Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: Un vecchio, splendido articolo

Un art. molto "yankee", e/ma molto bello.
Namib
--------------------------
http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20021125&s=alterman
Bush Lies, Media Swallows
 By Eric Alterman
The more things change... Roughly ten years ago, I celebrated the criminal
indictment of Elliott Abrams for lying to Congress by writing an Op-Ed in
the New York Times on the increasing acceptance of official deception. (I
was just starting my dissertation on the topic back then.) The piece got
bogged down, however, when an editor refused to allow me even to imply that
then-President Bush was also lying to the country. I noted that such
reticence made the entire exercise feel a bit absurd. He did not dispute
this point but explained that Times policy simply would not allow it. I
asked for a compromise. I was offered the following: "Either take it out and
a million people will read you tomorrow, or leave it in and send it around
to your friends." (It was a better line before e-mail.) Anyway, I took it
out, but I think it was the last time I've appeared on that page.
President Bush is a liar. There, I said it, but most of the mainstream media
won't. Liberal pundits Michael Kinsley, Paul Krugman and Richard Cohen have
addressed the issue on the Op-Ed pages, but almost all news pages and
network broadcasts pretend not to notice. In the one significant effort by a
national daily to deal with Bush's consistent pattern of mendacity, the
Washington Post's Dana Milbank could not bring himself (or was not allowed)
to utter the crucial words. Instead, readers were treated to such
complicated linguistic circumlocutions as: Bush's statements represented
"embroidering key assertions" and were clearly "dubious, if not wrong." The
President's "rhetoric has taken some flights of fancy," he has "taken some
liberties," "omitted qualifiers" and "simply outpace[d] the facts." But
"Bush lied"? Never.
Ben Bradlee explains, "Even the very best newspapers have
never learned how to handle public figures who lie with a straight face. No
editor would dare print this version of Nixon's first comments on Watergate
for instance. 'The Watergate break-in involved matters of national security,
President Nixon told a national TV audience last night, and for that reason
he would be unable to comment on the bizarre burglary. That is a lie.'"
Part of the reason is deference to the office and the belief that the
American public will not accept a mere reporter calling the President a
liar. Part of the reason is the culture of Washington--where it is somehow
worse to call a person a liar in public than to be one. A final reason is
political. Some reporters are just political activists with columns who
prefer useful lies to the truth. For instance, Robert Novak once told me
that he "admired" Elliott Abrams for lying to him in a television interview
about illegal US acts of war against Nicaragua because he agreed with the
cause.
Let us note, moreover, that Bradlee's observation, offered in 1997, did not
apply to President Clinton. Reporters were positively eager to call Clinton
a liar, although his lies were about private matters about which many of us,
including many reporters, lie all the time. "I'd like to be able to tell my
children, 'You should tell the truth,'" Stuart Taylor Jr. of the National
Journal said on Meet the Press. "I'd like to be able to tell them, 'You
should respect the President.' And I'd like to be able to tell them both
things at the same time." David Gergen, who had worked for both Ronald
Reagan and Richard Nixon as well as Clinton and therefore could not claim to
be a stranger to official dishonesty, decried what he termed "the deep and
searing violation [that] took place when he not only lied to the country,
but co-opted his friends and lied to them." Chris Matthews kvetched,
"Clinton lies knowing that you know he's lying. It's brutal and it
subjugates the person who's being lied to. I resent deeply being constantly
lied to." George Will, a frequent apologist for the lies of Reagan and now
Bush, went so far as to insist that Clinton's "calculated, sustained lying
has involved an extraordinarily corrupting assault on language, which is the
uniquely human capacity that makes persuasion, and hence popular government,
possible."
George W. Bush does not lie about sex, I suppose--merely about war and
peace. Most particularly he has consistently lied about Iraq's nuclear
capabilities as well as its missile-delivery capabilities. Take a look at
Milbank's gingerly worded page-one October 22 Post story if you doubt me. To
cite just two particularly egregious examples, Bush tried to frighten
Americans by claiming that Iraq possesses a fleet of unmanned aircraft that
could be used "for missions targeting the United States." Previously he
insisted that a report by the International Atomic Energy Agency revealed
the Iraqis to be "six months away from developing a weapon." Both of these
statements are false, but they are working. Nearly three-quarters of
Americans surveyed think that Saddam is currently helping Al Qaeda; 71
percent think it is likely he was personally involved in the 9/11 attacks.
What I want to know is why this kind of lying is apparently OK. Isn't it
worse to refer "repeatedly to intelligence...that remains largely
unverified"--as the Wall Street Journal puts it--in order to trick the
nation into war, as Bush and other top US officials have done, than to lie
about a blowjob? Isn't it worse to put "pressure...on the intelligence
agencies to deliberately slant estimates," as USA Today worded its report?
Isn't it more damaging to offer "cooked information," in the words of the
CIA's former chief of counterterrorism, when you are asking young men and
women to die for your lies? Don't we revile Lyndon Johnson for having done
just that with his dishonest Gulf of Tonkin resolution?
Here's Bradlee again: "Just think for a minute how history might have
changed if Americans had known then that their leaders felt the war was
going to hell in a handbasket. In the next seven years, thousands of
American lives and more thousands of Asian lives would have been saved. The
country might never have lost faith in its leaders."
Reporters and editors who "protect" their readers and viewers from the truth
about Bush's lies are doing the nation--and ultimately George W. Bush--no
favors. Take a look at the names at that long black wall on the Mall.
Consider the tragic legacy of LBJ's failed presidency. Ask yourself just who
is being served when the media allow Bush to lie, repeatedly, with impunity,
in order to take the nation into war.

President Bush is a liar.
E se lo dice lui.... :)
*LOL*
-Stefano

 E se lo dice lui.... :)
E se lo nega (negando poi di aver negato) mr. De Ce**ri, la cui carriera è
riassunta infra...
I. L'alfabetizzazione di mr. De Ce**ri:
1. Italiano. 
news:422082B9...@people.it
 ("qualc'altro").
2. Inglese. 
400C1EF4...@people.it
 ("the shit that was wrote from
ams67").
II. Richiamo alla netiquette per mr. De Ce**ri, noto per i suoi non
segnalati follow-up ad it.fan.culo:
RFC 1855: In NetNews parlance, "Posting" refers to posting a new article to
a group, or responding to a post someone else has posted. "Cross-Posting"
refers to
posting a message to more than one group. If you introduce Cross-Posting to
a group, or if you direct "Followup-To:" in the header of your posting, warn
readers! Readers will usually assume that the message was posted to a
specific group and that followups will go to that group. Headers change this
behavior.
III. Il "nazismo buono" di mr. De Ce**ri:
1. "Quanto alal [sic] 'Kristallnacht' nulla ha mai dimostrato il
coinvolgimento
di Hitler e del partito nazista" (
news:42076FEE...@people.it
).
2.  "Di bambini nei capi [sic] di sterminio ve ne furono ben pochi.  E molti
di
loro si salvarono." (dal thread IPI "L'attacco ad Adura, in Cisgiordania.
Tra le vittime anche due
bambini").
IV. Acribia esegetica di mr. De Ce**ri, un biblista eccentrico:
3F59E2E2...@interfree.it
 (si consiglia di leggere tutto il thread,
eterna fonte di divertimento, da qui all'eternità. Amen).
Namib

E se lo nega (negando poi di aver negato)
Non c'e' bisogno di negare nulla fin quando dei fessi non sapranno
portare qualcosa a sostegno delle loro affermazioni :)
-Stefano

Ovvero "De hebetibus", antico trattato sui 
Namib :)
C.V.D.
-Stefano

 dei fessi
Ovvero "De hebetibus", antico trattato sui "De Ce**ri". Eccone una fedele
traduzione:


 portare qualcosa a sostegno...
#_...dei du' bbigonzi che te so scesi oltre l'elastico delle mutande...
Te sta diventando 'n'ossessione 'sto sostegno...
Guarda che se riesci a mette da parte un paio de "testoni", se facemo rifa' 
quelle de silicone.
Eddatte na rimestatina... djiobon!
Tuo affezionatissimo
Giannozzo