Total Smackdown!

Bush and Cheney have become so dependent on the presumed stupidity of the average American. Last week, their strategy was to blame the press for reporting all of the bad news in Iraq. We've lost more members of the press in three years in Iraq than during the entire Vietnam War. It is down right insulting to blame them as messengers of bad news when security is so bad that trying to report any news means risking their lives. Lara Logan of CBS totally drove home the absurdity of Bushco's claims.

LOGAN: Well, who says things aren't falling apart in Iraq? I mean, what you didn't see on your screens this week was all the unidentified bodies that have been turning up, all the allegations here of militias that are really controlling the security forces.

What about all the American soldiers that died this week that you didn't see on our screens? I mean, we've reported on reconstruction stories over and over again…I mean, I really resent the fact that people say that we're not reflecting the true picture here. That's totally unfair and it's really unfounded.

...Our own editors back in New York are asking us the same things. They read the same comments. You know, are there positive stories? Can't you find them? You don't think that I haven't been to the U.S. military and the State Department and the embassy and asked them over and over again, let's see the good stories, show us some of the good things that are going on? Oh, sorry, we can't take to you that school project, because if you put that on TV, they're going to be attacked about, the teachers are going to be killed, the children might be victims of attack.

Oh, sorry, we can't show this reconstruction project because then that's going to expose it to sabotage. And the last time we had journalists down here, the plant was attacked. I mean, security dominates every single thing that happens in this country….So how it is that security issues should not then dominate the media coverage coming out of here ...

You'd have to have one dull and narrow mind to think that reporters were deliberately reporting only negative news. They report what they see all day and every day and probably leave some things out as they would inflame the rest of the Arab world. As I told a debater on one of my yahoo groups, "I don't care about us rebuilding a school or hospital we blew up, or about rescuing a bloody child whose family we killed or about a bunch of dirty little kids running behind soldiers begging for candy that they don't need because they don't have adequate dental care."

It is sad, sad, sad that this administration has absolutely no other rationale for or defense of their failures other than to blame the media.