I think I was first most impressed with Brit Hume when he dug through thousands and thousands of declassified legal documents to show a relation between certain clients of high level politicians and contracts secured from the Department of Transportation.

Doh!! Had ya goin!!

I´m just kidding, he´s never done anything like that, he´s not a journalist and has never done anything which was anywhere near the country code of the number for ´journalism´.

http://www.bnfp.org/neighborhood/jmoore.htm

As the world watched the military build up at the Kuwaiti border, Saddam called a meeting with then US ambassador April Gillespie, who told Saddam: "We have no opinion on the Arab-Arab conflicts, like your border disagreement with Kuwait." She went on to say: "James Baker has directed our official spokesmen to emphasize this instruction." (San Francisco Examiner, 11/18/02)

More "competence" from the GOP. Real strong on security.

In the true spirit of your heroes. I fully support putting you and everyone like you in a concentration camp somewhere in the middle of Wyoming. You can never be too safe and too sure, you know. Better a million Republicans die than one terrorist get away.

I agree with William Timberlake that objectivity is too elusive a goal to be useful in public debate. When we use the word "objectivity" or the word "neutrality" I think we are really talking about honesty. We want people to be honest and fair in assessing those with whom they disagree. When all they offer is insults it seems obvious that they are not being honest and fair.

But the human truths behind the standards of "honest" and "fair" makes the problem a very tough nut to crack. For myself, at this point, I don't see how a well-informed person can, with honesty, support this administration, believe in its competence or truthfulness, or support this war. When I hear people doing so, I try to be charitable and assume first that they have not been following the news. If they display that they have some knowledge of what's going on, I move on to the assumption that they are pursuing some agenda of power, money or psychological need. I look to expose their dishonesty.

I'm wrong to do this, I think. There is a genuine gap between personal honesty and facts. People have a huge capacity for sincerely believing in things that are quite obviously false. Perhaps Hume actually thinks he is being honest. Who knows what complex of employment goals, personal hurts, fear of self-examination, etc. makes it feel impossible to him to revisit the opinions in which he has poured his career, ego and self-image? His dishonesty cannot be exposed, because--maybe, I don't know--he is not, by his own lights, actually being dishonest. Right wing rage is a lot like drunkenness--it looks like it should be possible to hold people responsible at least for choosing to get drunk, but if you try, all you end up doing is arguing with a drunk. That's the kind of conversation I have had over and over with right wing people in the last few years. It's not useful.

The only thing that can be exposed is the failure to abide by facts. And that is why I am a liberal and a believer in the hopes and truths of the Enlightenment. Everybody, left and right, is susceptible to the kind of intellectual drunkenness that has overtaken conservatism in this country, but it is the Enlightenment position that facts are the cure for it. People should be as partisan as they want, but facts must be checked. So, thanks Glenn, for including facts, citations and links in all of your posts.

"Unfortunately propaganda works and given Fox's ratings, it's clear many people are soaking it up. To balance things out, we need a far-left network with the nightly news hosted by Noam Chomsky and regular appearance on their Sunday morning talk show by Dennis Kucinich and Bernie Sanders.

Having seen several of Chomsky's performances, including his dominance over Buckley in '69, all I can say is we need much more of him now.

And I do think that a new alternative medium is evolving, but I doubt it will ever take a TV form in opposition to Fox. Rather, it is to be seen in sites like this one, and over at TPM, notably firedoglake, where history is being made and documented, right now. Demographics are changing rapidly, and TV, while it will not go away, will lose some, maybe much, of its dominance. Americans will get news and opinion from more diverse sources, which should be a good thing.

"You could negotiate something that gets [the Iraqis] out of Kuwait for the most part (emphasis added), leaves them maybe a little bit on the water, leaves them a little bit of the oil." --Mario Cuomo, Los Angeles Times, Nov. 22, 1990

No, Cuomo doesn't speak for all Democrats, of course, but that instinct was in full flower in the Democratic party in 1990 and later. That's why Democrats fell all over themselves to appear "warlike" in 2002 debate about Iraq, to try to shed that image. What idiots.

And to the person who said a "Republican congress" forced Clinton to pull out of Somalia, wake up and read the history books. The "Black Hawk Down" incident was October 1993, and the Republicans didn't take over the House until the 1994 elections (meaning they weren't seated until January 1995). No, Clinton was thinking in purely political (cowardly) terms when he pulled out of Somalia, and Osama bin Laden cited that specific example (as well as Reagan's withdrawal from Lebanon in 1984) as to why Americans wouldn't fight.

Why is Brit Hume treated like a real journalist and news anchor?

Your assumption being that people treat Fox like a real News channel is the first problem with this question....

was cowardly in Somolia, what was Reagan in Lebanon?

As the world watched the military build up at the Kuwaiti border, Saddam called a meeting with then US ambassador April Gillespie, who told Saddam: "We have no opinion on the Arab-Arab conflicts, like your border disagreement with Kuwait." She went on to say: "James Baker has directed our official spokesmen to emphasize this instruction." (San Francisco Examiner, 11/18/02)

Anyone who can interpret that as tacit permission to invade Kuwait is delusional at best.

If you look at maps of the time, there was an area on the Kuwait/Iraq border that was in dispute. (It was roughly diamond-shaped, about 150 miles on the long axis, and general marked with hashmarks on world maps to show the territory was disputed. YOu'll see a similar area on maps on a portion of the border between Kenya and Sudan, for example.)

To say "you solve this problem among yourselves" means "and we won't have a problem with your invading a sovereign country" is just plain silly, and only the willfully deluded could believe otherwise.