so far the exempt media has yet to be held accountable in any way.
The latest round in this bush-Bashing hatefest has been the process of training the public to hate this war. The message is: “Hate this war because it’s BUSH’s war,” despite the clear sentiments of all the Usual Suspects when it was being debated… and before. How else could the “Peace Now” crowd justify demands for immediate withdrawal, knowing that the result would be anything but Peace in Iraq? The answer: it undercuts the President and the Republicans. And, it perpetuates the media’s distorted caricature of those who support American security interests in the face of the violent factions of Islam who have sworn to destroy us – on numerous occasions and in many languages – beginning as far back as 1979.
The exempt media itself recently bragged that a clear majority believes reporting on Iraq has been negatively biased, going on to infer the Americans WANT biased news – either one way or the other depending on their partisan whims. This mindset is certainly not at the heart of the problem (that is far more visceral), but it is certainly a symptom, one that also pervades American academia in much the same way.
We ignore these portents at our peril.
