WTF Is It Now?!?

'OUTRIGHT CRAPOLA'
In the Wake of 9-11, the American Press Has Embraced a 'Demented Caesarism' Fooking Numbnut

Mark Crispin Miller writes, "Although the press was always marvelously soft on Bush - reveling in his ignorance, saying not a word about his many scandals past, approving his bald theft of the election - after 9/11 such mere protectiveness mutated swiftly into a demented Caesarism, such as one would once have found among the Soviets, or as one finds today in places like Zimbabwe, North Korea, Cuba (and Iraq).

"At first, this sort of thing was understandable, if nauseating, the fearful pundits and reporters - as usual excessively responsive to the mass hysteria, and at the time also hysterical themselves - exalting Bush into the leader that a stricken nation dearly wished it had. Thus Bush was hailed as "eloquent," "commanding" and "astute," "Churchillian" and "another Roosevelt," etc., although he clearly wasn't ever any of those things.... The fact that they... kept on treating this Bush as a god - ... notwithstanding the abundant evidence that he was not at all divine but barely human - makes it quite clear that the press was transformed big-time by the shock of 9/11.

"Although the evidence of our own senses tells us otherwise - after all, he's right there on TV - the press accounts routinely fix his grammar, and sometimes even call him "a six-footer," which is very clearly not the case. Such frank cosmetic touches are, to put it mildly, un-American, more reminiscent of the cult of Stalin than of anything in US journalistic history.

"And yet such frank improvements of the president's own voice and person are not half as troubling as the journalists' refusal to stay with those major stories that pertain directly to the ugly fix that we are in today: Dick Cheney's criminal involvement in the arming of Iraq (against which brutal nation he now urges us to war); John Ashcroft's kid-gloves treatment of the robber barons at Enron - and that firm's many links to the administration (a scandal from which Gulf War II might help distract the rest of us); the abject failure of the "war on terrorism," as bin Laden walks (or sits) at liberty, along with most of the al Qaeda leadership (a big distraction would help there); and, speaking of the bombing of Afghanistan, the ruinous effect of that impulsive move on our attempts to nab the terrorists."