Originally published at: NY Times suffers from dementia, forgetting its own role in the Iraq War debacle | Boing Boing
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Self-examination has never been the NYT’s strong suit. This is particularly embarrassing instance.
Meanwhile, in the 20 years since she helped the Cheney Regency create a false pretext for this misbegotten war and occupation, Miller has been rewarded with gigs at Faux News and the looney tunes WSJ op-ed page and sinecures at neoCon think tanks.
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Your entire country failed to ask the right question,. Wasn’t there 1 Nay in all of Congress against the action? Mind you there were a lot of civilians in the streets many more than when Papa Bush hit Desert Storm on Hussein. An aside, he was doing something back then with long range artillery. The Canadian Gerald Bull was assassinated (Mossad) for his role. Gerald Bull - Wikipedia
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There’s a big gap between…
… and …
Tens of thousands of protesters in U.S. demos, with tens of millions more agreeing from the beginning that the invasion and occupation was a bad idea. It’s therefore more accurate (and less smug) to state that the corporate media and establishment politicians from both parties in the U.S. failed to ask the right question.
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133 nays in the House and 23 in the Senate. But far, far too few.
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our correspondent must be thinking of this instead
empires have so many different wars to vote on
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Nice turn of phrase. Yoink!
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… “the distinguished gentleman from Canada” might have been a little much 
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Three Arrows just had a good video about NYT’s role in the Iraq War.
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You’re not wrong, but America proceeded to re-elect Bush.
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Yea I kind of let that one fly off a bit fast. You were correct when speaking of the media ecosystem in the USA and I most certainly should have stated that. Thanks
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I marched in LA and among the tens of thousands, I happened across Ed Asner marching with his family. That was a sweet find for me.
“Hey, remember in SF a few years ago, you gave me that activism award?”
“Yes, and I wouldn’t expect you to be anywhere else today.”
CNN anchor Bernard Shaw later said that they, as part of the press, were “bamboozled” by the white house. This was a total copout. For each day’s news cycle, the Bush administration crafted sound bites carried out by the entire cabinet. Each and every night, Jon Stewart played all of them all in a series to SHOW CNN what was happening to them. Ominous lines to shut down questions, like “we don’t want the smoking gun to be in the form of a mushroom cloud.” As part of the spin, media were also given an unprecedented stream of infrared combat footage. This drew continuous viewers in spite of it also being on autorepeat. Very much like the Roman arena 2000 years later - bigger arena, bigger audience.
Viewers = ratings. CNN made a business decision. Very little coverage of those questioning the war. No deep study of how Saddam viewed Islamic extremists. No real indictment of Cheney for outing a CIA agent. Etc.
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Yes, I remember comparing it’s coverage to the UK’s Guardian newspaper and wondering what the heck had happened to the Times’s integrity.
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Now that we’re at the 20 year mark and we’re seeing all these look-backs, all I see is that history has to lay this squarely on George Bush Jr’s feet, him and Liz Cheney’s dad, Dick, and Rumsfeld. There are more, too, but those were the architects, the pushers. They are to blame for all the bad that came from it. When 9/11 is mentioned in the same breath, well, that’s false breath cuz they were not related.
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Right? I had friends who got swept up in this who were questioning my sanity. I’d tell them “I’m not reading this in ‘Tinfoil Hat Quarterly’. This is in The Guardian. Hell, it’s in Reuters if you look.”
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It’s not like the Guardian has maintained it’s own integrity. In ten years I have gone from being a subscriber to avoiding it’s Blairite TERFiness. The US side is still good though, I would love it if they could split off into an independent news source.
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Like they said at the time, mission accomplished.
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