In what seems like another lifetime ago, our old pal and brilliant colleague Cliff Schecter used to write a Friday “Cliff’s Corner” post at AMERICAblog that always started out with, “Another week. More preposterousness to report.”
As I said in a previous post, I am tempted to take it from there on a weekly basis: Another Sunday. More outrage to report. I can’t and won’t watch all the Sunday talk shows, and sometimes I refuse to watch any of them. However, today I caught some of “This Week” and a few minutes of the”Meet the Press” panel.
Big mistake on my part.
I listened as the commentators praised George W. Bush for (paraphrasing) being a terrible president but a (not paraphrasing) “good man.” A good man? Really? To repeat, a “good” man would not have:
- Ignored clear warnings in a memo about the impending 9/11 terrorist attacks, resulting in the single largest loss of life from a foreign attack on American soil
- Lied us into a fraudulent war or invaded a country that never attacked us
- Embraced people like Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, Condi Rice, FEMA director Mike Heckuva Job Brownie, Scooter Libby, Alberto Gonzalez, John Yoo, Jay Bybee, to name a few.
- Joked about WMDs while troops were dying in his illegal war
- Lied about the link between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda
I left out a few items from the other post because some of his policies were not due to his being an unethical guy, but because he is a Republican and disagrees with Democratic positions. I can’t hold that against him personally; that doesn’t necessarily make him a “good” or “bad” man. Torture, on the other hand…
Moving on. I then wasted minutes of my day that I’ll never get back watching as most members of the panels lit into President Obama and their criticisms were virtually unchallenged. That despite the inaccuracies and misinformation being thrown around. And their TV audience was, again, being fed propaganda and opinion as if it were fact.
The most positive– come to think of it, the only positive– thing that was said about the president was that he killed it last night at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner and should think about a career in stand-up comedy.
To recap, Bush is a “good man,” President Obama is a good comic.
Nearly every week I post about media bias and how Sunday after Sunday, Republican talk show guests (often conservative) outnumber Democratic ones, and how real Progressives are rarely represented at all. Today the split was more even, but there were still very, very few authentically liberal liberals. Maybe one.
And week after week, propaganda and lies are disseminated, and Americans who rely on these shows receive a limited, and often biased, view of current events.
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