Moyers On PBS

Have to give these folks credit - they all voted no on Iraq war vote.


[p] Daniel Akaka (D-HI Jeff Bingaman (D-NM Barbara Boxer (D-CA); Robert Byrd (D-WV); Lincoln Chafee (R-RI); Kent Conrad (D-ND); Jon Corzine (D-NJ Mark Dayton (D-MN); Dick Durbin (D-IL); Russ Feingold (D-WI); Bob Graham (D-FL); Daniel Inouye (D-HI); Jim Jeffords (I-VT); Ted Kennedy (D-MA); Patrick Leahy (D-VT); Carl Levin (D-MI); Barbara Mikulski (D-MD; Patty Murray (D-WA); Jack Reed (D-RI); Paul Sarbanes (D-MD); Debbie Stabenow (D-MI); the late Paul Wellstone (D-MN); Ron Wyden (D-OR). [br]

Interesting that no one on list is running for President in 2008.

 

This was NOT a vote to go to war.

This was a vote for the president to use military action if he deemed it necessary.

Based on the steaming dungheap of lies expectorating, vomiting from the administration in advance of that vote, I find derogatory references to the people on the other side of this vote reprehensible.

Where is your fucking sense of proper accountability?

 

Boom, with all due respect, this isn't a political thread. What's under discussion here is the nature and quality of the journalism in the run-up to the Iraq war. Here's the premise of the Moyers program, from PBS:

"Buying the War" examines the press coverage in the lead-up to the war as evidence of a paradigm shift in the role of journalists in democracy and asks, four years after the invasion, what's changed? "More and more the media become, I think, common carriers of administration statements and critics of the administration," says THE WASHINGTON POST's Walter Pincus. "We've sort of given up being independent on our own."

I linked the show itself a couple of posts ago.

 

Forget it.
Boom's got quoting Tourette's on this issue.

 

I think its one and the same. Moyers show brought to light something that I have thought about for a while.

I think the reason that Bush administration was succesful in gaining support for war was that very few questioned its merrit at decision time.

What really convinced me personaly that war was necessary was a lot of what I had read in the NY Times combined with democrat party support.

I do not think many would have just blindly accepted that Bush Administration word for it.

 

I think the fact that you wrote "democrat party support" is a giveaway to the fact that what you posted is arrant bullshit.

 

No - I just posted it to raise your blood pressure and get you off track of real issue. You have become way to predictable.

 

Simply posting quotes out of context, or vote totals, doesn't really speak to any of that, though.

So you're saying the Times was merely a mouthpiece for a Republican administration?

How do you reconcile that with the Republican conviction that the Times is the house organ of the American Left?

 

I haven't seen the show but I'd be willing to give it credence since Moyers, who was the White House Press Secretary in the Johnson Administration during the height of Vietnam war disinformation, would know first hand how to mislead the press.

 

I think the Times/ Judith Miller was duped. The question is by who. Was it Chalabi or the administration or both in conjunction.

Anyone who reads the Times on a daily basis would not say that they are the house organ of the left. Their editorials lean left but overall their coverage is very balanced. I never felt they were easy on the Clinton administration.


The fact that the Times was duped has pretty much left them handcuffed to speak strongly against war now.

 

Here's a good summary of Moyers' special from DailyKos:

http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2007/4/26/14259/0069

 

Judy Miller gained great access inside this admin, so to keep it, she swallowed, whole.