Alot of the reason I started to turn to reading as many blogs as I do on a daily basis was as much because of MSM as the WH itself. Daily (as time permits) I read over a dozen different blogs, newspapers and MSM sites, as well as check out C-SPAN and the usual TV fare. It’s really amazing how one portayal of a news story can vary from another.

This was first pointed out to me in 1990 when the first Gulf War broke out by my now husband, who was an ex-TV/newsman previously stationed at Ft Hood- every single story he trotted out had to be approved, even if the sources were AP, Reuters, etc. MSM is no different than the military- it has to be approved first. Bloggers have much more freedom in that regard.

But v.’a v. Auguste, Friedman..and me…

I am SO-o ashamed to have been -
until what seems very recently- the veriest gull for
that whole crew - including the very persuasive Friedman -
all of whom are unscrubably sullied jingo-shills.

It was, I think, that I *trusted* the few whom I saw
as truth tellers…NYT, CNN et al.
And they have so let us believers so down.

“Most especially since I am reasonably intelligent and reasonably informed..”,
he whimpered, more than a bit chagrined.
Some sort of f*cking scotoma, I guess.

Ashamed.

I’m not sure if you mean that Bush had in fact shown his true colors by then already and therefore any “deal” that someone much more willing to give him the benefit of the doubt than I have ever been would have reasonably been forfeit, or if you mean that a substantial majority of Americans had already seen the light before then.

To the former, there never was any good reason to think he wouldn’t be a disasterous President though hope springs eternal I guess; lots of people were fervently hoping (foolishly, I thought) after 9/11. To the latter, I actually think they already had wised up enough to vote him out of office in ‘04, but not in sufficient numbers and degree of conviction to overcome fraud, and officially defeated at the polls, a substantial number wavered back to the “winning” side.

Then again, in the original post Auguste isn’t talking about public opinion either, but the cluelessness of So-Called “MSM” aka Corporate Media shills who pretend not to get, or maybe in their honest doublethinking teeny little minds, actually don’t get, why we “keep making a big deal” out of Iraq, even as they try to get us to get in line for the compounded stupidity and evil of trying again with Iran while still being bogged down in both the previous regional misadventures. So it’s kind of in the space of Platonic ideals and not so much a question of fluctuating opinion, I guess.

Actually while I never cut Bush slack in the sense that I never supposed he’d be a decent President, I did think his handlers might have passed him off as another Reagan, by cutting (and keeping) shrewd deals with sectors of the populace other than the corporatacracy. (Not with me or anyone I cared about especially of course.) And then when he appeared to be bungling that badly in his first half-year in office, I had some hope we could endure him as a pathetic drunk-uncle President and wise up about elections and the seriousness of politics in general by 2002.

So for me, the thing that broke this pathetic live-and-let-live “deal” was 9/11. “What’s he gonna do for a Reichstag fire?” I wondered from time to time, until the question was answered.

Oh- unless your governor is brother of the Prez, that is. Then you’re good to go!

Hopefully in ‘08, people will remember how easily they could end up in a similar plight and vote accordingly.

But now it seems that many Americans who were deeply shocked by Katrina and Teh Shrub’s appalling response have sent that down the memory hole, but they have at last seen the same foul absurdity at work in Iraq, and fastened on to that.

To be sure, this does show a sense of priority–as awful and as personal as Bush-era fraud, waste and abuse in domestic matters is, trying to veer away from the Bush policy of systematically pissing off the rest of the globe and spreading chaos and misery in our wake overseas is overridingly important. The task of cleaning up our mess at home will be much harder the more we raise up foreign enmity and resentment.

Well, I personally have always been inclined to be a foreign policy wonk anyway–I think it stems partially from being an Air Force brat, meaning that in the family/social environments I grew up in, foreign policy was domestic–people I knew personally might be from foreign countries, or sent to go kill or die there; careers and hence our daily lives turned on our national alliances and adventures. No one explained this to me literally; I just sort of soaked it up from classmates who had lived in Saudi Arabia or the Philippines, and the stories, slides, stuff, and visiting friends Dad brought back from places like Thailand or South Korea.

From way out here in left field of course, there never was a deal to break; absolutely everything aWol has ever done or proposed to do always looked wrongheaded if not downright evil to me, and my judgements generally veer toward to the “evil” end of the spectrum.

In either case, the lives of people who had volunteered to serve without question or reservation were thrown away for nothing.