America slowly confronts the truth '(The old media dog sniffed the air..)

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/fisk/article330873.ece

> America slowly confronts the truth
>
> The old media dog sniffed the air, found power was moving away from the White House, and began to drool
>
> By Robert Fisk
>
> 12/03/05 "The Independent" -- -- Watching the pathetic, old, lie-on-its-back frightened labrador of the American media changing overnight into a vicious rottweiler is one of the enduring pleasures of society in the United States. I have been experiencing this phenomenon over the past two weeks, as both victim and beneficiary.




........"People seem less afraid now," Clooney told an interviewer in Entertainment magazine. "Lots of people are starting to ask questions. It's becoming hard to avoid the questions." Of course, these questions are being asked because of America's more than 2,000 fatalities in Iraq rather than out of compassion for Iraq's tens of thousands of fatalities. They are being pondered because the whole illegal invasion of Iraq is ending in calamity rather than success.

Yet still they avoid the "Israel" question. The Arab princes in Syriana - who in real life would be obsessed with the occupation of the West Bank - do not murmur a word about Israel. The Arab al-Qa'ida operative who persuades the young Pakistani to attack an oil tanker makes no reference to Israel - as every one of bin Laden's acolytes assuredly would. It was instructive that Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 did not mention Israel once.

So one key issue of the Middle East remains to be confronted. Amy Goodman, whom I used to enrage by claiming that her leftist Democracy Now programme - broadcast from a former Brooklyn fire station - had only three listeners (one of whom was Amy Goodman), is bravely raising this unmentionable subject. Partly as a result, her "alternative" radio and television station - how I hate that prissy word "alternative" - is slowly moving into the mainstream.......

.....In New York and Los Angeles, my condemnation of the American presidency and Israel's continued settlement-building in the West Bank was originally treated with the disdain all great papers reserve for those who dare to question proud and democratic projects of state. In The New York Times, that ancient luminary Ethan Bonner managed to chide me for attacking American journalists who - he furiously quoted my own words - "report in so craven a fashion from the Middle East - so fearful of Israeli criticism that they turn Israeli murder into 'targeted attacks' and illegal settlements into 'Jewish neighbourhoods'."

It was remarkable that Bonner should be so out of touch with his readers that he did not know that "craven" is the very word so many Americans apply to their grovelling newspapers (and quite probably one reason why newspaper circulations are falling so disastrously).

But the moment that a respected Democratic congressman and Vietnam war veteran in Washington dared to suggest that the war in Iraq was lost, that US troops should be brought home now - and when the Republican response was so brutal it had to be disowned - the old media dog sniffed the air, realised that power was moving away from the White House, and began to drool.

On live television in San Francisco, I could continue my critique of America's folly in Iraq uninterrupted. Ex-Mayor Willie Brown - who allowed me to have my picture taken in his brand new pale blue Stetson - exuded warmth towards this pesky Brit (though he claimed on air that I was an American) who tore into his country's policies in the Middle East. It was enough to make you feel the teeniest bit sorry - though only for a millisecond, mark you - for the guy in the White House......

This salvo is ALL ABOUT FISK. He wants to be able to tell people that HE told them so...when it has been obvious to anyone with a brain and a pulse for some time!

In his world, it doesn't count unless HE says it--the putz!