Of News and Truth
   by Gene Lyons

For years, the Republican media machine has dominated national politics.
Through a combination of ideological certitude, message discipline and bullying,
the right often succeeds in defining issues its way. Outfits like FOX News,
The Washington Times and The Wall Street Journal editorial page as well as
Rush Limbaugh and his cohorts serve as propaganda organs of the RNC.
Democrats have no equivalent apparatus. Indeed, one of the GOP’s most
useful fictions is "liberal bias," the idea that bigcity newspapers and TV
networks pick on poor, beleaguered Republicans.

But nobody touted Iraq’s imaginary WMDs harder than The New York Times
and The Washington Post. With Republicans controlling the White House and
both houses of Congress, GOP agitprop, as Marxists called it, has grown
increasingly brazen. As New York Times columnist Paul Krugman puts it,
"We’re living in a country in which there is no longer such a thing as nonpolitical
truth. ... [T] here are now few, if any, limits to what conservative politicians can
get away with: The faithful will follow the twists and turns of the party line with
a loyalty that would have pleased the Comintern."

Krugman must be reading my e-mail. What’s got the faithful upset is the
Wilson/Plame leaks investigation. The possibility that the White House
falsely denied that Bush insider Karl Rove and Vice President Dick
Cheney’s chief of staff I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby "outed" a covert CIA
agent in an attempt to hurt her husband, former Ambassador Joe Wilson,
has driven True Believers to near-hysteria.

Those writing the e-mail sound like the sheep in George Orwell’s "Animal
Farm," chanting mindless slogans to drown out challenges to the party line.
Expletives deleted, here’s a typical example: "You are calling political hack
Joe Wilson a whistleblower. Joe Wilson is a proven liar.... His wife arranged
for him to go to Niger to drink sweet tea.  Chenny [sic] did not authorize the trip.
Neither did George Tenet. Mr. Wilson lied about those facts."

The rest of the party line goes like this: Rove and Libby were warning reporters
against false stories. Anyhow, Wilson’s wife, Valerie Plame, wasn’t really a covert
agent working on WMD, but a nobody bureaucrat. Or if she was a spy, Rove
didn’t actually say her name. Besides, the Brits say Wilson was wrong, that there
was plenty of evidence that Iraq tried to buy African uranium, and anybody who
says different is pro-terrorist.  President Bush rules!

Why are the sheep agitated? Basically, I believe, for the same reasons White House
operatives attacked Wilson to begin with: They’d concocted a nuclear threat to
scare Americans into supporting a war against Iraq that Bush’s neoconservative
supporters had planned for other reasons and they were afraid the public would
figure it out. They attacked Wilson’s wife to punish him for telling the truth.

To hold otherwise requires what Orwell called "doublethink": believing
simultaneously in two contradictory facts. That evidence for Saddam’s nukes
was powerful, for example, although the Bush administration’s own Iraq Survey
Group, after searching everywhere and interviewing arrested Iraqi scientists,
concluded that no nuclear weapons program existed there after 1991; therefore,
no attempts to buy uranium.

It’s this simple: Wilson was right, Bush was wrong. All the rest is rubbish.

GOP robo-pundits were everywhere last week saying that Wilson lied about
Cheney authorizing Wilson’s trip—Newt Gingrich, Rush Limbaugh and the
allegedly thoughtful New York Times columnist, David Brooks.

But Wilson never said that. Here’s the relevant passage from his original
whistle-blowing article:" In February 2002, I was informed by officials at
the CIA that Cheney’s office had questions about a particular intelligence report....
The agency officials asked if I would travel to Niger to check out the story so
they could provide a response to the vice president’s office. "

Who sent him?" Agency officials. "

Did his wife, the secret agent," authorize" the trip, as Rove sneered to reporters?
Not that it matters, but no. Her bosses did. "She was not in a position to send
Joe Wilson anywhere except to bed without his supper," Larry Johnson, a former
CIA colleague, told the Los Angeles Times. Sometimes even the most brazen
agitprop can’t stand against reality. Under Communist rule, Moscow had two
newspapers. The standard joke was that "There is no Pravda in Izvestia, and
there is no Izvestia in Pravda" (" There is no Truth in News, and there is no
News in Truth. ") No, Americans aren’t there yet, but the Wilson/Plame affair
is pushing them in that direction.


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