You have to admit: He’s got us coming and going. By insisting that the media cover the story of Bush’s illegal rush to aggressive war, we’ve demonstrated we’re just a bunch of unreasonable extremists peddling a paranoid conspiracy theory — one that "everybody" already knows is true.
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June 14, 2005
True Lies
Comments
Kinsley’s whoring is at the heart of why Bush has power.It is the after the fact smugness that a fact was well known at the time, when, at the time, in truth, there absolutely positively was no such established fact. And Kinsely has the resources to assemble mountians of evidence of this in a thrice, but, why should he? What there was enough evidence that people who paid attention concluded that the President was a liar. If Kinsley really believed part of what he wrote, the headline would be “Everyone Knew Bush Was A Liar”, but, perhaps Kinsley believe the other part of what he wrote, headline “Can’t Prove Anything”.
The earlier suggestion that the Post and perhaps the NYT will start doing journalism and reporting was premature. When the Post and NYT have a smug self serving one liner that shows they are the shit and the 43rd Administration is yesterday’s news, then, they will report accordingly. It won’t be good reporting, so much as slanted to show they are the shit. And when the Sunday morning blow job artists have their own versions of the smug self serving one liner, then they will switch like the whores they are. Until they have that new smug, self serving, one line, they will stay with the proven, smug, self serving, one liners they have. When they have that one liner, they will switch.
Of course, if they had any memory of what came out of their own mouths on those same shows, they would know they are still talking shit. Sommersby is dead on, they just don’t care. And Kinsley is liberal, moderate, democrat …. Yes, the enablers are worse than the true believers and he is one of them.
Posted by: razor | Jun 14 2005 21:48 utc | 1
the enablers are worse than the true believers
right on, brother razor
Posted by: remembereringgiap | Jun 14 2005 21:55 utc | 2
“The American press is all about lies! All they tell is lies, lies and more lies!”
– “Baghdad Bob,” circa 2,003
Posted by: steve expat | Jun 15 2005 0:24 utc | 4
My response to the LA Times:
To the Editor:
In his June 12 op-ed “The Left Gets a Memo,” Michael Kinsley asserts that “There is no claim of even fourth-hand knowledge that [Bush] had actually declared” his intention to go to war with Iraq even as he publicly claimed war a last resort.
However, the Downing Street Memo, in addition to documenting that “intelligence and facts were being fixed around the [Iraq] policy” despite a “thin” case for invasion, summarizes the British Foreign Secretary’s remarks thus: “It seemed clear that Bush had made up his mind to take military action.”
As the Foreign Secretary communicates frequently with the US Secretary of State, we can reasonably presume that Colin Powell himself “seemed” to think Bush had made up his mind.
A smoking gun? No, but suggesting a link is hardly paranoid as Kinsley claims, particularly given that Rice, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Bush all made public claims that exaggerated the intelligence, such as the time Bush asserted that Iraq possessed stockpiles of biological weapons when the CIA merely claimed (incorrectly) that it had an R&D program.
Did Bush knowingly lie, or is the TelePrompTer his oracle? If the latter, just who was it who misled the American public? While I am not surprised that Senator Pat Roberts, the Republican chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, abandoned his promise to investigate such matters, I am surprised that Kinsley shows no curiosity. Is journalism no longer about following leads?
In the 1980s, there wasn’t a pundit I admired more than Michael Kinsley. Smart, meticulously analytical with a crisp, lucid writing style, Kinsley succinctly analyzed policy and dissected conventional wisdom and foolish ideas (of the left as well as the right) better than anyone else. He wrote what you were thinking before you knew you were thinking it. In that regard, Billmon and Digby are more like Kinsley was then than Kinsley is now. Other than a couple of silly columns about Canada, I can’t remember Kinsley writing a bad column during that period.
Somehow Kinsley (for health or other reasons) seemed to lose his way in the 1990s. While still a much more worthwhile read than most columnists, his columns generally became less insightful and far less meaningful and relevant. (I believe Paul Krugman once indirectly referred to this at Slate; something to the effect of “where are you MK” while we’re in the trenches.)
Yet none of this disappointment prepared me for Kinsley’s latest column on the Downing Street Minutes. It is hard to follow, ill-informed, illogical and — amazingly for a Kinsley column — frankly dumb.
As was pointed out via Atrios, the corporate media has created a Catch 22 for the lowly consumers of its products: it wasn’t news then because we couldn’t prove it was true, and it’s not news now because we always knew it was true. And as Billmon points out, Kinsley seems to add a new component to this meme: “according to Kinsley, what everybody knew three years ago is a paranoid theory now, albeit one promoted to ‘the very edge of national respectability.'” An old fan desperately hopes this was just sloppy writing on Kinsley’s part and what he meant to address as paranoid was the theory that the media conspired (and continues to conspire) to withhold vital information from the American public about the Iraq war. Of course, the corporate media did withhold vital information about the Iraq war from the American public (conspiracy or not).
Memo to the Corporate Media:
The Downing Street Minutes are as close to a smoking gun as anyone is likely to find in the real world. Can’t reporters and columnists at least ask some intelligent questions about it rather than merely dismissing it?
Richard Dearlove was the head of British foreign intelligence. In that capacity, he met with top American officials in Wahsington in the summer of 2002. He reported back to British ministers on his meetings in July 2002. The most important aspect of his job was to report accurately to government ministers about such intelligence matters. And this is what he told them as recorded in the minutes — all in one short paragraph:
1. Bush wanted to remove Saddam through military action
2. “[T]he intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.”
3. The White House National Security Council “had no patience with the UN route.”
4. “There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action.”
Now that is a story.
Posted by: Ben Brackley | Jun 15 2005 0:41 utc | 6
Proof. From Connecticut
In order to meet his or her burden of proof, a party must satisfy you that his or her claims on an issue are more probable than not. You may have heard in criminal cases that proof must be beyond a reasonable doubt, but I must emphasize to you that this is not a criminal case, and you are not deciding criminal guilt or innocence. In civil cases such as this one, a different standard of proof applies. The party who asserts a claim has the burden of proving it by a fair preponderance of the evidence, that is, the better or weightier evidence must establish that, more probably than not, the assertion is true. In weighing the evidence, keep in mind that it is the quality and not the quantity of evidence that is important; one piece of believable evidence may weigh so heavily in your mind as to overcome a multitude of less credible evidence. The weight to be accorded each piece of evidence is for you to decide.
Now, there is devastating proof Bush lied. In Kinsley world no one would ever meet their burden of proof, yet somehow Kinsley knows how to sort out the moderates from the extremists from the paranoids. I would say that is proof he is pretty satisfied with himself.
Posted by: razor | Jun 15 2005 1:06 utc | 7
Kinsley=Sad, desperate, can-I-still-talk-to-the-Kool-Kids (and keep my job), hack.
Posted by: Bollox Ref | Jun 15 2005 1:11 utc | 8
Kinsley always struck me as smart, but untrustworthy. Just look at his two most important early gigs: Senior Editor of The New Republic during two key periods of its rightward lurch (1979-1981 and again 1985-1991), and as a kind of Alan Colmes-precursor on William F. Buckley’s Firing Line.
No, Kinsley was never as pathetic as Colmes. But nobody would have bought Alan Colmes back in the 1970s and early 1980s. The ground hadn’t been carefully enough prepared for such an obviously phoney figure. Kinsley despite being sharper and smarter did much to prepare the way, as a kind of liberal mask that TNR and Firing Line could wear to prove that they were (respectively) still liberal and fair ‘n’ balanced.
Kinsley replayed this role for years as the original warm body occupying the “from the left” stool on CNN’s Crossfire.
Posted by: BenA | Jun 15 2005 1:42 utc | 9
Ben Brackley
Actually, Bush just wanted a war so he could be a “war president”. Also, taking out Saddam would, in his mind, prove he was better than his father, this was a good target.
911 gave him cover
Posted by: ed_finnerty | Jun 15 2005 2:57 utc | 10
Kurt Nimmo’s take (also re the Morgan Reynolds story for those of us real nutcases)
Cynthia Bogard. “The Bush Administration successfully stymied almost all mainstream coverage of the issue until Reuter reporter Steve Holland’s brave question at the joint Bush-Blair news conference on June 7. They had a lot of help from the White House press corps which, despite 19 daily briefings, asked Bush spokesperson Scott McClellan exactly two questions about the memo between May 1 and USA Today’s first mention of it on June 8.”
“USA Today chose not to publish anything about the memo before today for several reasons, says Jim Cox, the newspaper’s senior assignment editor for foreign news. ‘We could not obtain the memo or a copy of it from a reliable source,’ Cox says. ‘There was no explicit confirmation of its authenticity from (Blair’s office). And it was disclosed four days before the British elections, raising concerns about the timing,’” writes Editor & Publisher.
Posted by: DM | Jun 15 2005 3:51 utc | 11
DM, Kurt could be behind the Times, the Wash. Times that is. Nut cases…Maybe not. Let’s look at the context for a moment.
Seems to me that waters are a risin’ in DC. First you have the outing of Felt – by who, why…shot across the bow? Reminder to admin that All that Rises can fall? Secondly, Downing Street plumbing has utterly ruptured. Then you have this totally respectable indisputably Conservative guy, Morgan Reynolds, not only thinking this, but going public w/it. (Who is this guy? Professor emeritus at Texas A&M University and former director of the Criminal Justice Center at the National Center for Policy Analysis in Dallas – not to mention Chief Economist @Labor Dept. in this President’s Admin) Now it’s supposedly picked up by UPI/Wash. Times – house organ for this Admin – according to cannonfire.
(I would argue it’s almost secondary if Reynold’s reasoning is correct or not. The story is that he went so far as to say in print that he thinks it’s an Inside Job. Jesus H. Christ. People w/CV’s like that don’t do that everyday!!)
That tells us that there are some mighty pissed off people around town, of the sort that one doesn’t piss off, at least in unison, if one wants to stay in power. Let’s see – they gutted the CIA, wrecked the military, shredded American reputation around the globe, got into an quagmire in Iraq which has Wall Street furious, the dollar & the economy are teetering, oil prices could shoot up, GM’s on the brink, pension crisis looming, military short of troops but parents telling it to go to hell, elites waking up to Life & Death Seriousness of the threat they pose to the planet’s ability to sustain civilized life…Peak Oil perhaps..
I think the people who matter are stirring & perhaps converging in their thinking… Could get veryyy interesting verryy soon.. The Reality-Based Community could do worse than stay tuned.
Posted by: jj | Jun 15 2005 4:46 utc | 12
Yes I just saw the Wash.Times bit. Is this buried somewhere in the print edition? You would think, wouldn’t you, that if this appeared in the Wash.Times that it would at least merit a mention on Fox News. I’ll stay tuned but I don’t know how long I can hold my breath.
Posted by: DM | Jun 15 2005 5:09 utc | 13
Here’s the link to Wash. Times mention of Morgan Reynolds mentioned above. Link.
Unfortunately they do not reprint entire story from lewrockwell, just do a nutshell job. They do mention that he thinks only demolition accounts for WTC collapse, which means it was an inside job. Reasonable downpayment. Happily, even buzzflash saw fit to post a link.
Posted by: jj | Jun 15 2005 5:14 utc | 14
DM, I wouldn’t think anything about Fox news…but I would think more than a few Admin. members will have their morning coffee all over the kitchen in the morning. Probably high level meetings at Fox, on whether to assembly a bunch of MIT guys – on the military dole- etc. to debunk it quickly; or take a wait & see approach.
Do you agree w/my sense that the water in DC may be heading toward flood stage?
Posted by: jj | Jun 15 2005 5:16 utc | 15
Actually, yes. I don’t know much of anything about the working of the DC crowd, but this does have the feel of something you don’t see every day.
Posted by: DM | Jun 15 2005 5:24 utc | 16
Somewhere, in a parallel world no doubt, there is a lamppost missing a Michael Kinsley.
Still, color moi cynical, but all this DC “talk” is pretty much chatter and meaningless. What do we expect will happen with fat fascist pigs in charge? zip. nada.
Meanwhile, the fascist bulldozer rolls on: #1 domestic crisis now (IMHO): Ahnold’s attempt to destroy California. In other days I’d have bet 10-to-1 on his defeat, but today?
We may grumble and chatter like the Russians under the old USSR, but the fascists still rule.
Posted by: Lupin | Jun 15 2005 6:39 utc | 17
the Argentine Supreme Court just let a ruling that should make some people in the US squirm.
About 3,000 military officers – about 300 of whom still serve in the armed forces – could be accused, the Associated Press news agency reported.
If it can happen there, it can happen in the good ole USA too
Posted by: dan of steele | Jun 15 2005 8:29 utc | 18
Raw declassified source reference:
STATE DEPARTMENT OPENS FILES ON ARGENTINA’S DIRTY WAR
New Documents Describe Key Death Squad Under Former Army Chief Galtieri
National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 73 – Part I
Edited by Carlos Osorio
Posted by: Outraged | Jun 15 2005 9:12 utc | 19
LINK
Now that the editorial board of Pravada on the Potomac has Adopted the Kinsley defense, perhaps it’s time for the sequel:
True Lies II
Posted by: FlashHarry | Jun 15 2005 12:28 utc | 20
Morgan Reynolds’ publicly advocating the “WTC collapse was due to a preplanted bomb, not a consequence of the airplane attack” hypothesis does not make it any more likely – in my opinion. It’s still crazy.
Posted by: mistah charley | Jun 15 2005 15:09 utc | 21
FH–that WaPo thing looks like a sober second run at the Broder Doctrine first espoused on Press the Meat last Sunday…
____
BenB said:
“it wasn’t news then because we couldn’t prove it was true, and it’s not news now because we always knew it was true.
Yup, and it isn’t it a high, fine thing indeed when the waterheads start equating pre-existing truths with delusional theories?
Then again, I guess fine-tuning pretzel logic like that does allow one to forcefully argue that the fact that bacteria become antibiotic resistant due to natural selection actually proves that Darwin and Wallace were madmen.
FH (again, sorry)–
Also, might explain why they let Pincus come out of the backpages dungeon to bask in a a little bit of A1, below the fold light last weekend.
Which makes one wonder….is the WaPo pulling a corpoMed version of a limited hangout on this one?
Nice link to the post. A beautiful example of whoring, have the cake and eat it to. And the closing paragreaph tells the real message, they are going to make the switch to a different party line without ever admitting their complicity in the Adventrue and disastesr.
Here’s is a thought experiment: Assume that the day the downing street memo was written, it came into the hands of the Washington Post. Would the Post have published, or passed, since, Everybody knew?
Fucking lying sacks of evil shit.
Posted by: Anonymous | Jun 15 2005 17:55 utc | 25
It’s still crazy
It’s really crazy. What else is really crazy is that this Morgan Reynolds character can go around making all these crazy allegations, and he gets off scott-free. You’d think that the media would be hanging this guy out to dry! Is it really acceptable to allow this sort of seditious slander? You take this to its conclusion – this crazy bastard is actually accusing people within the US Govt. of mass murder. You’d think Bill O’Reilly or someone would get this crazy bastard on the air so that they can pull him apart and put and end to all this anti-government conspiracy bullshit. But for some reason, the media are going soft on this crazy SOB. When that article was printed in the Wash.Times yesterday, you could google news exactly 5 references to this story. Today, you can google exactly 5 references to this story. It seems that nobody is really interested in nailing this crazy bastard.
Posted by: DM | Jun 15 2005 23:31 utc | 26
“The American people know what they saw with their own eyes on September 11, 2001. To suggest any kind of government conspiracy in the events of that day goes beyond the pale.”
statement released yesterday by Dr. Robert M. Gates, President of Texas A&M University
At least someone has the guts to stand up to this crazy bastard.
I’ve always liked the phrase ‘beyond the pale’. Goes back to the British in Ireland I believe.
Posted by: DM | Jun 16 2005 0:02 utc | 27
dm
no ‘beyond the pale’ as i understand it – is where the jewish diaspora lived from poland into russia – which would include cities like minsk, riga – i remember reading a late 19th cenury book on the “pale’ written by an englishman spaking with contempt of shtetl life in the same way that freidman thinks of arab people
Posted by: remembereringgiap | Jun 16 2005 0:46 utc | 28
As far back as the 14th century (quick google)
The word ‘pale’ is a fence (as in a paling/picket fence). ‘Beyond the pale’ is the area outside of law and civilization. A place where no-one wants to go.
Posted by: DM | Jun 16 2005 0:58 utc | 29
The word “pale” as Rg says, has a very long history also with the jews in Poland and western Russia.
I had never before heard the term used in England or Scotland, but ‘beyond the pale” is a well-worn English term.
Posted by: FlashHarry | Jun 16 2005 1:14 utc | 30
The words ‘pale’ and ‘paling’ were the words used in Scotland when I grew up. Another google here does at least indicate that the phrase predates the jewish/russian diaspora usage.
If Colman can be bothered, perhaps he can have the last word on this (being Irish an’ all).
Posted by: DM | Jun 16 2005 2:02 utc | 31