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Pakistani president Gen. Pervez Musharraf is now teetering on the edge of the abyss, just as I predicted in the spring of 2007. He was pushed there by U.S. policy, and worse yet, his country is armed with nukes.
To prevent the Pakistani Supreme Court from declaring him ineligible to serve another term as president, a role he won last month in dubious elections, the autocratic Musharraf has declared martial law and ousted the Supreme Court’s chief justice.
So, George W. Bush sees himself as the great defender of the U.S. Constitution.
In a Nov. 15 speech to the right-wing Federalist Society, the President embraced the Constitution’s checks and balances as a vital protection against tyranny. And he demanded that federal judges act as fair referees, not political or ideological partisans.
The man who flew the plane that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima passed away last week at the age of 92.
Paul Warfield Tibbets, Jr. did not die from war wounds or violently at the hands of other people, years before his time. He died in hospice care, in a bed, from heart problems and strokes.
During Campaign 2000, conservative groups were given wide leeway in smearing Democratic candidate Al Gore without being called to account, even when the Vice President was falsely portrayed as a traitor.
For instance, in the weeks before Election 2000, Aretino Industries, a pro-Republican group from Texas, ran an emotional ad modeled after Lyndon Johnson’s infamous 1964 commercial that showed a girl picking a daisy before the screen dissolved into a nuclear explosion.
The rain pelted down in icy-cold droplets, chilling both the protesters in soaked parkas and the well-dressed celebrants bent behind umbrellas to shield their furs and cashmere overcoats.
Drawn to this historic moment – a time of triumph for some and fury for others – the two opposing groups jostled and pushed their way through security checkpoints, joining the tens of thousands pressing against rows of riot police lining Pennsylvania Avenue.
After three decades as a Washington journalist, one lesson stands out almost above all others: false narratives get good people killed and, perhaps even worse, could sound the death knell for the great experiment known as the American Republic.
In trying to understand what’s gone wrong with the U.S. political system over those three decades, I have come to view the core problem as the use of mass media to inject Americans with a synthetic reality that misrepresents recent history, exaggerates external dangers and ridicules the few citizens who object.
Editor’s Note: Six years ago on another Veterans Day holiday, eight news organizations published the findings of their unofficial recount of Florida’s disputed ballots. The recount had discovered that Al Gore would have won the decisive Florida election if all legally cast votes were counted.
However, just two months after the 9/11 attacks, the news organizations chose to conceal the obvious “Gore Won” lead, apparently putting their sense of “patriotism” over journalistic professionalism.
Read on.
