Game, Set, Match to Ms.Hamsher
I'm not willing to even grant mercy points in this smack-down. Ms. Hamsher in three as I see it. Limited excerpt below hardly does her justice. If you made it this far you can certainly check out the original, no?
The Latest Plame Smear: Does Fred Hiatt Even Read the Washington Post?
For years now the GOP machine has succeeded in strong-arming the Washington Post into legitimizing their propaganda, dribbling out sensational disinformation during Whitewater to the hacktackular Sue Schmidt to put on the front page without skepticism or question. Over time they have provided easy, sleazy copy and traded "access" to the point that it has fueled an empire of mediocrity where only the people willing to limbo low enough and shape the news to Karl Rove's satisfaction are rewarded with the scoops that trigger seniority. Both editors and reporters alike know their only ability to ascend the hierarchy comes from emulating supreme access pimp and BushCo. dupe Bob Woodward in a slavish devotion to stenography and the propagation of spin.
The new Washington Post editorial, an enormous turd that editorial page editor Fred Hiatt is no doubt behind, is such an unmitigated piece of BushCo. propaganda, such a giant bag of bs it deserves to be taken apart, piece by piece and beaten into the ground. Armando at Daily Kos has a rundown of Hiatt's bloodthirsty warmongering for which the paper will one day soon be held to account. But Sunday's editorial on the BushCo. leak shows exactly how the Post is earning its reputation for being just a few shades less reliable than PRAVDA:
A Good Leak
President Bush declassified some of the intelligence he used to decide on war in Iraq. Is that a scandal?
PRESIDENT BUSH was right to approve the declassification of parts of a National Intelligence Estimate about Iraq three years ago in order to make clear why he had believed that Saddam Hussein was seeking nuclear weapons. Presidents are authorized to declassify sensitive material, and the public benefits when they do.
How exactly does the public benefit from having selective, misleading bits of information leaked to a reporter for no other reason than to polish Bush's image in the press? Over at the Left Coaster, eRiposte takes apart the notion that this "declassification" was in any way intended to benefit the public.
Basically the NIE report had three sections -- the Key Judgments, which had no mention of the uranium claim, the Body of the NIE which did mention the uranium claim, and the Annex which contained the INR rebuttal that said the uranium claim was extremely iffy.
Says eRiposte:
If Libby had actually passed on the key judgments of the NIE to Miller, Miller would have discovered that it had NO mention of the uranium claim. So, it appears that Libby, Bush and Cheney tried to deliberately misrepresent the NIE to reporters by claiming that the uranium claim was part of the NIE's key judgments (even though it was not) and then tried to leak the contents from the body of the NIE (minus the annex) to make it appear as if the NIE made a strong case against Joseph Wilson's claims.
Hiatt may want to take a short trip down the hall, because journalists Barton Gelman and Dafna Linzer, also writing for Sunday's Washington Post seem very much aware of this fact.
Further, according to Fitzgerald the CIA report on Joe Wilson's trip had not been declassified at the time Libby leaked it to Miller. Hiatt conveniently ignores this in his eagerness to give Bush a free pass and attribute his craven abuse of power to some misty-eyed notion of public service.
But the administration handled the release clumsily, exposing Mr. Bush to the hyperbolic charges of misconduct and hypocrisy that Democrats are leveling.
This is a portrait of Fred Hiatt gorging on beltway cocktail weenies. How helpful of him to spread the meme that this is all just more partisan politics. There is no legitimate concern here, no. It's all just Democratic "hyperbole." I can't wait to see the polling on this one, I'm sure it'll prove there are a whole lot of Democrats out there.
[snip]
The Latest Plame Smear: Does Fred Hiatt Even Read the Washington Post?
For years now the GOP machine has succeeded in strong-arming the Washington Post into legitimizing their propaganda, dribbling out sensational disinformation during Whitewater to the hacktackular Sue Schmidt to put on the front page without skepticism or question. Over time they have provided easy, sleazy copy and traded "access" to the point that it has fueled an empire of mediocrity where only the people willing to limbo low enough and shape the news to Karl Rove's satisfaction are rewarded with the scoops that trigger seniority. Both editors and reporters alike know their only ability to ascend the hierarchy comes from emulating supreme access pimp and BushCo. dupe Bob Woodward in a slavish devotion to stenography and the propagation of spin.
The new Washington Post editorial, an enormous turd that editorial page editor Fred Hiatt is no doubt behind, is such an unmitigated piece of BushCo. propaganda, such a giant bag of bs it deserves to be taken apart, piece by piece and beaten into the ground. Armando at Daily Kos has a rundown of Hiatt's bloodthirsty warmongering for which the paper will one day soon be held to account. But Sunday's editorial on the BushCo. leak shows exactly how the Post is earning its reputation for being just a few shades less reliable than PRAVDA:
A Good Leak
President Bush declassified some of the intelligence he used to decide on war in Iraq. Is that a scandal?
PRESIDENT BUSH was right to approve the declassification of parts of a National Intelligence Estimate about Iraq three years ago in order to make clear why he had believed that Saddam Hussein was seeking nuclear weapons. Presidents are authorized to declassify sensitive material, and the public benefits when they do.
How exactly does the public benefit from having selective, misleading bits of information leaked to a reporter for no other reason than to polish Bush's image in the press? Over at the Left Coaster, eRiposte takes apart the notion that this "declassification" was in any way intended to benefit the public.
Basically the NIE report had three sections -- the Key Judgments, which had no mention of the uranium claim, the Body of the NIE which did mention the uranium claim, and the Annex which contained the INR rebuttal that said the uranium claim was extremely iffy.
Says eRiposte:
If Libby had actually passed on the key judgments of the NIE to Miller, Miller would have discovered that it had NO mention of the uranium claim. So, it appears that Libby, Bush and Cheney tried to deliberately misrepresent the NIE to reporters by claiming that the uranium claim was part of the NIE's key judgments (even though it was not) and then tried to leak the contents from the body of the NIE (minus the annex) to make it appear as if the NIE made a strong case against Joseph Wilson's claims.
Hiatt may want to take a short trip down the hall, because journalists Barton Gelman and Dafna Linzer, also writing for Sunday's Washington Post seem very much aware of this fact.
Further, according to Fitzgerald the CIA report on Joe Wilson's trip had not been declassified at the time Libby leaked it to Miller. Hiatt conveniently ignores this in his eagerness to give Bush a free pass and attribute his craven abuse of power to some misty-eyed notion of public service.
But the administration handled the release clumsily, exposing Mr. Bush to the hyperbolic charges of misconduct and hypocrisy that Democrats are leveling.
This is a portrait of Fred Hiatt gorging on beltway cocktail weenies. How helpful of him to spread the meme that this is all just more partisan politics. There is no legitimate concern here, no. It's all just Democratic "hyperbole." I can't wait to see the polling on this one, I'm sure it'll prove there are a whole lot of Democrats out there.
[snip]
posted by Sir Gumbo at 11:52 PM
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