corrente

Today's Pat Oliphant cartoon (or last week's? who knows how old these damned things are by the time they send them to me) neatly skewers the media: in a Wagnerian opera scene, we see a Brunhilde-clad Dick Cheney and a diminutive George Bush embracing center stage, surrounded by fallen bodies labeled "UN", "Filibuster", and "Judiciary", while fanning out behind them on bended knee, a chorus of soldiers with upraised spears is labeled "The Press". In front, the requisite bird is saying "Today's spear-carriers", and a man responds "Yesterday's spear-chuckers". The audience is leaving in disgust.

Count Joe Conason among the audience. In a Salon piece he wonders what has happened to render our media so indifferent to the implications of the damning memo reproduced in last week's Sunday Times of London:

"Are Americans so jaded about the deceptions perpetrated by our own government to lead us into war in Iraq that we are no longer interested in fresh and damning evidence of those lies? Or are the editors and producers who oversee the American news industry simply too timid to report that proof on the evening broadcasts and front pages?
There is a "smoking memo" that confirms the worst assumptions about the Bush administration's Iraq policy, but although that memo generated huge pre-election headlines in Britain, its existence has hardly been mentioned here. "

Well, the Gray Lady stuck it into their Friday late edition when no one was looking, and the Seattle Times did a piece on it last week. What the hell more does he want?

"When Bush signed the congressional resolution authorizing the use of military force against Iraq on Oct. 16, 2002 -- three months after the Downing Street memorandum -- he didn't say that military action was "inevitable." Instead, the president assured Americans and the world that he still hoped war could be avoided.
"I have not ordered the use of force. I hope the use of force will not become necessary," he said at a press conference. "Hopefully this can be done peacefully. Hopefully we can do this without any military action." He promised that he had "carefully weighed the human cost of every option before us" and that if the United States went into battle, it would be "as a last resort."
In the months that followed, as we now know, the president and his aides grossly exaggerated, and in some instances falsified, the intelligence concerning the Iraqi regime's supposed weapons of mass destruction and alleged ties to the terrorists who attacked us on 9/11."

Ah, Joe, Joe, this is all so old, and not nearly as titillating as the runaway bride (what OTHER run-ins with police did she have??). But, naif that he is, Joe sallies on:

"Not only did Bush and his top aides lie about their approach to the alleged threat posed by Iraq, but they continued to lie about that process in the war's aftermath.
And what of the aftermath of the war in Iraq? Evidently "little discussion" was devoted to that topic as the Bush administration prepared to sell the war, or so "C" reported to his colleagues in London. Iraqis and Americans, as well as their coalition partners, have been suffering the dismal results of that lack of planning ever since.
Despite much happy talk from Washington about the successes achieved in Iraq, recent polls show that Americans are more disenchanted than ever with the war. Nearly 60 percent now say the president made the wrong decision and that the outcome is not worth the price in lives and treasure. What would they say if the media dared to tell them the truth about how it all happened? "

What would they say, the bovine American public, even if the press dropped their spears and picked up their pens? Well, I can guess: