War is fun, if you’re not cannon fodder

Read as much of this New York Times report about the Bush Administration’s manipulation of TV coverage of the war with Iraq as you can stomach – and boyoboy, is it long, and almost oppressively detailed with stories about juicing the results with people who had conflicts of interests or kept up the fictions because they were well paid by the networks or were just dumb or mean – and never bother me, nor anyone else, with nonsense about how this administration ever gave a sh!t about anyone in this country who didn’t run a company populated with mercenaries.

Just a taste:
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Mr. Bevelacqua, then a Fox analyst, was among those invited to a briefing in early 2003 about Iraq’s purported stockpiles of illicit weapons. He recalled asking the briefer whether the United States had “smoking gun” proof. ‘We don’t have any hard evidence,’ ” Mr. Bevelacqua recalled the briefer replying. He said he and other analysts were alarmed by this concession. “We are looking at ourselves saying, ‘What are we doing?’ ” … . Mr. Maginnis said he concluded that the analysts were being “manipulated” to convey a false sense of certainty about the evidence of the weapons. Yet he and Mr. Bevelacqua and the other analysts who attended the briefing did not share any misgivings with the American public.”

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What should be more shocking, but, actually, isn’t, is how little vetting the cable news networks did while trying to discover its “sources’” ties to anything that might compromise their opinions about the war. But then, these people will still allow Ann Coulter on the air, so clearly, they’ve never been serious about actually providing context to anything.

The chief lesson of the Bush Administration, it seems, is: Just never allow them to get you to testify under oath, and you’ll keep your job forever.