WTF Is It Now?!?

Today in History: 1980 - television evangelist Oral Roberts claims to see a 900 foot tall Jesus Christ in Tulsa, Oklahoma.




It's been a long time coming. If anything "un-American" happened after September 11, it was the triumph of the notion--propounded by the Bushies, reinforced by the major media and far too readily accepted by cowardly Democrats--that "patriotism" somehow equals "support the Bush Administration."

The genuflection sometimes reached levels that we might call comic, except that there's nothing comic about a "free" press choosing to ape state-owned media, throwing rose petals at the feet of officials from the most unilateral and secretive Administration in modern American history ("sixty-nine years old, and you're America's stud," Meet the Press's Tim Russert once said to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld).

One is not quite ready to say, on the evidence of several days' worth of stories, that this sorry era is over just yet. The New York Times and the Washington Post both ran editorials on May 17 that were something short of being full-throated calls for investigation; from the right-wing papers, the predictable yelping about how it's really Clinton's fault.

- - from "As the Press Turns" by by Michael Tomasky.