Retired Generals on the Take 0

I seldom cast stones at the main stream media, but they have earned this rock.

Most of the stones cast at them are not cast at news reporting, but at opinion columnists. Opinion columnists trade in, natch, opinions, and they have the right to be stupid mistaken (though, damn! I’d love to have a job where I could get paid large sums of money for being consistently, repeatedly, continuously wrong, wrong, wrong, but then I’m neither Tom Friedman nor the CEO of Citibank).

A couple of weeks ago, the New York Times broke the story that many of the persons who posed as “military analysts” for various media outlets were in the pocket of the Pentagon and likely spouting the Bushie line in their “analyses.”

If you wanted more, you pretty much had to listen to NPR or read the left blogosphere.

The story has been pretty much ignored by those media organs implicated in that same story.

Who woulda thunk?

Glenn Greenwald has addressed it in great depth here and here.

ASZ talked about it here.

But in the print and broadcast media? Nada. Zilch. Nil.

The bottom line is that the Bushies pressured persons to lie to the public about what was going on in Iraq and implied that their sources of income would be jeopardized if they did not toe the Republican Party line.

This week, On the Media interviewed one of these analysts who who found his role as Bushie toadie to be–er–uncomfortable. From the website:

As reported in The New York Times last weekend, CNN, MSNBC, NPR and others have turned, again and again, to military analysts – retired members of the armed forces hired by broadcast and cable networks – for their supposed expertise on the war. Only, it turns out, the analysts were often coached by the Pentagon in what the Times said were “hundreds of private briefings.” Among those named was Maj. Robert Bevelacqua, a former Green Beret and Fox News contributor through 2005. Bevelacqua discusses his own role in the march to war.

Visit the website or listen here:

I don’t know about you.

But I am tired of liars running our government and tired of our government suborning perjury–well it’s not perjury unless you are under oath lies.

Lying. It’s a Bushie thing.

(Aside: I didn’t use to give money to Democrats. Then there was Bush.)