Compare and Contrast: Rathergate vs. WMD. A fun filled table comparing the story of nothing and the story of true merit. This is especially fun because now the search for Saddam's Weapons of Mass Destruction has officially ended.
WASHINGTON - The White House acknowledged Wednesday that its hunt for Iraqi weapons of mass destruction — a two-year search costing millions of dollars — has closed down without finding the stockpiles that President Bush cited as a justification for overthrowing Saddam Hussein.So again: the United States rushes to war with one of its main claims based on bad information from questionable sources, and CBS rushes to air with a story about the president based on information from questionable sources. Now - one of these stories told (each based on bad document and sources) has proven to be completely false. And it's not the one that's led to the deaths of over a thousand American servicemen and tens of thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians.
So when do the fired CBS employees get their Presidential Medals of Honor?
Terry Jones: Of course it's wonderful to see the human race rallying to the aid of [Asian tsunami] disaster victims, but it's the inconsistency that has me foxed. Nobody is making this sort of fuss about all the people killed in Iraq, and yet it's a human catastrophe of comparable dimensions.
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There are a lot of great quotes, notes, and lines in this article. I'm not going to quote them all, as much as I would like to. Iraqi lives are being aggressively and negatively affected by the war in Iraq, whether by insurgents or "coalition" forces. Wars are ruining lives all over the world (especially in Africa), yet they go ignored (especially if they're in Africa) by most of the world. And while it is great to see so much rallying to the aid of natural disaster victims, the treatment of man's worst disaster on man (war) is touched on ever so briefly, and always downplayed in the media. But hey - Jennifer Aniston and Brad Pitt broke up! Where should I go to send Brad some support money and Jen some support cuddling?
Of course, Terry Jones is an actor, director, and member of Monty Python. And British. Being an actor, and a foreign one at that, he should just stay out of politics like all people in Hollywood. Unless those people are Arnold Schwarzenegger, Ronald Reagan, etc.
Via Eschaton: The funny (and of course overlooked by the cranial-rectal inversion crowd) thing about the CBS/document story is that contrary to the screeching about it, the entire saga is proof that there is no goddamn liberal media.
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Excellent post from Atrios concerning the amount of real bullshit that goes on in the media today and in recent years and the comparative actions. From Jayson Blair and Stephen Glass to all of the crap that was Whitewater-era trash journalism. I do not understand how this country keeps itself so easily involved with every little fake crisis that the media or this current administration can come up with while ignoring real issues, or quietly forgetting similar situations that don't shine favorably on The Right.
A boob gets exposed during half time at the Superbowl last year, and we get "nipplegate." CBS rushes a story with cooked documents from questionable sources and we get "Rathergate." George Tenet and the CIA aid a spurious war in Iraq by rushing cooked documents from questionable sources, thousands die, and Tenet gets a presidential medal of freedom and Bush gets re-elected. And where's the *gate on this talk show host that turned himself into a paid advertisement for Bush's No Child Left Behind act? Or is that one going to quietly disappear while this whole Dan Rather thing goes on for eight months, or however long it takes until the Robert Blake murder trial kicks into high gear so we can talk about that non-stop?