Comments on: Will the Bush/Cheney Crimes Get Flushed Down the Memory Hole?

By: Ted666

Ted666 — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 21:36:24 +0000

I could handle it. I would welcome it.

By: FrozenNorthObserver

FrozenNorthObserver — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 21:15:07 +0000

unfortunatley the US is now more rot than not and it does not look like anything of any real importance is going to “change”. Obama has already indicated that his desire is to ignore the “rule of law” where it would apply to BushCo. The main reason being that there are way to many big Dems who would be exposed as being complicit. None of it could of happened without them. The spiral will continue down without a full “House” cleaning.

By: Selkirk

Selkirk — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 19:27:38 +0000

Thanks for getting back on point.

Keep in mind one thing. I think it’s important not to come to the conclusion that any amount of media manipulation is done without the complete complicity of the media itself. Censorship is a strong word. I think the better word is self-censorship.

It is true that the media does a horrible job of what it is supposed to do, but I refuse to believe that they have any reason to do so other than the fact that they want to.

By: syolles

syolles — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 18:56:14 +0000

I think that as the administration and/or oligarchic efforts to control the media were increasingly successful, the audience began to shrink. I found the internet and specifically firedoglake during the Valerie Plame scandal.
I am of an age when we remember newspapers doing that kind of reporting and analysis. We remember it. The memory has not been washed down the memory hole, so that the difference with today’s media is clear.
I think that the obvious political lens of MSM and as well as the decline in substance are major factors in their fall in readership/viewership and the rise in the use of the internet.
So it’s amusing to hear media titans speak of the competition from the internet hurting their news operations. My god, they gave up the news operations, and that is why the internet grew — to replace what the readers had lost.
Now if anyone knows this, it must certainly include the villagers of an age to remember the difference–
I can’t imagine that everyone active in media is in denial of this explanation for the failure of the MSM. But perhaps so. In acceding to the political demands of those in power, the media lost its audience, gradually, but definitely, over the last twenty years.
As we have long suspected, and now are more sure of, the public center is far to the left of where the MSM has been telling us it is.
So I think politics, their own politics, is a very significant factor, in the failure of media.
Now I have wondered over recent years why there has not been much significant movement to change that lens, to get an audience back. (Rachel Maddow is a very new addition.) I began to conclude that the propaganda function must be more important to ruling elites than circulation figures or viewership. If the media did not keep pumping out the right wing noise propaganda, the whole right wing Bush administration might have collapsed.
I really think there was nothing more holding it together.
But if right wing political propaganda is clearly more important than circulation figures, than the propagandists are also holding the air waves closely, filled with nonsense and lack of content, in order to prevent
this venue from being used to communicate other ideas. It is fenced off.
A kind of no man’s land.
We saw the rise in recent years of independent political documentaries, because the previous medium for these ideas, television, was closed to us by the right wing political gate-keepers.
The censorship is blatant. Very little coverage of the coal ash spill.
How can that be? In America?

By: Hugh

Hugh — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 18:20:59 +0000

You really should lay off that koolaid. You are hallucinating. And given the imperial Presidency, I would think that office could use some weakening. You condone lawbreaking. You condone the selective application of the laws. You condone dictatorship. You are very hard to take seriously.

By: FreedomNow

FreedomNow — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 17:51:51 +0000

Whether or not the order violated existing law or perhaps was justified by inherent Article II authority has to be adjudicated by the Supreme Court. Transperency and adherence to rule of law principles will be established by the Courts in relationship to FUTURE Presidents. It would be an enormous waste of judicial AND Obama’s political capital (it would be HIS justice department that would pursue such cases) and resources (tax money in the midst of economic difficulties) to engage in such political gamesmanship.

By: FreedomNow

FreedomNow — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 17:47:13 +0000

The judgment of historians now will differ from the judgment of historians later. Truman looks much different now than he did immediately after his Administration.

By: FreedomNow

FreedomNow — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 17:46:08 +0000

A trial WOULD weaken the Office of the President, whether intended or not. The CIA operatives have already had to take out legal insurance on their own dime against these kinds of things. It is a policy difference. Democrats originally supported all the policies they later came to disown for political reasons. I know it goes against current conventional wisdom, but there is little the Bush Justice Department did that wouldn’t have been condoned by the Reno Justice department. I did not concur with all that Reno did in the Gonzales and Randy Weaver cases but to go after her after the fact would have been to weaken the Executive Office of the President. Same here.

By: twolf1

twolf1 — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 17:37:45 +0000

…In an informal survey of 109 professional historians conducted over a three-week period through the History News Network, 98.2 percent assessed the presidency of Mr. Bush to be a failure while 1.8 percent classified it as a success.

Asked to rank the presidency of George W. Bush in comparison to those of the other 41 American presidents, more than 61 percent of the historians concluded that the current presidency is the worst in the nation’s history. Another 35 percent of the historians surveyed rated the Bush presidency in the 31st to 41st category, while only four of the 109 respondents ranked the current presidency as even among the top two-thirds of American administrations…

By: Hugh

Hugh — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 17:36:46 +0000

I would simply leave the judgement of history to be done by historians, not by lawyers of the opposite political party.

Again this is just a strawman. We are not talking about the judgement of history. We are talking about the prosecution of violations of law. While the Bush Administration engaged in massive politicization of the Department of Justice, the history here too is that employees at Justice serve the law not the President. Again “lawyers of the opposite political party” is just another strawman since for you any lawyer who would prosecute any politician or officeholder could only act according to their political biases and would only be chosen for them. If this is how you believe the justice system works, then we might as well go back to our caveman days because law and justice are impossible, a fraud that the few perpetrate on the many.