Consortiumnews.com

Reader Commentaries

March 26, 2007

Editor’s Note: Our readers express their views on stories ranging from “Plame-gate” to the media smearing of Al Gore to George W. Bush’s rush to war in Afghanistan to the neo-conning of the Washington Post:

Covert CIA agent Valerie Plame's outing by the Bush Administration destroyed Brewster-Jennings, a CIA covert front company that specialized in hard-to-get intelligence regarding Iranian nuclear weapons development and acquisition. Treason. Forget everything about this "affair" except that Bush/Cheney destroyed this major CIA operation by allowing, knowing about, and helping Plame to be exposed. Treason.

Plame's Brewster-Jennings company WAS a good (and probably the best) source of intelligence on the Iranian nuclear program and was taken out by the Bush Administration way back then. Why? Obviously war mongers and war profiteers don't want good intelligence, it hampers their ability to lead us into their NEXT war based on lies, and keeps their favorite scapegoat "custom created bad intelligence" alive and well.

Imagine if Clinton had destroyed an important covert CIA front company that took hundreds of millions of tax dollars and decades to create, and was a specialist in an area where the U.S. is now banging war drums?

Joe Wilson confirmed the bogus nature of Bush/Cheney claims that Saddam looked to purchase uranium from Africa and included in the State of the Union Address, the infamous 16 words. Always looking ahead, Bush and company destroyed a major CIA covert company that we badly need today to fact check their assertions on Iran's nuclear capabilities. How convenient, how Rovian, how controlling of the reality can you get? It's enough to make your head spin and fall off (and that's what they are hoping).

Trying to discredit Wilson who exposed their using ‘bad intelligence' to start their FIRST invasive war by destroying a valuable intelligence source capable of fact checking their NEXT invasive war is truly brilliant. You have to admire them for their utterly conspiratorial, long range evil minds and deadly plans that probably involve the use of tactical nukes for the sheer fun of it to really "accomplish the mission."

Halliburton, Exxon, Carlyle Group, and cronie profits are good places to start in understanding why they did it and I don't think we need to look much further than Treason as a just cause for impeachment, it's actually Numero Uno on the list.

How can this story fall so far and so fast from the limelight? The Rovian puppetmasters have us so tangled up and spun around we can't grasp one straw long enough to bust their backs. And yet the Plame affair is truly a horror show of conspiracy in an area we desperately need to protect... Good Intelligence.

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Listened to Valerie Plame and cannot believe that Novak continues to report in his column the misinformation that he does. It goes to the right-wing canard of keep saying the same thing, even if it is a lie, and it becomes true. If the 29% of the people who still support our Neocompoop president and his incompetent cohorts could understand that process even they might see the light and we could see the 20 % sink to .0000002% (Cheney – but not his daughters -, his wife, Bush (maybe unless he misunderstands his misinterpretation of what is actually being said), his wife, but not his daughters either and maybe Rumsfeld, and a few of the folks up at the mental health clinic outside of town (in that old TB quarantine county building – there on the hill).

Gentlemen, when in the world will you please take the gloves off...........ala the Rovian method???

It is appreciated that you take the time to rebut the nonsense that Novak et al spew, but it is always like putting a band-aid on. It is time to go after the messenger! Novak will continue to make claims about Plames "covert" or "non-covert" status...........while no one on our side makes any statement about HIS own status as a "non-journalist ! Further, lets do some digging on Gannon/ Guckert and see what he was up to and is currently doing. He has been allowed to slip beneath the radar with no ill effects for himself or the Administration. There has to be a very interesting story there, which needs to be revealed!

I would like to see a detailed bio on Novak as well. (is he married? To whom? What does she do? Who is she connected to? Or is he single..........does he hang with Guckert?

When dealing with fellas who like to out others.............it should be made as painful as possible for them to do so!!! Surely, he, Guckert and others have many many skeletons to expose. With another election cycle underway.........we know the GOP / Rove forces are already preparing the assault, and we should be ready with the information about them, and their messengers! It is great to dig up and expose what they have done in the past, but lets prepare, instead, for what they are about to do next!!

For "one-stop shopping" about how America's major, 'mainstream' media WHORES corrupt American society, government, politics, and elections, this article by ROBERT PARRY of ConsortiumNews.com is an amazing compilation - names, dates, times, and how the WHORES of the press/media, with MALICE afore sight, TWISTED actual comments by Vice President Gore into quotations that seemed to bolster the meme "Al Gore is a serial liar, exaggerator, and prevaricator."

WHY did the media whores react with such fury to VP Gore in the long season of 1999-2000, when Mr. Gore was trying to escape the shadow cast by Bill Clinton's sex scandal? After all, no one, anywhere, could come up with any "dirt" on the Gore marriage... and wasn't President Clinton's extramarital affair(s) the basis of his IMPEACHMENT in the lame-duck Republican Congress?

Well, as Mr. Parry notes in his article, the operative word is "BULLIES." The "mainstream media" learned that, like Roman emperors selling bread & circus to justify their cruel rule, the "major media" player - the network news divisions, the Washington Post, New York Times, TIME magazine and other press outlets, and the relatively new CABLE 'news' talk shows - could sell the MONICA LEWINSKY scandal to readers and TV viewers as reliably as a good soap opera sold a tempestuous marriage episode to their fanatical following. Indeed, in the "good times" of the Clinton 1998 economy, Americans had the luxury of settling into their sofas to watch the latest episode of the Ken Starr soap opera "get your leaked grand jury testimony here for only the price of hanging out on the justice department steps!", which morphed into the Tom DeLay lame-duck Congress impeachment.

And from the EASY MONEY of getting Ken Starr and Republican impeachment leader quotes, the WHORE MEDIA fell like a pack of jackals on Al Gore in 1999 and 2000; trying to sustain their easy feedings at the expense of "boy scout" Gore.

Mr. Parry's article captures the childish lies and exaggerations of the media whores, from Chris Mathews (CNBC) to the Buffalo News to Rupert Murdoch's New York Post to dozens of local, hometown US papers - to, of course, the NEW YORK TIMES and WASHINGTON POST themselves, the self-professed "leaders" in America's national, international, and government news coverage.

We can not top Mr. Parry's exposition of the media's awful, pathetic, often childish whoring of the "Al Gore is a prevaricator!" agenda (even though that it what this blog is specifically set up to do!)

BUT we can point out something JUST AS IMPORTANT: the importance, the NECESSITY, of the DEMOCRATS running for office NOT TO PUT UP WITH SERIAL EXAGGERATIONS and FABRICATIONS by the media whores.

In his second term, President Truman actually wrote a letter to a Washington Post music critic threatening to punch that critic in the nose should they meet in person. (The WP critic had lambasted Truman's daughter's musical recital at Constitution Hall in Washington, DC.) Truman was roundly mocked for his belligerence, but he at least had some fire in his belly. The Clinton-Gore-Kerry-Democrat model for dealing with harsh, even lying critics, is to try to APPEASE them!

Setting the sordid low for that behavior, "I just want to be loved" President Bill Clinton invited New York Times journalistic thug (and former Nixon speech writer) WILLIAM SAFIRE to a White House function - the week after Safire had written a column (and headlined thus by his NYT editors) "HILLARY CLINTON IS A CONGENITAL LIAR"! IF Bill Clinton had an ounce of President Truman's outrage, the history of the late Clinton White House might have been written differently. But instead, the Clintons were CLUELESS as to how to neutralize the DC whore media's "gotcha" reporting, allowing even the Clinton's overnight guest list to be turned into a SCANDAL! the so-called "LINCOLN BEDROOM SCANDAL."

Which reminds us - Mr. Parry's otherwise exceptional article doesn't even mention the penultimate DC press corpse SMEAR against Al Gore: the so-called "WHITE HOUSE TRASHING SCANDAL" of January 2001.

This "scandal" started innocently enough, when the incoming Bush-Cheney press spokesmen claimed that some "W" keys had been lifted off of computer keyboards by pranksters of the departing Clinton-Gore staff. But in a typical KARL ROVE smear operation, within days of the "playful" allegations, the story had MORPHED into - "Clinton-Gore Staffers DESTROY WHITE HOUSE PROPERTY!" and the "WHTIE HOUSE TRASHING!" scandal was born - a "scandal" which the bullies of the Washington Post, New York Times, cable 'news' talk shows, and rest of the pied-piper major media wrote about with blaring headlines - for weeks on end!

The amazing thing about the "WHITE HOUSE TRASHING SCANDAL!" was that NOT ONE PHOTOGRAPH, ever, was produced as "proof" of the so-called "trashing." Indeed, a quarter-million dollar GAO report (commissioned at the insistence of the Republican Congress and Senate) found that "there had been NO damage to White House offices not consistent with any tenant moving out of offices after an eight year lease" - i.e. routine wear and tear on carpets, furniture, and walls removed of pictures, posters, and electronic cables.

The other amazing thing of the entire FABRICATED "White House Trashing Scandal" is that it is all there, in the archives of the Post and Times and "Hardball" footage and other 'news' sources, waiting for some diligent journalism student to write the book "The anatomy of a Right-Wing and major-media FABRICATED SMEAR JOB - on a former Vice President and popular vote-winning presidential candidate!"

The Bush-Rove-Cheney White House SMEAR of departing Clinton-Gore staffers effectively drove Vice President Al Gore - the winner of the 2000 popular vote by over 500,000 votes - OUT OF TOWN, in disgrace, effectively tarred-and-feathered by a journalistic smear mob; and in doing so, the DC "major media" effectively handed President Bush and his and his handlers the brush and palette they needed to RENOUNCE and discard their "MORE BIPARTISAN TONE IN WASHINGTON" campaign pledge of the 2000 presidential race.

BY DRIVING VICE PRESIDENT GORE OUT OF WASHINGTON, IN DISGRACE, the Washington press corps and "major media" ENABLED President Bush to ram his partisan nominees past a stunned and quiescent Democratic senate; and also ENABLED Mr. Bush to go on his 2001 summer of partisan REPULICAN PHOTO-OPS and FUNDRAISER VACATIONS.... while Al Qaida terrorists plotted, unhindered, to HIJACK FOUR US AIRLINERS at one time.

Mr. Bush was so enthralled in his fund-raiser and photo-op vacation of 2001 that he did EXACTLY NOTHING when the CIA warned him, in July of 2001, "AL QAIDA is DETERMINED TO ATTACK in AMERICA, probably by hijacking airliners."

Eight weeks later, the New York skyline was bleeding smoke and toxic dust - the DC press corps and "major media" had ENABLED the Republican presidential candidate of 2000, who didn't even win a majority of the popular vote, to NEGLECT his sworn duties to "PRESERVE and DEFEND.... these United States."

Your two articles on the way certain unconscionable members of the media perpetuate lies gives me great agony. The painstaking precision and depth of your analysis is so welcome, as is the original context and actual language that was so wantonly distorted. I'm forwarding the "War on Gore" article to one of the Gore volunteers from Climate Project, and maybe she can provide a link to it on one or more of their e-bulletin boards, since they are always sharing new info with each other. No doubt in their presentations they will be faced with hecklers of the "Lyin' Al" ilk; your article will give them ammo, maybe.

To add gall to the wormwood of your clarification: "...the newspaper was distorting Gore's clear intent by attaching "that" to the wrong antecedent. From the full quote, it's obvious the "that" refers to the Toone toxic waste case, not to Gore's hearings," is the ironic understanding of Gore's greater and even more generous intent by one of his comments after the hearings, "

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