Shooting the Messenger

[saavedra77]

On Salon.com, today, Sidney Blumenthal tartly reviews the Bush Administration's recent attempts to shoot the messenger on prisoner abuse.  Just you never mind all those torture photos, torture memos, disputes with the FBI and JAG lawyers, reports of "extraordinary rendering" and "phantom prisoners," or the Supreme Court's ruling in Rasul v. Bush.  Cuz, y'see, the NGOs just hate America ...

(If you're not familiar with salon.com, you can read the entire article if you either subscribe or watch a brief ad.)

Comments

[saavedra77.livejournal.com]

Four things come to mind: 1) a right-wing spin machine that's bigger & better than ever; 2) a dysfunctional news media (intimidated, even driven by #1); 3) one-party rule in D.C.; 4) a public whose attention span, critical thinking skills, and options are being whittled down by #s 1 - 4.

As I was saying to uniquecrash in my previous post, this is why something like the Watergate investigation absolutely couldn't happen, today. The White House would spin it as "a few bad apples" in the Committee to Re-Elect the President, Rush Limbaugh and Fox News would attack the Washington Post for being too liberal and relying on anonymous sources, the whole machine would start vilifying Deep Throat if his name got out, the rest of the press would play it as a flap between the liberal Post and conservatives, and the story would drop out of the headlines when everyone got sick of the shouting match. And, obviously, the people running Congress wouldn't permit hearings on whether their party's president or his administration did anything wrong.