Perspectives

Our Courageous Media: Telling Truth to (Greviously Wounded) Power

from "Where Were They When We Needed Them?" By Rich Miles
t r u t h o u t

In the October 17 issue of US News and World Report, editor in chief Mortimer Zuckerman published a scathing description of the shortcomings of the Bush administration in a back-page editorial titled "One Swampy Mess."

Two days later, Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell's chief of staff when Powell was Secretary of State, revealed much of what he knew about the Cheney-Rumsfeld 'cabal' that circumvented regular channels of decision-making in the State and Defense departments, allegedly to ram through policies including the Iraq War that otherwise might have withered under public scrutiny.

And in an interview published in the Financial Times of London two days BEFORE Zuckerman, Bush 41's friend Brent Scowcroft let loose with his grave misgivings about the basic honesty and competence of his pal's son's presidency. There have been several more high-profile defections from the lockstep Republican Bush 43-as-god ideology, notably in both houses of Congress, but also including such stalwart Bushian apologists as the National Review, the Wall St. Journal, and even (gasp!) Fox News. It's starting to look like jackals on a carcass, now that the head elephant is weakened enough to be attacked, along with his coterie.

Those of us who opposed the near-election, then Supreme Court installation, then God forbid the RE-election of George W. Bush, have known at least the basic outlines of what is being said against Bush these days for at least 5 years, so the only part of the recent revelations that come as a surprise is the sheer brazen balls of these people, and the clarity of the perfidy they've perpetrated on America.

Many in the blogosphere, and even a few in the MSM, have been saying things like this, with different details, for the entire time W has been on the national political radar, and some have suffered grievously for their efforts - witness Joseph Wilson, Valerie Plame (who did not herself ever do anything to harm the Bush administration), Gen. Eric Shinseki, Richard Clarke, Paul O'Neill, and a host of others recently documented by Nick Turse of TomDispatch.com.

Norman Solomon, in a Perspective piece at that same web site, points out that not only have the people who knew what was really going on kept their counsel until now, when it's too late to bust Bush out of office, but that the nation's newspaper of record, the New York Times, was complicit in leading the country to war, but now has taken on the self-righteous mantle of a late-arriving Cassandra, telling us now what many of us who have never supported Bush have known for years - that there are not and never were good and compelling reasons for the US to send our children to war in Iraq. Quite the contrary, the whole war was fabricated at virtually every level, as several observers said it was.

So my question to these Bush-bashers-come-lately is: where the hell were you people when we needed you?

In the year 2004, those of us working our butts off to get Bush canned stood by and watched as pure lies, gross innuendo, delegated attack politics, guilt by alleged but never proven association, and religious-cum-patriotic posturing scuttled our man Kerry (with a little help from the man himself, it must be said), and caused the weak-minded, the magical thinkers, and the venal to re-elect the most corrupt president in American history because the filth came too fast and furious for anyone to counter, and most of our national news voices didn't really even try.

And now that Bush is weakened by events, individuals and news organizations who could, if they had had the courage, if they had told what they knew BEFORE November 2, 2004, have averted the disaster which is the second George W. Bush administration, are all jumping on the anti-Bush bandwagon, telling us that they knew all along how incompetent, how corrupt, how duplicitous and hypocritical Bush and his thugs are, and their consciences make them come clean now.

Well, those of us on the ground knew it too - many of us have known it since before 2000 - and we watched helplessly as voice after voice in opposition to the crime that is Bush were either ignored by the MSM, or actually buried even deeper by the journalistic cowards who would not stand up to what was obvious to the rest of us - that the American people, their safety, their happiness and success and values mean nothing to Bush et al. What matters is power, and redistributing wealth upward, and more power.

So to Mort Zuckerman, who prior to October 17, 2005, was one of the most reliably jingoistic supporters of all things Bush and Republican, and all the others who didn't have the simple humanity to do all in their power to defeat Bush one year ago, I say: SHAME on you. Our country, and our position in the world, and our children - our children, Mort! - will be decades recovering from the Bush administration.

We knew. We tried to tell you. Almost everything we feared would happen in a second Bush term has come to pass, just as many of us predicted it would. And you weren't listening, and so your sudden epiphanies mean nothing to us.

Don't blame us - we voted for America.