Blog For Arizona

Dean Rapid Response

Ed.: Here's another fine example of the work our Dean Rapid Response team volunteers are doing to combat media bias against our candidate. We won't stand still for the Goreing of Dean by the corporate media echo-chamber. To join the fight go to the DeanRR_AZ Yahoo group and sign up.

To the editor,

When Sen. Ted Kennedy and Gov. Howard Dean recently called George Bush on his administration's big lie about Iraq,
whom did the "liberal" media attack? Those who called attention to Bush's lies, or Bush himself for starting a knowingly fraudulent (and apparently personal) war? That's right, they attacked those who spoke the truth.

The facts: Before his unilateral attack on Iraq, George Bush was told by the CIA to remove inaccurate claims of Iraqi WMDs from his speeches, but TeamBush put them back in. The U.N. opposed the war, and the arms inspectors said there was no evidence for WMDs. Very recently, the U.S.'s Army War College called Bush's attack "a strategic error of the first order," and the Carnegie Endowment for Peace recently said there was no Saddam-Al Queda link. One-time Bush supporter General Clark even switched political parties after Bush's Pentagon admitted to him that they would use the 9-11 attacks as a pretext for attacking Saddam. Secretary of State Colin Powell finally admitted last week to what was obvious to all before Bush's war: there was no threat. Most recently, Bush's former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill provided documents to Wall Street Journal reporter Ron Suskind proving that Bush had been planning to attack Iraq even before he got into the White House.

Despite this gross violation of trust by the Commander-in-Chief, the media highlighted instead those that were bashing the critics of Bush: On CNN (14 January) Commerce Secretary Don Evans admonished Sen. Kennedy: "He just needs to be reminded that the president worked with Congress." The truth as we all now know, Mr. Secretary, is that Bush Inc. lied to Congress in order to get their support. And to Evans' comment "The president worked with the U.N. as he continued to work through the issue of whether or not we went to war in Iraq," I respond: that is a deceptive half-truth - TeamBush may have interacted with the U.N., but they did not agree with him as "worked with" implies. A not-so-subtle difference.

Attacking presidential candidate Gov. Dean for likewise speaking the truth, CNN's Judy Woodruff (14 January) tried the old media distraction maneuver: don't discuss the truth, but instead call the messenger names. She called Dean a "hypocrite," claiming his support for the our going in to stop the Bosnian genocide contradicts his anti-Iraq stance. The reality is that Dean supported the Bosnia action on humanitarian grounds - "preventing genocide" in Dean's words. Bush's foremost justification for his "pre-emptive" attack on Iraq was not based on preventing genocide, but rather on the his administration's fictitious claims of "imminent threat" to U.S. soil - including "nuclear bomb" capability and other scary "WMD's"- as well as the allegation that Saddam Hussein was in league with Osama bin Laden. Had Bush asked the U.S. to go in to prevent genocide in Iraq (without all the lies), that would have been a different story. But next time, who will believe him?

Rich Kozak
Flagstaff

posted by Michael Bryan @ 1/15/2004 02:26:00 PM