Rich, NYTimes: "Two Top Guns Shoot Blanks"

[understandinglife]

Two Top Guns Shoot Blanks

By FRANK RICH
Published: June 19, 2005

TO understand how the Bush administration has lost the public opinion war on Iraq it may be helpful to travel in H. G. Wells's time machine back to Oct. 30, 1938.

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The shelf life of the fakery that sold the war has also expired. On June 7, a Washington Post/ABC News poll found for the first time that a majority of Americans believe the war in Iraq has not made the United States safer. A week later Gallup found that a clear majority (59 percent) wants to withdraw some or all American troops. Most Americans tell pollsters the war isn't "worth it," and the top reasons they cite, said USA Today, include "fraudulent claims and no weapons of mass destruction found" and "the belief that Iraq posed no threat to the United States." The administration can keep boasting of the Iraqi military's progress in taking over for Americans and keep maintaining that, as Dick Cheney put it, the insurgency is in its "last throes." But when even the conservative Republican congressman who pushed the House cafeteria to rename French fries "freedom fries" (Walter B. Jones of North Carolina) argues for withdrawal, it's fruitless. Once a story line becomes incredible, it's hard to get the audience to fall for it again.

This, too, echoes the history of the Welles hoax. Three years after his "War of the Worlds," the real nightmare that America feared did arrive. Yet some radio listeners at first thought that the reports from Pearl Harbor were another ruse. Welles would later recall in an interview with Peter Bogdanovich that days after the Japanese attack, Franklin Roosevelt sent him a cable chiding him for having cried wolf with his faked war "news" of 1938.

Such is the overload of faked reality for Americans at this point that it will be far more difficult for the Bush administration than it was for F.D.R. to persuade the nation of an imminent threat without appearing to cry wolf. Nor can it easily get the country to believe that success in Iraq is just around the corner. Too many still remember that marvelous aircraft-carrier spectacle marking the end of "major combat operations" in Iraq - a fake reality show adapted, no less, from a Tom Cruise classic, "Top Gun." Some 25 months and 1,500 American deaths later, nothing short of a collaboration by Orson Welles and Steven Spielberg could make this war fly in America now.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/19/opinion/19rich.html?pagewanted=2&hp

Yes, Mr. Rich - MISSIONNOTACCOMPLISHED because it was a lie from the start and every single person who has died or been injured since August 2002 is the total responsibility of Bush, Blair and their fellow neoconster criminals.

Yes, Mr. Rich - This is reality. The reality of murder; the reality of willful destruction of not only the Iraqi civilization but the American Constitution.


http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article4173.htm


WE THE PEOPLE .... WILL NEVER FORGET

"... we sent our young people into harm's way without leveling with the American people." - Congresswoman Pelosi before Congress, 16 June 2005

Peace.


www.missionnotaccomplished.us - Impeachment of Bush and Cheney; indictment and prosecution of all members of the Bush regime who participated in the deception, should be campaign promises of any candidate worthy of our vote in the 2006 Congressional elections.

[savannahana]

1. *must read* - truly not to be missed! thanks UL, or

i probably would've missed it!

(can't read fast enough lately)

nominated & :kick:

[understandinglife]

2. Thank you. It is an excellent comparison and analysis.

Peace.


www.missionnotaccomplished.us - Stop the atrocities; indict and prosecute Bu$h and all the other neoconster war criminals.

[faithnotgreed]

3. thank you frank rich