Bush's nose is growing; nobody cares

Bush's nose is growing; nobody cares

ANTONIA ZERBISIAS

It has been exactly one week since the Washington Post ran a page one
story quoting U.S. President George W. Bush as saying that the reason
the U.S., "along with other nations,'' invaded Iraq was because its
brutal vicious dictator would not permit any weapons inspections.

Here is the quote, from Bush's news conference with U.N. secretary
general Kofi Annan, which CNN ran live last Monday. (The italicized
emphasis is mine.)

Asked about those infamous 16 words in his State of the Union Address
about Iraq shopping in Niger for yellowcake uranium, the leader of the
free world replied: "The larger point is and the fundamental question
is, did Saddam Hussein have a weapons program? And the answer is
absolutely. And we gave him a chance to allow the inspectors in, and he
wouldn't let them in. And, therefore, after a reasonable request, we
decided to remove him from power ..."

So yes kids! We were all hallucinating when we watched news footage of
reporters chasing U.N. weapons inspectors around Iraq last winter. Those
were but voices in our collective head when we heard pleas from the
likes of Prime Minister Jean Chrétien and former weapons inspector Scott
Ritter to allow the digging around to continue. And we must have all
swallowed a giant tab of yellowcake when we read the news of U.N.
weapons inspectors scrambling to beat a path out of Baghdad on the eve
of the Shock & Awe bombing campaign.

So ask yourself: How come the commander-in-chief shoots from the lip
once again and nobody is talking about it?

Even one of the journalists who originally reported Bush's explanation,
The Post's Dana Milbank, soft-peddled it in his story co-written a week
ago with Dana Priest.

(Again, the emphasis is mine "The president's assertion that the war
began because Iraq did not admit inspectors appeared to contradict the
events leading up to war this spring: Hussein had, in fact, admitted the
inspectors and Bush had opposed extending their work because he did not
believe them effective."

Appeared? Like, maybe we're not sure? Like the president isn't, oh let's
not put too fine a point on it, lying?

On CNN's media show Reliable Sources on Sunday, Milbank told host Howard
Kurtz: "I think what people basically decided was this is just the
president being the president ... He is under a great deal of pressure."

Now I must say that Milbank is probably the toughest White House
correspondent there is, constantly churning out critical stories that go
against the pro-Bush tide. But when even he says this is "just the
president being the president'' or suggests that the man can't handle
the pressure, it's time to pull the covers over your head.

Meanwhile, most of the right-wing and/or conservative columnists I track
through http://www.townhall.com, The Wall Street Journal and other
sources are curiously silent about Nigergate, or Sixteen Wordsgate, or
whatever phrase it will take to awaken the somnambulating American
majority to the fact that their president led them to war while telling
at least one whopper about Saddam building nukes.

Dozens and dozens of pundits are behaving like nothing is going on, as
if, in the words of the folks at http://www.tompaine.com, they "aren't
acknowledging the elephant in the living room.''

As for the few pro-Bush professional opinionators who do write about it,
they do so only to diss the critics.

"Completely frustrated by their inability to belittle, sneer at or just
plain falsify about the victory of our troops in Iraq, opponents of the
president are now reduced to using bits and pieces of non-evidence to
contend that we did not have to replace the brutal regime of Saddam
Hussein,'' insists Caspar Weinberger, Ronald Reagan's former defence
secretary, in last Friday's Wall Street Journal.

Bush's yellowcake lie is but "a small mistake,'' writes The National
Post's Kelly McParland, who compares the whole affair to the Gary Condit
scandal, just a case of media boredom during the summer news doldrums.

"The Niger uranium flap has achieved the status of midsummer frenzy,"
concurs syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer, adding that Bush's
"blunder opens the way to the broad implication that the president is a
liar or a dissimulator who took the country to war under false pretenses."

Implication? Tell that to the families of the dead.

As http://www.fair.org reports, the "Bush uranium lie'' is the "tip of
the iceberg'' of confabulation. Why aren't the media making more of the
falsehoods? How can Bush get away with saying that Saddam would not
allow the weapons inspections?

Funny thing is, according to the latest poll from the Washington-based
Pew Research Center for People & the Press, more than half of all
Americans — 51 per cent — believe that the U.S. media are liberal, while
70 per cent want a "decidedly pro-American'' tilt to their news.

Looks like the media are delivering.

Talk about gassing your own people