If somebody famous, anybody, shoots somebody else accidentally or not, that’s big news. The vice president is pretty much as famous as the most famous musicians and movie stars, these days.
It’s as if Britney Spears shot Kevin Federline in the face. Does anybody doubt that wouldn’t be leaped on instantly in the press? Would Clothahump start a pit thread decrying the media’s anti-Christina Aguilera bias because they were a day late reporting X-tina’s latest record cracking the top 20?
Are we living on the same planet? Are we talking about the same media?
The media that acted as little more than a cheerleading chorus when we invaded Iraq.
The media that, for months on end, did little more than repeat Bush administration talking points.
The media that uncritically covered staged PR exercises like the “Mission Accomplished” aircraft carrier love-in.
The media that, even with incontrovertible evidence of administration inefficiency and duplicity, has taken it’s sweet-ass time offering anything in the manner of tough questions and critical reporting.
The media that, even now, is more interested in a story that doesn’t matter (a hunting accident) than in all the stories that do.
The only reason the White House press corps has even begun to resemble a group of critical, cantankerous truth-seekers over the past months is that the screw-ups and dishonesty of the administration have been so fucking blatant that you’d have to be Blind Freddy to miss them.
I really do wish, SA, that your evaluation of the media were correct, and that they had indeed been as critical of the administration as you allege. But, as usual, you’re living in conservative bizarro land.
I don’t think the problem is that the incident is being reported; it’s the high dudgeon and effrontery displayed by the press in behaving as though some sort of crime were committed by not notifying them instantly that it had happened.
It’s bogus to claim a cover up. This isn’t the sort of incident that can be covered up. Other people were around; emergency service people had to be called; hospital and police reports would have to be made; etc.
The press hates this administration and is eager to make it look bad; and it’s overly-impressed with it’s own role in the nation’s affairs and seems to feel it’s owed instantaneous notification even when incidents occur in an admistration member’s private life.
The above is to Revtim.
mhendo, the reportage you mention did indeed occur. However, these are mere sprinklings of postives amidst almost ceaseless negative reports presented day after day for most most of the war’s duration. Time and again I’ve seen/heard from returning soldiers and civilian personnel about how well things are going over there but one would never know it based on what one hears here.
Let’s face it: everybody’s opinion of how the war is going is based on media reports. If the media was reporting the war positively, the country would think it was going well; and if the media is reporting the war negatively, the country will think that it’s going badly. As is apparent on this very board, it’s entirely possible for people of differing political stripes to view the same thing in completly opposite ways. Most of us who are conservative think the war is the right thing to do and that things are going well in Iraq; most liberals think the opposite; therefore, given that the media is overwhelmingly liberal, they report the war in a negative way overall despite the occasional snippets of something positive that they throw out because they think it’ll either play well with their viewers or allow them to claim that they present both sides.
For the first couple of years after Bush’s election, the pres seemed to love the administration. As i said, and as anyone watching would have know, the press consistently repreated administration talking points and offered uncritical reporting of administration policies and actions.
If things have changed, and the press do actually hate the administration, as you suggest, it might be worth asking whether the administration has done anything to cause this change of heart. But of course, that would require you to offer some criticism of Bush and his people.
Objection, your honor!
Assuming facts not in evidence.
Seriously, just because you keep repeating this mantra doen’t make it true
Two things: new administrations are usually granted a sort of honeymoon period by the press; and 9/11 occurred, which caused the media and the country to get behind and support the adminstration as it tried to deal with the aftermath.
No, it would simply mean that Bush decided to deal with Hussein forcefully in order to remove the threat that Hussein presented rather than to continue to play U.N. games while he became more and more of a threat. The media was always against U.S. action in Iraq but downplayed it, given that Bush enjoyed a lot of support at the time. Still, the media were faunching at the bit to find fault with the war, and once it began to look as though no WMD would be found (one of only several reasons for the invasion, if you’ll recall), it was off to the races where the press was concerned, and we’ve heard very little in the way of anything positive since.
Do you seriously contend that the media isn’t overwhelmingly liberal, both in the politics of its members and in the way it presents information to the public? I don’t think even the media itself makes much of an argument otherwise these days. (And please spare me Fox/Limbaugh as examples to the contrary; they are mere islands of sanity ( 
) in an ocean of liberal media bias.)
Find me any other reason that was offered by the Administration that was anywhere near as prominet as this reason.
And i don’t mean some post-hoc revision that has been offered since the failure to discover WMDs.
I mean some evidence, from the period before the actual invasion, of any reason that even came close to WMDs and the “imminent threat” posed by Iraq in the mind of the administration.
Holy Shit! Cheney shot him in the bedroom!??!?!
Not true SA. Not true at all.
WMD were the reason, and phoney connections to Al Queda were the reason we had to get them thar WMD.
And what threat was that?
Specifically, what bad things could have happened if we hadn’t invaded back in 2003?
I can’t believe that, after five years of the press’s cowering sycophancy to the Bush administration, you’re still not only trying to pretend like there’s a liberal bias in the media, you actually act surprised to find that people disagree with you on the subject.
Starving Artist
Hmmmm now I see. Because Bill Clinton was so blatantly conservative, he was such an easy target for the liberal media when they made such a big deal out of that Monica Lewinsky “scandal” - and that was an intrusion into his private life too.
You don’t consider Dick Cheney to be a celebrity? You don’t have to be an A-List celebrity to be the target of a media frenzy when you are charged with a crime.
Just ask Robert Blake, OJ Simpson or Claudine Longet.
My recall is pretty good, because I’ve repeatedly posted about this in the past. Having done so many times now, I’ll let you Google these sources yourself:
Feel free to go back and peruse them in detail. It’s true that they mentioned other reasons in passing besides WMDs to invade Iraq. But they were overwhelmingly about the WMDs.
That’s the historical record. Feel free to distort it at your leisure. (You would anyway.)
:: sigh ::
One of these days I’ll learn not to post anything unless I have 36 hours to devote to arguing it. Unfortunately, today is not the day.
Regards.
When you call a man out, it is considered to be poor form not to shoot him, SA
Oh, woe is you!
You’ll have to forgive us if we don’t accept your bald-faced assertions, in contradiction of all available evidence, as holy writ.
Actually, we’ve turned several corners. So many that I’m beginnign to think Iraq is a buckyball.
Where’s the Baghdad McDonalds or the Samarra Starbucks? No, really: if all the earlier good news was true, surely everybody’s getting ready to open up businesses in Iraq. Where’s WallyWorld?
Oh yeah, that’s right: they’d be blown up in a day. But other than that, we’ve got the insurgency on the run. :rolleyes: