And the others on that panel with Liasson just sat there and listened to her lies! That just shows the utter bankruptcy of our so-called pundit class.

This is the central deceit that causes the war in Iraq to continue despite most Americans' wanting it to end for quite some time (because "only the Left" wants an end to war while "the Center" wants to say until we win). It's why crimes committed by the Washington elite go uninvestigated and unpunished (due to the lie that only "the Left" favors investigations and punishment while ).

(sentence ends there...)

It seems to me that the subservience, insularity and myopia of the contemporary press are truly unprecedented, as is their stubborn refusal to look at their dysfunction and the price we have all paid for it. If Liason and her ilk had been around thirty five years ago, Nixon would have served out his term.

As I understand it, when Obama refers to "withdrawal", he's referring to the possible withdrawal of "combat troops" only.

This is commitment that is meaningless except for what it is NOT, namely, a withdrawal of the American military from Iraq and an end to the military occupation of that country.

So, if we're going to address "facts" and "truth", why not start by addressing the most misleading lie of all - that thousands upon thousands of American troops will remain in Iraq and that McCain's stated "100 years" view is likely a more honest and accurate description of reality than Obama's "withdrawal".

The real disconnect is between what it appears the American people want and what either candidate is actually promising. But this is a topic that is never discussed in polite company...

So Liasson just flatly stated that "the American people" -- as opposed to "the left wing base," which is (of course) a different animal altogether -- don't want to withdraw troops from Iraq within 16 months but instead favor withdrawal only when "facts on the ground" permit it.

No, Glenn. What Mara said was that the American people want a commander in chief to look at the facts on the ground instead of just sticking to some campaign promise. Most probably, the American people believe, or want to believe, that the facts on the ground do and will next January favor withdrawal in 16 months. That is also what Obama believes. Whether those beliefs will survive a careful assessment early next year, and what will happen if they do not are key questions, to which the answers are unclear. In the meantime, you shouldn't take liberties with what Liasson actually said.

It was Lenin, at a party meeting in 1903, who had the brilliant idea of naming the minority faction the "Bolsheviks" (from the Russian word for majority).

In the meantime, you shouldn't take liberties with what Liasson actually said.

I quoted exactly what she said in full and summarized it exactly accurately.

She said "the American people" want "facts on the ground" to determine when we leave Iraq, not a timetable.

The polls show exactly the opposite.

What Liasson said "the American people" want is just false, and that's true even if you think that it comports with what Obama's position is.

When one considers who is paying out billions of dollars each month of this American Iraq Occupation(American taxpayers) who is giving up lives (American troops in Iraq) or being badly injured,traumatized or recklessly victimized once "out" unless forced back in(stop ordered)(American troops).

When one considers what Americans have been destroying in Iraq.

When one considers what Americans have been building or continue to desire to build in Iraq.

When one considers majortity of Americans want out of Iraq very soon.

When one considers Iraqis are increasingly not going to settle with Amereicans on American terms for this Iraq Occupation.

When one considers how many Iraqis have been killed,families wrecked,displaced,chased out,forced out,maimed.

When one considers how Iraq,a relative progressive ME nation despite Saddam and his minions is now so very torn apart and in social disarray.

After all the above who indeed is keeping Americans in Iraq and calling for more Iraqis to be killed or displaced so American and western energy interests can move into Iraqi oil fields?

It is astounding.

Fact is, Iraq is off the front page. Most Americans don't think too much about it either way. You're the 'media maven', count the decline in the number of articles now vs. 2 years ago. People are worrying about their own welfare not what the pundits are telling them to be outraged and/or terrified of. I think this more than anything is what sticks in the craw of the pundits, bloggers and other self appointed jerks; that they've lost significant power to make us sit up on our hind legs and bark on cue.

If the "American people" were really so against the war, wouldn't they just ignore all this tripe and vote Obama overwhelmingly?

This is exactly why the McCain campaign is -- with MediaCorp's help -- desperately trying to pretend that Obama is changing his stance on Iraq.

I'm used to this desperate attempt by a hostile and ignorant news media attempting to sideline any rational and common-sense policy which conflicts their desired hawkishness as 'left wing' loonies.

But it's not just people like me -- this extends to their own journalists. The news producers' systems are set up to weed out the non-hawks and what you end up with are the most manipulable.

Remember, in the very earliest 1980s, the New York Times' own reporter Ray Bonner [and similarly the Washington Post's amazing Alma Guillermoprieto] reported that Reagan's El Salvadoran death squad allies had massacred civilians at El Mozote.

As payback for this accurate coverage, the giant hawk propaganda machine spun into action, led by the U.S. embassy squad (Hello Elliot Abrams!) and the screaming freaks at the Wall Street Journal, and of course the cowardly, hawk nuts at the NYT gave in, removing Bonner from his beat and throwing him on the local business beat, prompting him to leave.

About 10 years' later, the dug-up bones proved him right, so the NYT issued another one of their frequent 'Hey sorry we lied & suppressed reports contrary to what they hawkish administration told us but it's really not our fault!'

From "The Mozote Massacre", Colombia Journalism Review, 1993

In his story for the Times, Bonner reported seeing "the charred skulls and bones of dozens of bodies buried under burned-out roofs, beams, and shattered tiles," and more bodies along the trail leading into the village and at the edge of a nearby cornfield, including bodies of women and children...

"That story," Bonner goes on to say, "was the beginning of the end of my career at The New York Times."

As Tim Golden observed..."the magnitude of the atrocity seemed to be matched by the baldness of the official response. Army and government leaders said no such massacre had taken place. Official of the Reagan administration ... derided the reports as gross exaggerations."

Indeed, shortly after Bonner and Guillermoprieto's stories ran, Thomas Enders, then assistant secretary of state for inter-American affairs, attacked them before a congressional committee, saying that although there had been a firefight between the army and the guerrillas in the area, "no evidence could be found to confirm that government forces systematically massacred civilians." President Reagan accordingly certified that the Salvadorans were "making a concerted and significant effort" to end "the indiscriminate torture and murder of its citizens." (Later that year a House Intelligence staff report revealed that the embassy officials sent to investigate the massacre "never reached the towns where the alleged events occurred.")

Elements of the press soon joined in the attack on the story. Leading the attack was The Wall Street Journal, which in early February devoted its entire editorial column to a critique of U.S. press coverage of El Salvador, singling out Bonner as being "overly credulous," and accusing the Times of closing ranks "behind a reporter out on a limb." William A. Henry III of Time weighed in during March: "An even more crucial if common oversight is the fact that women and children, generally presumed to be civilians, can be active particpants in guerrilla war. New York Times correspondent Raymond Bonner underplayed that possibility, for example, in a much-protested Jan. 27 report of a massacre by the army in and around the village of Mozote."...

..."The price I paid," [Guillermoprieto] adds, "and that all reporters in El Salvador in those critical and brutal years of the war paid, was a loss of confidence in themselves, and the besieged feeling of always having it be our word against the state department." The result, she believes, was that certain editors lost their trust in her.

The argument against much reporting critical of a crucial ally in Central America, she says, "was not 'No, the evidence is not there,' it was 'No, you are a leftist sympathizer.'"...

...in August, Bonner's job in El Salvador was suddenly over. He was ordered to return to New York. Bonner subsequently took a leave of absence and later left the paper.

Executive editor A. M. Rosenthal maintained that political pressure had nothing to do with the transfer; still, the Reagan administration was surely delighted -- and many journalists felt they had learned a lesson. As Michael Massing pointed out in these pages ("About-face on El Salvador," CJR, November/December 1983), "the episode has made reports wary of provoking the embassy. Bonner's transfer, one reporter says, 'left us all aware that the embassy is quite capable of playing hardball,' and, as a result, 'people treat it carefully. If they can kick out the Times correspondent' -- a perception shared by several correspondents -- 'you've got to be careful.'"...

...Bonner says he is grateful that the Times chose to mention him and Guillermoprieto, both in Golden's October 22 piece and in the editorial, titled "The Mozote Horror, Confirmed." Guillermoprieto finds less comfort in the belated vindication. "The fact is that evidence for the massacre existed from the day those stories appeared in the newspapers," she says. "Two journalists from two leading newspaper, traveling independently of each other, provided the same evidence. There were photographic documents, credible sources."

"It was very, very hard to fight the Reagan administration; it's very hard to fight any administration," she adds. "I'm not terribly optimistic. What we see is that administrations are increasingly able to dictate the terms of coverage -- in Panama, for example, in the Iraq war."

On October 22, 1992...the Times headline announced SALVADOR SKELETONS CONFIRM REPORTS OF MASSACRE IN 1981..."

http://backissues.cjrarchives.org/year/93/1/mozote.asp

No matter how many lives are at stake, no matter how clear the evidence, the power centers of the major news producers line up on command to the hawks and anti-leftist nut brigades.

And this continues, no matter how many times those same news producers are later found to issue belated and weak apologies for their cruddy and cowardly evasions earlier.