One way to prevent this kind of behavior in the future is to charge media enablers with treason. According to the American Heritage Dictionary, treason is the betrayal of one's country. There is hardly a worse betrayal of one's country than providing propaganda cover for a fake war. The death of one "American" soldier in such a fake war is sufficient cause for charges of treason. To date, 4,258 "U.S." service members have died in "Iraq." That doesn't count the many suicides, subsequent deaths from injuries, the maiming, the poisoning, and the psychological damage that have resulted from this fake war.

Then there are the civilian deaths in "Iraq," estimated to be anywhere from 151,000 to 700,000 or more. Who is to be held to account for this? For certain, the members of the Bush criminal regime. But they absolutely could not have done it without the help to their media co-dependents. Glenn Greenwald is a rising voice in not just Web media, but on radio and television as well. He and others are doing what everyone in every medium of the media (a little Latin for you) should be doing. We can start by raising to a crescendo the call for criminal prosecution of the Bush criminal regime. From there it is an easy segue to treason indictments for their media co-conspirators. Aim low, you get lower. Aim high, you might just get higher.

The video is really funny. I didn't realize Richard Pryor had so much nuance to his performance. Or I forgot. It probably was Tim Reid playing the Ebony reporter.

As far as Obama not calling on a reporter from the Wall Street Journal, what point is there for reporters to show up, if they never get to ask a question. Obama is just doing it democratically. If there are a hundred or more reporters in the room, and he chooses them randomly, eventually a Wall Street Journal reporter will be picked. There will be plenty more chances in future press conferences over the next 7+ years. The Wall Street Journal is no longer a reputable newspaper now that it is owned by Rupert Murdoch.

I read the New York Times and Washington Post online from time to time, but I don't pay for a subscription. I used to watch network television, but thanks to digital TV they no longer broadcast analog (yes, I bought the converter box and an amplified antenna, but still get a crappy picture), and it's pretty much good riddance. I don't care what these people think is important because they have been the enablers of the fiascos that we have gotten ourselves into for as long as I can remember.

It is amazing that in a supposedly civilized, educated, advanced country that public discourse is at such a low level. The key weakness of most of those who consider themselves "liberals," or "progressives," is the tendency to make nice, to give the argument to the illegitimate arguer in order to seem "reasonable."

Richard Bruce Cheney is an international criminal, a suborner of mass murder, kidnapping, torture, felony negligence, lying the country into war, government by secrecy, crony defense contracting, treasonous exposure of an intelligence agent, and spying on "American" citizens. This is to name some felonies that we know about.

Any discussion of Dick Cheney should have as a starting point the lack of accountability he is held to for his many crimes. As long as he, an international criminal, is treated as anything other than an international criminal he will continue to stirr up trouble for the current administration with impunity.

Brack Obama is at fault for not pursuing a criminal investigation of the Bush criminal regime. But he is far from being the only enabler. Supposedly legitimate journalists like Joan Walsh give tacit legitimacy to what Cheney says by appearing on TV to argue side issues. The real issue is whether we are a nation of laws, not of men. Why isn't Dick Cheney in jail? Now there's a debating point.

I agree, except for "The Bush neocons 'knew' that Saddam Hussein was involved in 9/11 and had weapons of mass destruction, just as Churchill 'knew' that the U.S. Army intentionally spread smallpox among the Mandan Indians. The senior Bush aide who famously told Ron Suskind that 'we create our own reality' could have spoken for Churchill." Neither the Bush gang nor Churchill "knew" anything. They both consciously lied.

Much ballyhoo was made around Ward Churchill here in Madison, Wisconsin, where I live. In true knee-jerk fashion, he was hyped as the courageous freedom fighter standing up for the oppressed masses. I watched a bit of the video of his speech at UW Whitewater in 2005 on TV. It was déjà vu, and thensome. I've seen many a grandstander in my life, but he was the worst. Crude, narcissistic, arrogant, using the cheapest techniques of audience manipulation, he was more than I could handle. I turned it off after about three minutes. It's on YouTube if you need to induce vomiting.

As far as what Churchill said about the September 11, 2001 attacks, his remarks were an easy way to direct attention to himself. There were children on the planes that crashed, not that the other deaths were in any way justified. Churchill's level of callousness is in the realm of mental illness. Indigenous people should declare him anathema.