July 13, 2006

Wall Street Journal huuuuuge White House whore
Even more so than the NY Times.

[O]ne could say that Bush owes his continued occupancy of the White House to the Gray Lady of American journalism. Above and beyond Judith Miller's and Howell Raines's front-page amplifications of administration lies about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, the Times's timely self-censorship proved essential to Bush's re-election campaign. Had the "paper of record" recorded the existence of the National Security Agency's warrantless (and unconstitutional) wiretapping program before the 2004 election -- instead of sitting on the story for more than a year -- we could very well be debating President John Kerry's equivocations on Iraq, rather than President Bush's incessant blather about staying the course.

But there are worse things than a pseudo-liberal newspaper's cooperating with malevolent power in Washington. For example, there is the Wall Street Journal's alarmingly mendacious suck-up response to the Bushwhacking of the Times.

That the hysterical reactionaries of the WSJ think that we require less information about the government in wartime speaks more to the newspaper's unconscious wish for a president who would be king than it does to the WSJ's concern for the safety of ordinary Americans.

- John R. MacArthur, publisher of Harper's Magazine.

No comments: