Washington Post embeds itself with the neocons

2006-09-16

Richard Moore

   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

--------------------------------------------------------
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
-- 

--------------------------------------------------------
Escaping the Matrix website     http://escapingthematrix.org/
cyberjournal website            http://cyberjournal.org
subscribe cyberjournal list     mailto:•••@••.•••
Posting archives                http://cyberjournal.org/show_archives/
Blogs:
  cyberjournal forum            http://cyberjournal-rkm.blogspot.com/
  Achieving real democracy      http://harmonization.blogspot.com/
  for readers of ETM            http://matrixreaders.blogspot.com/
  Community Empowerment http://empowermentinitiatives.blogspot.com/
  Blogger made easy             http://quaylargo.com/help/ezblogger.html