March 2008: Tie A Yellow Ribbon...

Or make that: slap the ribbon on something that opens so that something else can be pumped in?

... When the "something else" might just be a reason for BushCo to invade a country?

[Image: Photoshop recreation of megastore parking lot sighting—
from a day I had no camera on me]

At Editor & Publisher, Greg Mitchell has been doing a "Five Years Ago" series about abysmal media coverage of the war. The whole series is not available, though some elements are online in other places—

— Questions We Wish They'd Asked Five Years Ago
— Five Years Ago 'Embeds' Got Ready for War Duty in Iraq: How Did That Work Out?
— And, on some journalists who got it right, there's this.

The series is based on Mitchell's book, So Wrong for So Long: How the Press, the Pundits—and the President—Failed on Iraq. Amy Goodman's interview with Mitchell is here.

On the March 19 anniversary, Scott Horton posts: Six Questions for Aram Roston, Author of The Man Who Pushed America to War.

The discussion of Ahmad Chalabi paints the very striking picture of a master con-man out-conning the con-men who run BushCo. The con artist's maneuvers being enabled by his charming the uncritical members of our media into promoting his stories.

But, no surprise there: this bunch was charmed by Commander Guy.

Horton and Roston look at how Chalabi used his understanding of what kind of people inside The System could be worked. As during the Clinton administration, when he befriended right-wing congressional staffers who then helped push policies contrary to the administration's.

And, there's his outfoxing of the CIA—

"In the early 1990s, the CIA invented and paid for the Iraqi National Congress with U.S. taxpayer money, built up Chalabi as its leader and let him spend that money, and then in the mid 1990s, it cut him off. But then he used the credibility and the organization they gave him, and headed to Washington, D.C. to lobby for money overtly, bypassing the CIA completely. In fact, he was basically at war with them. And that animosity proved useful because they had bureaucratic enemies in D.C."

While a fancy foreigner like Chalabi can outmaneuver amateurs like the CIA, BushCo has things well in hand here in HomelandWorld.

On March 10, Scott Horton's reaction to the Elliot Spitzer sting: "It looks like the Bush Justice Department just bagged themselves another Democratic Governor."

On the 22nd, Horton offers evidence of "More Political Taint in the Spitzer Case".

Though I can't find the source, at the time I read a comment to the effect of:

Proof the Spitzer sting was engineered by political operatives in the DOJ—the news broke on a Monday morning instead of a Friday evening...