Pollack and O’Hanlon
What Glenn says. In spades, freakin’ spades:
It is difficult to remember a media spectacle to match yesterday’s grand pageant where Ken Pollack and Michael O’Hanlon were paraded across virtually every network and cable news show and radio program and heralded as “war opponents” and “Bush critics” who nonetheless returned from Iraq and were forced by The Truth to admit that we are Winning. For sheer deceit and propaganda, it is difficult to remember something quite this audacious and transparently false.
As was demonstrated yesterday, O’Hanlon and Pollack were among the most voracious cheerleaders for Bush’s invasion and, as the war began to collapse, among its most deceitful defenders. But it goes so far beyond that.
Even through this year, they have remained loyal Bush supporters. They were not only advocates of the war, but cheerleaders for the Surge. They were, and continue to be, on the fringe of pro-war sentiment in this country. And yet all day yesterday, this country’s media loudly hailed them as being exactly the opposite of what they really are. It was 24 hours of unadulterated, amazingly coordinated war propaganda that could not have been any further removed from the truth.
It was shocking enough to see these two jokers represented as “war critics” on the pages of the NY Times (before I even saw Greenwald’s article, by the way). Hearing them identified as such on NPR’s “Morning Edition” was worse, and by the time I heard the BBC repeating the same lie on “The World”, I was ready to scream. It was repeated that evening on “All Things Considered”, and on “Day to Day” where they gave one of the interchangeable fruitcakes a respectful interview as if the subject was sane or even remotely accurate about anything. And yes, I heard it again that evening on the night-time broadcast of “The World.”
As Greenwald points out, especially in the second link, these guys have been cheerleaders for the war since day one. DAY. NUMBER. ONE.
Any time you’re tempted to say, “Brendan, why such kneejerk mistrust of the media?”, remember this post: what we saw yesterday was nothing but a coordinated propaganda effort for Iraq, and a rehabilitation campaign for two “scholars” who should not only be discredited, but run from our midst for crimes against the republic. Neither O’Hanlon nor Pollack is worth a single column inch, unless the article is detailing their public hanging.
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