“Broder was on the panel. Gwen was gushing about how he was her mentor. They were discussing the economy. This was in the dark days after 9/11 when all was not well economically. … I wrote an angry letter to Gwen, but clearly nothing has changed.”

I’m glad you didn’t let Gwen Ifill off the hook here.

I’d been a big fan of hers when she started out — she’s likeable, intelligent, genuine.

But she’s really played the game the way they all have, just with that hallmark PBS-Lehrer style that never challenges a public (GOP) official about their lies, and never challenges the questions framing public debate.

After tracking this practice in Ifill’s work over a period of time, I noted her handling of the Swift-Boating of John Kerry. NOT ONCE did Gwen Ifill give air to the facts that discredited John O’Neill and the SBVets. NOT ONCE did Gwen Ifill note the historical record that supports Kerry’s 1970-71 comments on the conduct of that war. She just extended the issue through navel-gazing and back-n-forth about the debate. But that’s not even the real reason to be concerned.

This was 2004. The Toledo Blade had just won a Pulitzer Prize for its coverage of the actions of the elite Tiger Force Unit in Vietnam — in the midst of a Presidential campaign. A Presidential campaign in which John Kerry was attacked for statements made in 1970 about the U.S. policies that allowed — demanded — American soldiers to target civilians/violate the Geneva Convention/fight an illegal war without just cause or provocation.

Yet Gwen Ifill could not say a single word about the Pulitzer Prize in 2004.

http://www.toledoblade.com/app…..TIGERFORCE

The 22-article series documented the “45-member unit’s rampage through two provinces” … “killed hundreds of unarmed men, women, and children.”

Gwen Ifill would not say a single word about the Toldeo Blade, nor about Tiger Force.

Even though John Kerry’s “winter soldier” statement was accurate.

“Based on classified records and interviews with former soldiers and Vietnamese civilians, The Blade series described the 45-member unit’s rampage through two provinces between May and November, 1967 – the longest-known series of atrocities committed by a U.S. battle unit in the war.

Soldiers hurled grenades into underground bunkers full of women and children. They shot elderly farmers toiling in their fields. They severed the ears of the dead to fashion into necklaces. One former unit medic told The Blade that soldiers “would go into villages and just shoot everybody. We didn’t need an excuse. If they were there, they were dead.”

Records show that two soldiers in the platoon, Lt. Donald Wood of Findlay, and Sgt. Gerald Bruner of Colon, Mich., tried to stop the atrocities but were transferred from the platoon after they complained to superiors.”

Gwen Ifill could not and would not point out that the SwiftBoaters were shills. That history itself disproved their very reason for being — John Kerry’s willingness to speak the truth. That they are paid political attack dogs — not a grassroots group.

Gwen Ifill could not point out that American soldiers in Iraq were being asked to perform under equally illegitimate circumstances, nor that they were facing a guerilla force embedded in a national population, whose language and culture was completely alien, and whose customs and taboos were routinely violated.

Gwen Ifill did not point out that American soldiers in Iraq are ordered to carry out the same kind of policies that were the rule in Vietnam. Instead of torching a few hooches, they bulldoze them. But in Iraq, all of Fallujah is a hooch. For that matter, all of Iraq is just a giant hooch — and the policy is to torch the whole damn place.

There’s a strong connection between Vietnam and Iraq in terms of how the US handled itself. And in 2004, with one Pulitzer, a blockbuster story, a war-hero Prezntial candidate going up against a draft-dodging AWOL incumbent, and the fate of innumberable American soldiers and even more Iraqi civilians (& partisans) hanging in the balance … Gwen Ifill said nothing.

Every other editor and pundit had that same chance, in 2004, to make a difference in the course of events that were to follow over the 4 years.

That is it in a nutshell.

…we’ll call this the “I’m too drained from travelling to come up with any original ideas, so I’ll just pimp our blogroll instead” edition…

If (when) Hillary runs in 2008 she’ll be sixty years old. and Bill will qualify for Medicare.

Isn’t there something diseased about obsessing about the marital habits of a 58 year old woman? And a husband who (let’s not forget) was recently hospitalized for a heart condition?

I mean, eeeuw.

If we don’t fight back, THEY WILL NEVER STOP. They do what they do because we let them. Let’s do something –

LET’S SEND PANTIES TO THE PANTY-SNIFFERS!