THIS MODERN WORLD

Glenn Greenwald interviewed Jeff Cohen about Scott McClellan’s book and Cohen’s experience at MSNBC in 2002-3 here (mp3).

Also:

McClellan and the Media ‘Enablers’
by Jeff Cohen

No sooner had Bush’s ex-press secretary (now author) Scott McClellan accused President Bush and his other former collaborators of misleading our country into Iraq than the squeals of protest turned into a mighty roar.

I’m not talking about the vitriol directed at him by former White House colleagues like Karl Rove and Ari Fleischer. I’m talking about McClellan’s other erstwhile war collaborators: the movers and shakers in corporate media.

The people McClellan refers to in his book as “deferential, complicit enablers” of Bush administration war propaganda.

One after another, news stars defended themselves with the tired old myth that no one doubted the Iraq WMD claims at the time. The yarn about hindsight being 20/20 was served up more times than a Rev. Wright clip on Fox News.

Katie Couric, whose coverage on CBS of the Iraq troop surge has been almost fawning, was one of the few stars to be candid about pre-invasion coverage, saying days ago, “I think it’s one of the most embarrassing chapters in American journalism.”

The rest.

John McCain challenging Barack Obama to go to Iraq is pretty childish. It’s not like a Senator’s meticulously-planned stroll through Baghdad is going to give them an accurate view of what’s going on in Iraq. Here’s McCain’s most well-known trip to the Green Zone, in which little shopping trip needed little more than a bullet-proof vest, “100 American soldiers, with three Blackhawk helicopters, and two Apache gunships” :

And here’s a photo from McCain’s most recent trip :



If McCain thinks challenging Obama to go to Iraq will teach him something beyond “American troops get annoyed when they get pulled from the field and put on ‘babysit a Sentor’ duty”, then maybe Barack can return the favor and challenge “Maverick” to visit a place where he could learn something. Like a junior college where he can take an Econ 101 class or a temp agency where he can learn what life is like for us who haven’t spent the last three decades in Washington D.C. married to a multi-millionaire or to a bookstore to read about how things are really going in Iraq…

A couple of recent examples of the master’s inimitable way with words.

First, from his May 21 column:

“Call it the triple deficit,” said Mr. Rothkopf. “A fiscal deficit that will soon have us choosing between rationed health care, sufficient education, adequate infrastructure and traditional levels of defense spending, a trade deficit that has us borrowing from our rivals to the point of real vulnerability, and a geopolitical deficit that is a legacy of Iraq, which may result in hesitancy to take strong stands where we must.”

The first rule of holes is when you’re in one, stop digging. When you’re in three, bring a lot of shovels.

Wow.

Okay, so if I’m in a hole, I should stop digging, but if I’m in three, I should have lots of shovels so I can — stop digging? dig simultaenously? jump from hole to hole? how can I be in three holes at the same time anyway?

Damn you Thomas Friedman and your mindbending extradimensional metaphysical metaphors! You’re making my brain hurt!

(Also: who even knew there were rules of holes? If that’s the first, what are the others? Are there penalties for noncompliance?)

And then there’s this, from May 18:

I don’t doubt for a second President Bush’s gut support for Israel, and I think it comes from his gut.

You see, his gut support comes from …

Oh, never mind. That one doesn’t really need elaboration.

It’s no wonder Thomas Friedman is a highly respected pundit, and you are not.

(Bonus related cartoon here.)

I’ve got 10 pairs of tickets for Tue Crimes: The Untold Story Behind the Devastation of Iraq, hosted by the Nation Institute at TownHall in New York City on June 3rd.

Go behind the headlines of the occupation of Iraq with Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Chris Hedges, journalist Laila Al-Arian, bestselling author Jeremy Scahill, and Seymour Hersh, as they discuss the war, the plight of Iraqi civilians and the role of private mercenaries. The event is a dual book launch for Hedges and Al-Arian’s Collateral Damage and Scahill’s Blackwater (in paperback).

Tickets will be given away on a first-come, first-served basis: send an email to tomtomorrow-at-earthlink-dot-net with the word TICKETS in the subject line. (And if you don’t win, you can still purchase tickets here.)

(Full disclosure: NationBooks, which is part of the Nation Institute, is publishing my next book.)

As Atrios points out, today is the fifth anniversary of Thomas Friedman’s SuckOnThis Day.

The traditional gift for fifth anniversaries is wood, so perhaps we can get him hundreds of thousands of trees, one for each human being he’s helped kill, and then set them all on fire.

To understand Friedman’s berserk depravity, remember that by May 30, 2003, the press was already publishing things like this famous picture. Take a look at that, and then listen to Friedman say this:

FRIEDMAN: What they needed to see was American boys and girls going house to house, from Basra to Baghdad, um, and basically saying, “Which part of this sentence don’t you understand?”

You don’t think, you know, we care about our open society, you think this bubble fantasy, we’re just gonna let it grow?

Well, Suck. On. This.