Don’t question Bush’s newest “Plan” for Iraq

Bush’s newest “Iraq” plan is to continue bashing those who question this costly war.  There’s still no metric and no projection of how many more Iraqi and American deaths will occur or what might be accomplished by those deaths.  Only more rhetoric.

As reported by Media Matters,  the Bush Administration’s Iraq strategy is truly bizarre.  It is not a war strategy at all. It is only a PR strategy and, with very few exceptions, it has been gobbled up by the official stenographer for the Bush Administration: the mainstream media.  Here are the official talking points for the “new” Iraq strategy:

  • Republicans are “pro-military” and “support the troops,” while Democrats are “anti-military” and “attack the troops.”
  • Democrats want to “cut and run.”
  • Iraq is the central front in the war on terror.
  • Democrats are “divided” or “weak” on national security.
  • The Republicans will always win debates on national security.
  • The Republicans won the Iraq debate.

    • What’s especially curious about this “war” strategy” is that it could never have served to justify invading Iraq. Not even neocons could have bought this, could they?  It would have been transpararent for all to see back in 2003. 

    For those who are so currently so numbed to evidence-based reasoning, though, it’s interesting to note that this “Iraq” strategy could actually serve to justify any military endeaver anywhere in the world (just substitute any other country for “Iraq” in the third point).   Notice the absence of facts in this strategy–it is actually a highly …

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    The 2006 midterm elections- even more decisive than we think.

    Yesterday’s coverage of the 2006 midterm elections on NPR’s All Things Considered immediately grabbed my interest. Like the major Democratic upset of 1994, polls show that the public feels extremely disillusioned with those currently running our government. This could lead to a decisive shift in the composition of the House, just as when the Republicans took control 12 years ago. This year’s election parallels the 1994 election in many other ways: voters that identify with the minority party feel more energized than those of the party in control, and independent voters claim they prefer the opposing party to the current majority.

    That part doesn’t really surprise many people at this point, though it does invigorate me a bit to see Americans have actually paid enough attention to the legislature’s behavior in recent years to find it disturbing. The real surprise in this story lies in what makes this year’s election different from the one in 1994: voters don’t just dislike Republicans, they dislike Democrats too.

    In 1994, dissatisfaction with the Democrats drove many to vote for the then-better-regarded GOP. But this year, polls by the Wall Street Journal and the Pew Research Center show that Americans have a marked distaste for both parties:

    “The proportion saying the current Congress has achieved less than previous ones has climbed to 45%, double the number who said this in the 2002 or 1998 midterms, and higher than the number who expressed frustration with Congress in 1994 (38%). Republican leaders in Congress are blamed

    …
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    Blogs as “Horizontal flow, citizen to citizen”

    Check out Jay Rosen's eloquent piece on the power of blogs to empower formerly passive audiences:  The people formerly known as the audience are those who were on the receiving end of a media system that ran one way, in a broadcasting pattern, with high entry fees and a few…

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    Blogs will save us from objective journalism.

    Bill O’Reilly hates the blogosphere. He hates many things, of course, among them Pepsi, rapper Ludacris, a wide array of conventional media outlets, and even some of his own guests. But today I focus on an entire media outlet that O’Reilly labels as biased, lacking in evidence, and in large part sensationalized: political blogs.

    Of course, O’Reilly doesn’t oppose online journalism on his own. Even more mainstream news anchors (if you can call Mr. O’Reilly a news anchor) tend to scoff and roll their eyes at the notion of “the blogosphere” or the opinions expressed over the internet. O’Reilly has led the most outspoken movement against internet editorialism, though. In June of 2003, Bill had this to say about bloggers:

    “Nearly everyday, there’s something written on the Internet about me that’s flat out untrue…the reason these net people get away with all kinds of stuff is that they work for no one. They put stuff up with no restraints. This, of course, is dangerous…”

    By July of 2005, the “blogosphere” had become a common slang term for the mainstream news media, and became the focus of one episode of O’Reilly’s Factor program:

    “Personal attacks lodged through the internet! How are so-called “Web logs” being used as ideological weapons? And who’s behind the smear campaigns? We’ll have a No Spin look at a dangerous new weapon in the culture wars!”

    But as “dangerous” as these “weapons in the culture wars” may seem to some, online outlets such as …

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    FCC again inviting big corporations to take more control of the media

    The Federal Communications Commission and industry lobbyists are once again trying to let huge media companies get even bigger by resurrecting the same rule changes that millions of Americans rejected in 2003. It's hard to believe that anyone at the FCC could actually be considering the welfare of the American people…

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