The President and the pressmen.
taranaki
10-27-2003, 03:38 PM
It seems like Vietnam all over again
By FRANK RICH
THE NEW YORK TIMES
IN HIS now legendary interview last month with Mr Brit Hume of Fox News, United States President George W. Bush explained he doesn't get his news from the news media - not even Fox.
'The best way to get the news is from objective sources,' the President said, laying down his utopian curriculum for Journalism 101. 'And the most objective sources I have are people on my staff who tell me what's happening in the world.'
Those sources? National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and Chief of Staff Andrew Card.
Helpfully dispensing with the 'We Report' half of his network's slogan, Mr Hume didn't ask the obvious follow-up question: What about us poor benighted souls who don't have these crack newscasters at our beck and call?
The answer came soon enough anyway. The White House made Ms Rice's Newshour available to all Americans by dispatching her to Oprah.
'No camera crews have ever been granted this much access to this national security adviser,' talk-show host Oprah Winfrey told her audience as she greeted her guest.
A major scoop was not far behind. Is there anything you can tell us about the President that would surprise us, Ms Winfrey asked. Yes, Ms Rice said, Mr Bush is a very fast eater. 'If you're not careful,' she continued, 'he'll be on dessert and you're still eating the salad.'
That's the way it was, Oct 17, 2003.
This is objective journalism as this administration likes it, all right - news you can't use. Until recently, the administration often got what it wanted, especially on television, and not just on afternoon talk shows.
From 9/11 to the fall of Saddam Hussein, the obsequiousness became so thick that even Mr Terry Moran, the ABC News White House correspondent, said his colleagues looked 'like zombies' during the notorious pre-shock-and-awe Bush news conference of March 6.
That was the one Mr Bush himself called 'scripted'. The script included eight different instances in which he implied Saddam had something to do with 9/11, all of them left unchallenged by the dozens of reporters at hand.
Six months later, the audience is restless. The mission is not accomplished. The casualty list cannot be censored. The White House has told too many whoppers, the elucidation of which has become a cottage industry laying siege to the bestseller list.
THE POWER OF TELEVISION
VANITY Fair, which once ran triumphalist photos of the administration by Annie Leibovitz, now looks at this White House and sees Teapot Dome. The Washington Post, which killed a week of Boondocks comic strips mocking Ms Rice a few days before her Oprah appearance, relented and ran one anyway last weekend on its letters page, beside the protests of its readers.
Print, even glossy print, is one thing, TV another. Like it or not, news doesn't register in our culture unless it happens on TV.
It wasn't until the relatively tardy date of March 9, 1954, when newsman Edward Murrow took on Mr Joseph McCarthy on CBS' See It Now, that the junior senator from Wisconsin hit the skids. Mr Sam Ervin's televised Watergate hearings reached a vast audience that couldn't yet identify the pre-Robert-Redford-and-Dustin-Hoffman Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. Voters didn't turn against our Vietnam adventure en masse until it became, in Michael Arlen's undying phrase, the Living Room War.
However spurious any analogy between the two wars themselves may be, you can tell the administration itself now fears Iraq is becoming a Vietnam by the way it has started to fear TV news.
When an ABC News reporter, Mr Jeffrey Kofman, did the most stinging major network report on unhappiness among American troops last summer, Internet columnist Matt Drudge announced on his website Mr Kofman was gay and, more scandalously, Canadian - information he said had been provided to him by a White House staffer.
This month, as bad news from Iraq proliferated, Mr Bush pulled the old Nixon stunt of trying to 'go over the heads of the filter and speak directly to the people' about the light at the end of the tunnel. In this case, 'the people' meant the anchors of regional TV companies like Tribune Broadcasting, Belo and Hearst-Argyle.
Last Sunday, after those eight-minute regional Bush interviews were broadcast, Mr Dana Milbank, the Washington Post's White House reporter, said on CNN's Reliable Sources the local anchors 'were asking tougher questions than we were'.
I want to believe Mr Milbank was just being polite, because if he's right, the bar for covering this White House has fallen below sea level. The local anchors rarely followed up any more than Mr Hume did. They produced less news than Oprah.
Will countries like France, Russia and Germany provide troops for Iraq, one of them asked Mr Bush. 'You need to ask them,' was the reply.
When an administration is hiding in a no-news bunker, how do you find the news? The first place to look, we're starting to learn, is any TV news show on which Ms Rice, Mr Card, Vice-President Dick Cheney, Secretary of State Colin Powell and Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld are not appearing.
If they're before a camera, you can assume the White House has deemed the venue a safe one - a spin zone, if you will. They will proceed to obfuscate or dissemble at will, whether they're talking to Ms Winfrey, local anchors or a Sunday morning network chat-show host.
A TV news venue the administration spurns entirely, by contrast, stands a chance of providing actual, fresh, accurate information. There have been at least two riveting examples this month.
Ms Rice, Mr Powell and Mr Rumsfeld all refused to be interviewed for an Oct 9 PBS Frontline documentary about the walk-up to the Iraq war.
Yet without their assistance, Frontline fingered Iraqi Governing Council president Ahmad Chalabi as an administration source for its pre-war disinformation about weapons of mass destruction and the Al-Qaeda-Saddam link. It also reported the administration had largely ignored its own State Department's prescient 'Future of Iraq' project - a decision that helped lead to our catastrophic ill-preparedness for Iraq's post-Saddam chaos.
Frontline didn't have to resort to leaks for these revelations, either: The sources were on-camera interviews with Lieutenant-General Jay Garner, the first interim leader in Iraq, and Mr Ahmad himself.
The administration officials who snubbed Frontline habitually do the same to ABC's Nightline. ABC veteran anchor Ted Koppel explained why in a round-table discussion published in a new book from the Brookings Institution Press, The Media And The War On Terrorism: 'They would much rather appear on a programme on which they're likely not to get a tough cross-examination.'
On Oct 15, the week after the Frontline expose, the White House was true to form when asked to provide a guest for a Nightline show exploring the President's new anti-media media campaign. But later in the day, the administration decided to send a non-marquee name, Mr Dan Bartlett, its communications director.
Mr Koppel, practising the increasingly lost art of relentless follow-up questioning, all but got his guest stuttering as he called him on half-truth after half-truth.
Mr Bartlett tried - but failed - to get away with defending a litany of pre-war administration claims and insinuations: that the entire US contribution to rebuilding Iraq would be only US$1.7 billion (S$2.96 billion), that Iraqi oil income would pay for most of the reconstruction, and that the entire war would proceed as quickly as a cakewalk.
YOU CAN'T CONTROL THE NEWS
IT'S at times like these that we must be grateful Disney didn't succeed in jettisoning Nightline for David Letterman.
If the Oct 15 Nightline wasn't an Edward Murrow turning point in the coverage of the war on terrorism, it's the closest we've seen to one since 9/11. There will be others, because this administration doesn't realise trying to control the news is always a loser.
Most of the press was as slow to challenge Mr McCarthy, the Robert McNamara Pentagon and the Nixon administration as it has been to challenge the wartime Bush White House. But in America, at least, history always catches up with those who try to falsify it in real time. That's what former presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon both learnt the hard way.
Even as Mr Bush was using a regional anchor to tell 'the people' congressional delegations were visiting Iraq and would come back with happy progress reports, Fox News and Newsweek told us these delegations were spending their nights in the safety of Kuwait, not Iraq.
Even as identical, upbeat form letters from American soldiers mysteriously turned up in newspapers across the US, Stars And Stripes, the Pentagon-financed armed forces newspaper, reported half the troops it polled had low morale. 'Some troops even go so far as to say they've been ordered not to talk to VIPs because leaders are afraid of what they might say,' observed Stars And Stripes' Mr Jon Anderson in a Koppel-style interview with the commander, Lieutenant-General Ricardo Sanchez.
This week, the Washington Post's Mr Milbank reported the administration has shut off TV images of dead American soldiers too, by enforcing a ban on 'news coverage and photography' of their flag-draped coffins returning to US military bases.
In-bed embeds are yesterday's news. It's only a matter of time before more dissenting troops talk to a reporter with a camera - and in TV news, time moves faster now, via satellite phones, than it did in the era when a network report had to wait for the processing of film or the shipping of video.
At the tender age of six months, the war in Iraq is not remotely a Vietnam. But from the way the administration tries to manage the news against all reality, you can only wonder if it may yet persuade the audience at home that we're mired in another Tet after all.
By FRANK RICH
THE NEW YORK TIMES
IN HIS now legendary interview last month with Mr Brit Hume of Fox News, United States President George W. Bush explained he doesn't get his news from the news media - not even Fox.
'The best way to get the news is from objective sources,' the President said, laying down his utopian curriculum for Journalism 101. 'And the most objective sources I have are people on my staff who tell me what's happening in the world.'
Those sources? National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and Chief of Staff Andrew Card.
Helpfully dispensing with the 'We Report' half of his network's slogan, Mr Hume didn't ask the obvious follow-up question: What about us poor benighted souls who don't have these crack newscasters at our beck and call?
The answer came soon enough anyway. The White House made Ms Rice's Newshour available to all Americans by dispatching her to Oprah.
'No camera crews have ever been granted this much access to this national security adviser,' talk-show host Oprah Winfrey told her audience as she greeted her guest.
A major scoop was not far behind. Is there anything you can tell us about the President that would surprise us, Ms Winfrey asked. Yes, Ms Rice said, Mr Bush is a very fast eater. 'If you're not careful,' she continued, 'he'll be on dessert and you're still eating the salad.'
That's the way it was, Oct 17, 2003.
This is objective journalism as this administration likes it, all right - news you can't use. Until recently, the administration often got what it wanted, especially on television, and not just on afternoon talk shows.
From 9/11 to the fall of Saddam Hussein, the obsequiousness became so thick that even Mr Terry Moran, the ABC News White House correspondent, said his colleagues looked 'like zombies' during the notorious pre-shock-and-awe Bush news conference of March 6.
That was the one Mr Bush himself called 'scripted'. The script included eight different instances in which he implied Saddam had something to do with 9/11, all of them left unchallenged by the dozens of reporters at hand.
Six months later, the audience is restless. The mission is not accomplished. The casualty list cannot be censored. The White House has told too many whoppers, the elucidation of which has become a cottage industry laying siege to the bestseller list.
THE POWER OF TELEVISION
VANITY Fair, which once ran triumphalist photos of the administration by Annie Leibovitz, now looks at this White House and sees Teapot Dome. The Washington Post, which killed a week of Boondocks comic strips mocking Ms Rice a few days before her Oprah appearance, relented and ran one anyway last weekend on its letters page, beside the protests of its readers.
Print, even glossy print, is one thing, TV another. Like it or not, news doesn't register in our culture unless it happens on TV.
It wasn't until the relatively tardy date of March 9, 1954, when newsman Edward Murrow took on Mr Joseph McCarthy on CBS' See It Now, that the junior senator from Wisconsin hit the skids. Mr Sam Ervin's televised Watergate hearings reached a vast audience that couldn't yet identify the pre-Robert-Redford-and-Dustin-Hoffman Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. Voters didn't turn against our Vietnam adventure en masse until it became, in Michael Arlen's undying phrase, the Living Room War.
However spurious any analogy between the two wars themselves may be, you can tell the administration itself now fears Iraq is becoming a Vietnam by the way it has started to fear TV news.
When an ABC News reporter, Mr Jeffrey Kofman, did the most stinging major network report on unhappiness among American troops last summer, Internet columnist Matt Drudge announced on his website Mr Kofman was gay and, more scandalously, Canadian - information he said had been provided to him by a White House staffer.
This month, as bad news from Iraq proliferated, Mr Bush pulled the old Nixon stunt of trying to 'go over the heads of the filter and speak directly to the people' about the light at the end of the tunnel. In this case, 'the people' meant the anchors of regional TV companies like Tribune Broadcasting, Belo and Hearst-Argyle.
Last Sunday, after those eight-minute regional Bush interviews were broadcast, Mr Dana Milbank, the Washington Post's White House reporter, said on CNN's Reliable Sources the local anchors 'were asking tougher questions than we were'.
I want to believe Mr Milbank was just being polite, because if he's right, the bar for covering this White House has fallen below sea level. The local anchors rarely followed up any more than Mr Hume did. They produced less news than Oprah.
Will countries like France, Russia and Germany provide troops for Iraq, one of them asked Mr Bush. 'You need to ask them,' was the reply.
When an administration is hiding in a no-news bunker, how do you find the news? The first place to look, we're starting to learn, is any TV news show on which Ms Rice, Mr Card, Vice-President Dick Cheney, Secretary of State Colin Powell and Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld are not appearing.
If they're before a camera, you can assume the White House has deemed the venue a safe one - a spin zone, if you will. They will proceed to obfuscate or dissemble at will, whether they're talking to Ms Winfrey, local anchors or a Sunday morning network chat-show host.
A TV news venue the administration spurns entirely, by contrast, stands a chance of providing actual, fresh, accurate information. There have been at least two riveting examples this month.
Ms Rice, Mr Powell and Mr Rumsfeld all refused to be interviewed for an Oct 9 PBS Frontline documentary about the walk-up to the Iraq war.
Yet without their assistance, Frontline fingered Iraqi Governing Council president Ahmad Chalabi as an administration source for its pre-war disinformation about weapons of mass destruction and the Al-Qaeda-Saddam link. It also reported the administration had largely ignored its own State Department's prescient 'Future of Iraq' project - a decision that helped lead to our catastrophic ill-preparedness for Iraq's post-Saddam chaos.
Frontline didn't have to resort to leaks for these revelations, either: The sources were on-camera interviews with Lieutenant-General Jay Garner, the first interim leader in Iraq, and Mr Ahmad himself.
The administration officials who snubbed Frontline habitually do the same to ABC's Nightline. ABC veteran anchor Ted Koppel explained why in a round-table discussion published in a new book from the Brookings Institution Press, The Media And The War On Terrorism: 'They would much rather appear on a programme on which they're likely not to get a tough cross-examination.'
On Oct 15, the week after the Frontline expose, the White House was true to form when asked to provide a guest for a Nightline show exploring the President's new anti-media media campaign. But later in the day, the administration decided to send a non-marquee name, Mr Dan Bartlett, its communications director.
Mr Koppel, practising the increasingly lost art of relentless follow-up questioning, all but got his guest stuttering as he called him on half-truth after half-truth.
Mr Bartlett tried - but failed - to get away with defending a litany of pre-war administration claims and insinuations: that the entire US contribution to rebuilding Iraq would be only US$1.7 billion (S$2.96 billion), that Iraqi oil income would pay for most of the reconstruction, and that the entire war would proceed as quickly as a cakewalk.
YOU CAN'T CONTROL THE NEWS
IT'S at times like these that we must be grateful Disney didn't succeed in jettisoning Nightline for David Letterman.
If the Oct 15 Nightline wasn't an Edward Murrow turning point in the coverage of the war on terrorism, it's the closest we've seen to one since 9/11. There will be others, because this administration doesn't realise trying to control the news is always a loser.
Most of the press was as slow to challenge Mr McCarthy, the Robert McNamara Pentagon and the Nixon administration as it has been to challenge the wartime Bush White House. But in America, at least, history always catches up with those who try to falsify it in real time. That's what former presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon both learnt the hard way.
Even as Mr Bush was using a regional anchor to tell 'the people' congressional delegations were visiting Iraq and would come back with happy progress reports, Fox News and Newsweek told us these delegations were spending their nights in the safety of Kuwait, not Iraq.
Even as identical, upbeat form letters from American soldiers mysteriously turned up in newspapers across the US, Stars And Stripes, the Pentagon-financed armed forces newspaper, reported half the troops it polled had low morale. 'Some troops even go so far as to say they've been ordered not to talk to VIPs because leaders are afraid of what they might say,' observed Stars And Stripes' Mr Jon Anderson in a Koppel-style interview with the commander, Lieutenant-General Ricardo Sanchez.
This week, the Washington Post's Mr Milbank reported the administration has shut off TV images of dead American soldiers too, by enforcing a ban on 'news coverage and photography' of their flag-draped coffins returning to US military bases.
In-bed embeds are yesterday's news. It's only a matter of time before more dissenting troops talk to a reporter with a camera - and in TV news, time moves faster now, via satellite phones, than it did in the era when a network report had to wait for the processing of film or the shipping of video.
At the tender age of six months, the war in Iraq is not remotely a Vietnam. But from the way the administration tries to manage the news against all reality, you can only wonder if it may yet persuade the audience at home that we're mired in another Tet after all.
taranaki
10-29-2003, 06:53 AM
No debate on the issue of what the White House allows American citizens to see on their news programs?
"Don't show military funerals,guys,it's bad for morale..."
In times of war,the truth is not just bad for morale,it's bad for political careers.Could this be why George Bush has divorced himself from the real world and is trying so hard to convince everybody that he's actually achieving something?
Here's another little gem,courtesy of the Washington Post...
Bush Says Attacks Are Reflection of U.S. Gains
By Dana Milbank and Thomas E. Ricks
Washington Post Staff Writers
Tuesday, October 28, 2003; Page A01
President Bush yesterday put the best face on a new surge of violence in Iraq as his top defense aides huddled to discuss additional ways of thwarting the anti-American rebellion there before it becomes more widespread.
The president, speaking after attacks on police stations and a Red Cross facility in Iraq killed at least 35 people, said such attacks should be seen as a sign of progress because they show the desperation of those who oppose the U.S.-led occupation.
"The more successful we are on the ground, the more these killers will react," Bush said as he sat in the Oval Office with L. Paul Bremer, the U.S. administrator in Iraq. He added: "The more progress we make on the ground, the more free the Iraqis become, the more electricity is available, the more jobs are available, the more kids that are going to school, the more desperate these killers become, because they can't stand the thought of a free society."
While Bush argued that the latest violence -- attackers also hit the Baghdad hotel where Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz was staying Sunday -- was vindication of the administration's approach, Pentagon officials conferred about how to prevent such attacks from foiling its plan to transfer power to Iraqi police and security forces.
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, meeting with Bremer, and senior military officials including Air Force Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Army Gen. John P. Abizaid, the top U.S. commander for the Middle East, brainstormed about how to stop the attacks on the very institutions that are needed to advance the U.S. occupation force.
The U.S. strategy is to turn over security missions to Iraqi soldiers and police forces as quickly as possible. "We're all doing a lot of thinking about it," said one official involved in the discussions. But, he said, no clear answers have emerged yet. In a sign of the matter's urgency, Rumsfeld scheduled another meeting for today with Abizaid, Myers and Bremer.
The deliberations are taking on increased urgency because U.S. intelligence and military officials are saying U.S. forces in Iraq have a limited time to break the resistance before the general population joins it.
A senior intelligence official told The Washington Post that the United States has a window of three to six months to put down the resistance. Iraqis generally are not aiding or abetting groups believed to be responsible for the violence. But, the official said, the anti-U.S. groups are trying to form a coordinated campaign across Iraq.
If successful, "they would be more effective and harder to prevent," the official said. "They would send a signal to the populace" that they are an alternative to the occupation.
Another senior intelligence official said the United States has not devoted enough attention to understanding the anti-American groups in Iraq because intelligence resources have been devoted to locating weapons of mass destruction. As a result, the intelligence community and the military have little precise information about the resistance. "I am not happy with the kind of information we are getting," the official said.
The military also believes that insurgencies like the one in Iraq coalesce into larger rebellions if allowed to fester. Adding to the need for rapid action, a senior U.S. military official involved in Iraq strategy said yesterday that the Pentagon expects to significantly pare its presence in Iraq when major troop rotations come in February. "The feeling is, get it done while we have the assets available," the official said.
Bush gave no hint of such backroom deliberations as he argued that the recent attacks only demonstrated foes' desperation. It was an amplification of a theme he struck after terrorists attacked the U.N. headquarters in Baghdad on Aug. 19, when he said, "Every sign of progress in Iraq adds to the desperation of the terrorists and the remnants of Saddam's brutal regime."
Democrats reacted with ridicule. Sen. John F. Kerry (Mass.), a presidential candidate, likened Bush's statement to the "light at the end of the tunnel" claims during the Vietnam War. "Does the president really believe that suicide bombers are willing to strap explosives to their bodies because we're restoring electricity and creating jobs for Iraqis?" Kerry asked in a statement.
Bush got a similar reprimand earlier from Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who has supported the president on Iraq. "This is the first time that I have seen a parallel to Vietnam, in terms of information that the administration is putting out versus the actual situation on the ground," he told Newsweek. White House press secretary Scott McClellan defended Bush's assertion, saying: "Our military leaders have said that some of these attacks have become more sophisticated, but what you're really seeing is that the more progress we make, the more desperate these killers become."
"Don't show military funerals,guys,it's bad for morale..."
In times of war,the truth is not just bad for morale,it's bad for political careers.Could this be why George Bush has divorced himself from the real world and is trying so hard to convince everybody that he's actually achieving something?
Here's another little gem,courtesy of the Washington Post...
Bush Says Attacks Are Reflection of U.S. Gains
By Dana Milbank and Thomas E. Ricks
Washington Post Staff Writers
Tuesday, October 28, 2003; Page A01
President Bush yesterday put the best face on a new surge of violence in Iraq as his top defense aides huddled to discuss additional ways of thwarting the anti-American rebellion there before it becomes more widespread.
The president, speaking after attacks on police stations and a Red Cross facility in Iraq killed at least 35 people, said such attacks should be seen as a sign of progress because they show the desperation of those who oppose the U.S.-led occupation.
"The more successful we are on the ground, the more these killers will react," Bush said as he sat in the Oval Office with L. Paul Bremer, the U.S. administrator in Iraq. He added: "The more progress we make on the ground, the more free the Iraqis become, the more electricity is available, the more jobs are available, the more kids that are going to school, the more desperate these killers become, because they can't stand the thought of a free society."
While Bush argued that the latest violence -- attackers also hit the Baghdad hotel where Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz was staying Sunday -- was vindication of the administration's approach, Pentagon officials conferred about how to prevent such attacks from foiling its plan to transfer power to Iraqi police and security forces.
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, meeting with Bremer, and senior military officials including Air Force Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Army Gen. John P. Abizaid, the top U.S. commander for the Middle East, brainstormed about how to stop the attacks on the very institutions that are needed to advance the U.S. occupation force.
The U.S. strategy is to turn over security missions to Iraqi soldiers and police forces as quickly as possible. "We're all doing a lot of thinking about it," said one official involved in the discussions. But, he said, no clear answers have emerged yet. In a sign of the matter's urgency, Rumsfeld scheduled another meeting for today with Abizaid, Myers and Bremer.
The deliberations are taking on increased urgency because U.S. intelligence and military officials are saying U.S. forces in Iraq have a limited time to break the resistance before the general population joins it.
A senior intelligence official told The Washington Post that the United States has a window of three to six months to put down the resistance. Iraqis generally are not aiding or abetting groups believed to be responsible for the violence. But, the official said, the anti-U.S. groups are trying to form a coordinated campaign across Iraq.
If successful, "they would be more effective and harder to prevent," the official said. "They would send a signal to the populace" that they are an alternative to the occupation.
Another senior intelligence official said the United States has not devoted enough attention to understanding the anti-American groups in Iraq because intelligence resources have been devoted to locating weapons of mass destruction. As a result, the intelligence community and the military have little precise information about the resistance. "I am not happy with the kind of information we are getting," the official said.
The military also believes that insurgencies like the one in Iraq coalesce into larger rebellions if allowed to fester. Adding to the need for rapid action, a senior U.S. military official involved in Iraq strategy said yesterday that the Pentagon expects to significantly pare its presence in Iraq when major troop rotations come in February. "The feeling is, get it done while we have the assets available," the official said.
Bush gave no hint of such backroom deliberations as he argued that the recent attacks only demonstrated foes' desperation. It was an amplification of a theme he struck after terrorists attacked the U.N. headquarters in Baghdad on Aug. 19, when he said, "Every sign of progress in Iraq adds to the desperation of the terrorists and the remnants of Saddam's brutal regime."
Democrats reacted with ridicule. Sen. John F. Kerry (Mass.), a presidential candidate, likened Bush's statement to the "light at the end of the tunnel" claims during the Vietnam War. "Does the president really believe that suicide bombers are willing to strap explosives to their bodies because we're restoring electricity and creating jobs for Iraqis?" Kerry asked in a statement.
Bush got a similar reprimand earlier from Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who has supported the president on Iraq. "This is the first time that I have seen a parallel to Vietnam, in terms of information that the administration is putting out versus the actual situation on the ground," he told Newsweek. White House press secretary Scott McClellan defended Bush's assertion, saying: "Our military leaders have said that some of these attacks have become more sophisticated, but what you're really seeing is that the more progress we make, the more desperate these killers become."
freakray
10-29-2003, 08:53 AM
If Bush thinks the increasing attacks in Iraq are a true sign of success, he's far more delusional than I gave him credit for. :disappoin
Doesn't he realise those attacks are happening because they want the USA out of there?
I guess that, since the attacks are terroristic in nature, they are also indicative of how successful the 'War on Terrorism' is right?
The US forces are really getting control of those terrorists.......
Doesn't he realise those attacks are happening because they want the USA out of there?
I guess that, since the attacks are terroristic in nature, they are also indicative of how successful the 'War on Terrorism' is right?
The US forces are really getting control of those terrorists.......
YogsVR4
10-29-2003, 10:08 AM
No debate on the issue of what the White House allows American citizens to see on their news programs?
The White House cannot control what people see on News programs.
The rest is the usual blah-blah-blah :disappoin
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The White House cannot control what people see on News programs.
The rest is the usual blah-blah-blah :disappoin
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taranaki
10-29-2003, 04:04 PM
Not without the cooperation of the press,for certain.But if you want an interview with the President,or access to his news conferences,you'd better play it his way.
Blah,blah,blah?
http://www.scumware.com/images/ostrich.gif
There's plenty of sand for both you and George in Iraq.
Maybe if Good Ole George is so convinced that he's winnig the war,he should pay Iraq a visit,do the open motorcade thing,a few photo ops,etc....
Dont think there are that many grassy knolls in Bagdhad,so he should be safe.
Blah,blah,blah?
http://www.scumware.com/images/ostrich.gif
There's plenty of sand for both you and George in Iraq.
Maybe if Good Ole George is so convinced that he's winnig the war,he should pay Iraq a visit,do the open motorcade thing,a few photo ops,etc....
Dont think there are that many grassy knolls in Bagdhad,so he should be safe.
TexasF355F1
10-29-2003, 05:05 PM
The White House cannot control what people see on News programs.
The rest is the usual blah-blah-blah :disappoin
:iagree: Just the normal people taking there personal sides, so no difference there. On a more humorous side, my roomate just pre-order the George W. Bush action figure. The one in the fighter pilot fatigues. I like GWB and all but I think my roomate goes a little overboard.
The rest is the usual blah-blah-blah :disappoin
:iagree: Just the normal people taking there personal sides, so no difference there. On a more humorous side, my roomate just pre-order the George W. Bush action figure. The one in the fighter pilot fatigues. I like GWB and all but I think my roomate goes a little overboard.
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