[BREAK]
NY Times: Where all the news that fits (our wished for image) we print!
Okay, in our gut we all know that "nostalgia" is just our way of looking at the past through some user-friendly form of Alzheimer's.
We tend to forget the bad, exaggerate the good and, in the end, find ourselves to be either the hero/ine of that chapter, or, at the very least, an innocent bystander in anything that reflects badly on the participants.
But a news organization, at least one that claims to have any standards at all (you're off the hook on this,
Fox News, NY Post
etc.?), must remember relevant facts that must be emphasized in any editorializing, even if such facts cast a harsh light on that same news outlet.
Well, the standards for newspapers keeps getting lowered.
In the wake of 9/11, Mr. Bush had a second chance to rally the nation — and the world — only to squander it on a pointless, catastrophic war in Iraq.
When the icon of national news in the US, even after giving a grudgingly half-hearted apology for its HUGE part in granting uncritical and factually flawed justification for our attack, invasion and occupation of Iraq, can now point to Bush's Baghdad Blunder with scorn, yet leave it's own role unspoken, we MUST take time for a reality check.
I, along with hundreds of thousands of others, marched in NYC on February 15, 2003 . . . a month prior to Bush launching us on his Iraq blunder.
We ALL knew that, had we depended on the verbiage in the NY Times alone, we would have never crowded 1st, 2nd and 3rd Avenue in NYC that cold day.
We would have been home, waiting for our courageous leader to launch an attack on Osama's buddy, on the holder of tons and tons of WMD. And we would have been willing to shed much of our kids' blood in order to prevent Saddam from launching a fleet of lethal gas/chemical/biological agent bearing drones that would cross the vast ocean and kill hundreds of thousands of us.
Yep, that's what a faithful NY Times reader would have done . . . had (s)he only garnered info from the gray lady of US media.
Fortunately, those marching had a less parochial view. They had access to the leading media from around the world. And, many had been granted the tools of critical thought by their teachers - long before No Child Left Behind took critical thought off the table.
So, despite the war drums beating from 42nd street, the world saw the largest display of disenchantment with government (US/UK) policy ever!
And the Times yawned, and pointedly ignored the whole thing. In fact, readers of the Times, back then, would have little trouble catching the inference that those against the Iraq madness were ill-informed dupes who were committing a treason based on ignorance, or worse.
Now, years after it refused to acknowledge those dissenters, it has suddenly jumped into the group shot of those that said "NO!"
And, after years of the Times being a pamphlet composed of the slogans of Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld, the Times now writes as if it were a Bush critic from day 1!
Nostalgia sure is a soothing balm. I'm now going to remember the days in High School, when I was a lady killing machine. (If you think you remember me as a skinny, pimple-faced, rather shy guy, you are so not in that same "as you wished it were" memory hole as I, and the editors at the Times.)
JB
=====
The State of the Union - New York Times
Editorial
The State of the Union
Published: January 24, 2007
The White House spin ahead of George W. Bush’s seventh State of the Union address was that the president would make a bipartisan call to revive his domestic agenda with “bold and innovative concepts.” The problem with that was obvious last night — in six years, Mr. Bush has shown no interest in bipartisanship, and his domestic agenda was set years ago, with huge tax cuts for wealthy Americans and crippling debt for the country.
More Here