So the media has finally gotten something it is competent to report

It's no surprise that the report of John Edward's affair was broken by the nonserious tabloid "The National Inquirer." With occasional very rare exceptions, that's all any of the media is any more - tabloids. Sex sells tabloids, especially if it is sex by a Democratic politician.

So it is no surprise that when the National Inquirer hassles John Edwards into confessing an affair, the media jumps all over it and distributes the story far and wide. Here, for example is ABC News carrying the story - broken by the National Inquirer, remember - as though it were real news.

What makes it real news, worthy of being carried by every mainstream "News" outlet in the U.S.? Sure, John Edwards ran for the Democratic nomination for President, but he never was a contender. So why has the news media jumped all over this story and pushed it as far as they could, delving into personal details that are of no concern to anyone outside the Edwards family?

Well, he's a prominent Democrat, that's why.

Think not? Do you remember this story? It was real news about a man who really does have a shot at becoming President - and it died with no follow-up. No delving into the reactions of the politician's family. No reportorial effort to see if it effected the candidate's policies in any way. A day or two, a fast denial by the politician's campaign, and then - (crickets.)

Why no follow up or repeated stories? Well simple. It was about a Republican politician. Another example is the stories of Arnold Schwarzenegger's history of sexual abuse of women. Not a big story because Arnold is a Republican politician. For some reason Arnold was not considered worthy of a full-court press by the National Inquirer.

The media has a narrative that stories about Democratic politician's sex lives are important and that the details matter, but stories about Republicans are one and two day stories that are never followed up on. This is not just the media narrative, though. It is also the actions of the Republican opposition researchers who dig these things up and then feed the stories into the right-wing Wurlitzer which plays the media and accentuates its reaction to the already existing media narrative.

The right-wing Wurlitzer is out in force during this Presidential election. It's not just the play of the news regarding John Edward's sexual indiscretion. It's also the stories about Obama's strange weaknesses. Really now, how can it be a weakness for Obama that he is popular and respected, very well-educated, quite physically fit (as, of course, are both George W. Bush and a potential future Republican Presidential nominee, General Petreaus) and gives great speeches that enthusiastic people WANT to attend?

In what kind of Bizarro world are those weaknesses for a Presidential candidate while the inability to remember the substance of a question long enough to answer it as McCain has repeatedly demonstrated is, together with McCain's great age and likely PTSD from his extended captivity and torture not a severe weakness?

Oh, sorry. I was thinking that the media was a potential watchdog on government as my civics teachers used to teach. But apparently the only remaining news watch dogs are the tabloids who cover Democratic political sexual peccadilloes. It is too much now to expect news judgment and competence from the media that is proud of Bill O'Reilly and the misogynist Chris Matthews and led by Matt Drudge. My bad.

More support for Ron Suskind's accusations that the CIA planted the Habash Letter at the direction of the White House

Joe Conason has stepped into the issue of whether the Bush administration (Cheney) directed the CIA to create and plant the forged Habash Letter to justify the invasion of Iraq just as the administration's earlier lies were falling apart. Joe points to the evidence that supports Ron Suskind's story.

The letter itself was handed by Ayad Allawi to the Sunday Telegraph's foreign editor and Chief MidEast reporter, Con Coughlin. Allawi is well known to be a paid operator who worked for years for the CIA, while Coughlin is known to be a source of a lot of NeoCon claptrap that has appeared in print over the years.

Specifically, Allawi was a longtime asset of the Central Intelligence Agency, which had funded his struggle against Saddam for years prior to the invasion. His CIA sponsorship is noted in nearly every news article about Allawi, usually contrasted with the Pentagon sponsorship of his political rival, Ahmed Chalabi, the infamous fabricator of WMD intelligence (and suspected double agent for Iran).

And where was Allawi right before Coughlin broke the story of the Habash Letter?

On Dec. 11, 2003 -- three days before the Telegraph launched its "exclusive" on the Habbush memo -- the Washington Post published an article by Dana Priest and Robin Wright headlined "Iraq Spy Service Planned by U.S. to Stem Attacks." Buried inside on Page A41, their story outlined the CIA's efforts to create a new Iraqi intelligence agency:

"The new service will be trained, financed and equipped largely by the CIA with help from Jordan. Initially the agency will be headed by Iraqi Interior Minister Nouri Badran, a secular Shiite and activist in the Jordan-based Iraqi National Accord, a former exile group that includes former Baath Party military and intelligence officials.

"Badran and Ayad Allawi, leader of the INA, are spending much of this week at CIA headquarters in Langley to work out the details of the new program. Both men have worked closely with the CIA over the past decade in unsuccessful efforts to incite coups against Saddam Hussein." (The Web link to the full story is broken but it can be found on Nexis.) [Snip]

That picture becomes sharper in the months that followed Allawi's release of the Habbush forgery, when he suddenly returned to favor in Baghdad and eclipsed Chalabi, at least for a while. Five months later, in May 2004, the Iraqi Governing Council elected Allawi as his country's interim prime minister, reportedly under pressure from the American authorities. Combining subservience to the occupiers with iron-fisted tactics, he quickly squandered any popularity he might have enjoyed, and his INA party placed a humiliating third in the 2005 national elections.

So RonSuskind has extensive tapes with sources in the CIA who were aware of the instructions from the White House to forge and plant the Habash Letter. (See the partial transcript Suskind has posted with Rob Richer.)Then we have a well-known CIA asset, Allawi, who the reporter Coughlin reports gave him the letter who oddly enough was in the U.S. working with the CIA (as was independently reported by Dana Priest and and Robin Wright of the Washington Post) immediately prior to the date the Telegram printed the letter.

Shortly after the letter was printed, the U.S. government pressured the Iraqis to appoint Allawi as interim Prime Minister. A payoff?

This is a story that supports Suskind's book. The Bush administration will clearly push back as hard as it can. This story, published by Ron Suskind, may well determine the legacy of George Bush and his administration. It comes down to a question of the relative reliability of the known liars in the Bush/Cheney administration against the reputation of a Pulitzer Prize winning reporter, Ron Suskind. The weight so far is heavily on Suskind's side. Any allegation that Suskind is wrong will be seen as coming from known liars and will very likely have been planted - much as was the Habash letter itself.

We will hear more about the Habash Letter. A lot more.

What do each of these people have in common?

• Vince Foster


• Media Whores online.
  Wikipedia has an article on the watchdog site which closed in 2004. The right-wing Wurlitzer went after them when they exposed the arrest of Bush's daughters, Jenna and Barbara Bush, for underage drinking at Chuy’s in Austin.


• Jamil Hussein


• Private Scott Thomas Beauchamp Private Beauchamps' stories have been completely confirmed. Doesn't matter. The Wurlitzer still is out to destroy him.

What do they each have in common? Each told the truth when the right-wingers preferred a lie. So in each case the right-wing Republicans set out to destroy each of them.

Go read the story written by Phoenix Woman at Firedoglake.

Why the media failed in the run-up to the war in Iraq

The major American media institutions bought into the lies and deceptions that the White House was peddling to take America to war in Iraq in 2003. Then they spread those lies and deceptions far, wide and deep so that any effort to question them became something only a fool or a traitor to America would try.

The result was the Cheney/Bush/Rumsfeld preemptive(?) invasion of Iraq leading to the quagmire that we are now told we cannot leave, because leaving Iraq means that America has lost the war there. For personal reasons of their own, admitting that the war is lost is anathema to George W. Bush and John McCain. Those personal reasons are never stated. They are cloaked in patriotism with the idea that "America" cannot lose the war in Iraq.

We also know that Saddam had nothing to do with 9/11, that he considered bin Laden and al Qaeda his enemies, and that he had no nuclear weapons program, chemical weapons program or biological weapons program in active or potentially active status. The UN inspection teams had it right in their reports.

Once those lies were recognized generally there have developed several new reasons for why we invaded Iraq and remain there.

• First is that we had to remove a nasty dictator. Saddam was bad, but Mugabe in Zambia is worse, as are the leaders of Sudan who are conducting genocide on the natives of Darfur - but we don't have carrier groups off either coast nor do we have troops on the ground sending back a steady stream of bodybags from either of those countries.
  
• Then there is the idea that we should be there to bring democracy to Iraq. Besides being highly paternalistic, it is something now universally recognized by thinking people that we cannot do that with armed troops. Our very presence caused too much animosity, for one thing. For another, the sectarian strife we unleashed and with the help of al Qaeda sharply increased has made democracy a dream unlikely to be achieved until far in the future if at all. Certainly it will not happen while we have troops in Iraq.
  
• Another reason now given is that if we leave abruptly things will obviously get much worse rapidly. No one bothers to explain how or why they will get worse, but somehow the conditions now must not be as bad as it can get. Again, this his a highly paternalistic view of the Iraqi people. Somehow they won't be able to sort out governing themselves unless we have our Army and Marine Corps on hand to protect their politicians. Clearly they can't make the Iraqi government we foisted on them work. How can they create one of their own? They're just Arab Wogs, right? [The insult, WOGs, apparently is an acronym developed by the British army when they were attempting the idiotic occupation Iraq after WW I. It supposedly stands for "Old Wiley Gentlemen." Looked at that way, is seems more of a compliment than an insult.]
• The other reason for not getting our troops out of Iraq seems to be that Dick Cheney and the NeoCons think that if we admit that we have already lost the occupation we will appear weak to our enemies, such as Iran and North Korea. This is what I wrote on the subject last May 30th:

  This pessimistic view is one that leaves the U.S. in a real bind. As we remain in Iraq we are being bled like a Bull in a bullfight by the picadors before the main bull fight begins. There appears no way to actually change things there in a manner that would result in real peace. But if we leave, our pullout will set off the attempted genocide of the Sunnis by the Shiites, followed by the entry of Sunni Arabs from Syria, Saudi Arabia, etc.
  
  Bush seems to have decided that Iraq can establish a national government that will be able to pacify the situation. The five months it has taken to establish a government after the last election and the fact that no decision has been made on the security positions in that government, plus the fact that the government has no real power outside the Greed Zone of Baghdad makes that an unlikely long shot.
  
  Does the term "No win situation" occur to anyone besides me?

  Nothing has changed since then except to get worse.

So now for these weak reasons our purpose in keeping our nearly depleted Army and Marine troops in Iraq has been reduced to fear of admitting that we have lost the war there, and maybe that we are afraid the Iraqis have to have use there to shoot at so they won't focus even more on each other.

How did we get to this point? The incompetence of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld has been widely discussed in great detail. The failures of the major media have been decried, but with a lot less specificity. Until now. Now Gary Kamiya has written an excellent indictment of the media and published it in Salon. [Sit through the Day-Pass. It is short, and the article is worth the trouble!]

Then follow that up by reading Glenn Greenwald's discussion of the really bad lies that ABC News told America - repeatedly - about the Anthrax attacks on Americans and the (nonexistent) connection to Iraq and Saddam Hussein. This is the second of his discussions. It includes ABC's defense of its' indefensible actions in misdirecting the American public.