³The Post editorial pages were an echo chamber for pre-war
distortions and paranoid fantasies originated by the White
House Iraq Group (WHIG). So it's grotesquely fitting that
the Post would hire as an op-ed columnist, Michael Gerson,
Bush's top speechwriter who -- as a key wordsmith within
WHIG -- helped originate the flights of rhetorical fancy
that so dazzled the Post's laptop warriors. Gerson spun the
deceit; the Post peddled it. Now they'll operate under the
same roof.²
The name 'WHIG' is very interesting. The 'Whig party', in politics, means 'the
party of the king'. And the whole Iraq war project has contributed to the
process of turning the US into a dictatorship / 'kingdom'. The name seems to be
one of those 'elite symbolism' things, like choosing 911 as the date of the WTC
incident, or putting Masonic images on the dollar bill.
rkm
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Original source URL:
http://www.buzzflash.com/articles/contributors/410
Published on BuzzFlash (http://www.buzzflash.com/articles)
Jeff Cohen: Smoking Gun: Washington Post Hires Top Bush Speechwriter
By BuzzFlash
Created 09/14/2006 - 12:46pm
A BUZZFLASH GUEST CONTRIBUTION
by Jeff Cohen
Few media marching bands have beat the Iraq war drums more frantically and with
more influence than the editorial pages of the Washington Post. On Monday, the
Post announced the hiring of another drummer boy, one who played a key
propaganda role inside the Bush White House.
The Post editorial pages were an echo chamber for pre-war distortions and
paranoid fantasies originated by the White House Iraq Group (WHIG). So it's
grotesquely fitting that the Post would hire as an op-ed columnist, Michael
Gerson, Bush's top speechwriter who -- as a key wordsmith within WHIG -- helped
originate the flights of rhetorical fancy that so dazzled the Post's laptop
warriors. Gerson spun the deceit; the Post peddled it. Now they'll operate under
the same roof.
In explaining why the Post was adding yet another pro-war voice to its op-ed
page, hawkish editorial page editor Fred Hiatt described Gerson as being "a
different kind of conservative from the other conservatives on our page."
Thanks, Fred, for all the diversity.
In their new book "Hubris," Michael Isikoff and David Corn write that it was
Gerson who -
* inserted references to the yellowcake-from-Niger tale into various Bush
speeches, including the 2003 State of the Union.
* helped prepare Secretary of State Colin Powell's dishonest and bellicose
speech to the U.N.
* conceived Team Bush's trademark paranoid "soundbite" warning of a potential
Iraq nuclear program: "The first sign of a smoking gun might be a mushroom
cloud."
According to "Hubris," the "mushroom cloud" line was intended for a Bush speech,
but was too good to hold [1]. It was first deployed in September 2002 by
anonymous White House aides in a New York Times front-page scare story (by
Judith Miller and Michael Gordon) warning that Iraq had "stepped up its quest
for nuclear weapons." On CNN that day, Condoleezza Rice declared: "We don't want
the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud." And Gerson's line became a standard and
manipulative war cry from then on.
Speechwriter Gerson should be right at home at the Washington Post. From
September 2002 through February 2003, the Post editorialized 26 times in favor
of the Iraq war. As Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman have documented, its
op-ed page was also dominated by hawks screaming for war. War skeptics were
denounced as "fools" and "liars" and worse -- and the skeptics were not given
space to respond [2].
As Gerson's "smoking gun/mushroom cloud" soundbite took flight, Al Gore made an
Iraq speech questioning "preemptive war." On the Post op-ed page, Gore's speech
was "dishonest, cheap, low" and "wretched...vile...contemptible." And that was
all in one column. Another called it "a series of cheap shots."
By contrast, the error-filled Colin Powell speech at the U.N. (that Gerson
worked on) was hailed at the Post with almost Pravda-like unanimity. An
editorial -- headlined "Irrefutable" -- declared: "It is hard to imagine how
anyone could doubt that Iraq possesses weapons of mass destruction." And the
Post op-ed page from right to "left" embraced Powell's speech.
"When reading the Post's pre-war coverage," summarized journalist Robert Parry,
"there was a whiff of totalitarianism [3] in which dissidents never get space to
express their opinions but are still excoriated by the official media. When the
state speaks, however, the same media hails the government's brilliance."
Gerson and his new colleagues at the Post worked together to help bring us one
of the worst foreign policy debacles in our nation's history. Newspapers are
supposed to hold discredited public officials to account. The Post is hiring
him.
It's partly because of the Post's inexcusable coverage before the war, and its
ongoing pro-war editorial bias, that I will be joining Scott Ritter, former CIA
analyst Ray McGovern and other activists at Camp Democracy in Washington D.C.
this Tuesday, Sept. 19 [4], for a public forum on the media's role in Iraq and
Iran.
There will also be a protest march to the Washington Post headquarters that
evening. With the newspaper's hiring of Gerson, I know an appropriate slogan:
"Two, four, six, eight/Separate the press and state."
A BUZZFLASH GUEST CONTRIBUTION
Jeff Cohen [5] is the founder of FAIR [6], and author of the new book: "Cable
News Confidential: My Misadventures in Corporate Media [6]"
Links:
[1]
http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003121401
[2] http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0304-07.htm
[3] http://www.consortiumnews.com/2006/041906.html
[4] http://campdemocracy.org/schedule
[5] http://jeffcohen.org/
[6] http://www.fair.org/index.php
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