OK. This is hilarious. I’ve been nominated for _The Week_ Magazine’s “Media Person of the Year.” Click “here”:http://tinyurl.com/2yfc2 to vote.
What’s silly is that I’m nestled in between Roger Ailes and Ashleigh Banfield. (Hm. Half of that snugglefest wouldn’t be so bad.) What’s sillier is that I’m on a list that includes people such as Jayson Blair (ugh), Howard Dean, Paris Hilton and Jon Stewart.
Amusing.
On a related note, Utne will announce the winners of its 2003 “Independent Press Awards”:http://www.utne.com/uipa tomorrow. I’ve been nominated for the Online Political Reporting. Stiff competition there, though. Wish B2I luck!
Day: December 22, 2003
WMDs still MIA
Well, the great Iraqi WMD Hunt appears to be winding down.
Well, the great Iraqi WMD Hunt of 2003 appears to be winding down. The Associated Press reports:
Weapons-hunters are spending more time on base, intelligence experts have been reassigned to work on the counterinsurgency, and the man leading a search for chemical, biological and nuclear weapons is thinking of bowing out.
The conventional wisdom is that no one in the electorate cares anymore. Saddam’s been caught! “The war’s going great!”:http://gallup.com/poll/releases/pr031219.asp
But they should care, because — and this will come as no surprise, but I have to say it — this war was fought using the American people’s tax money and their sons and daughters. Since March 20, 548 troops from Coalition countries “have died”:http://lunaville.org/warcasualties/Summary.aspx, at the average rate of 1.6 a day.
Citizens should care because they were lied to. There’s really no polite way to say it, but the White House lied about the threat of Saddam’s WMDs to get the American people to support the war. And it worked. Now, $87 billion and almost 550 dead soldiers later, the hunt is almost played out.
“It’s probably time to call it quits,” said Hans Blix, the former chief U.N. weapons inspector, whose teams were given one-third the time the United States has spent looking for weapons.
“The U.S. and the U.K. are so wedded to the idea that the Iraqis were hiding things that they are not willing to explore the possibility that they’re wrong,” Blix said.
If there’s anything good that came out of the campaign of mass deception, I’d like to think that the American people won’t be fooled twice. Perhaps that realization hit Karl Rove, too, and may be another reason Washington and London chose to believe Col. Muammar al-Qadhafi when he said he would give up his WMDs and allow UN inspectors in. Because the White House couldn’t cry wolf twice, Qadhafi is now a man the West can do business with instead of a lyin’, theivin’, treacherous dictator, like Saddam Hussein.
But perhaps my faith in the common sense of the American people is misplaced. I mean, according to a recent Gallup poll, “53 percent of Americans think Saddam Hussein was personally involved in the 9/11 attacks”:http://gallup.com/poll/releases/pr031219.asp, _up_ 10 points from a similar poll take in September.
The American people were lied to — they should be angry. Instead, they’re still willingly believing lies.