Operation Hose America

http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/05/21/9102/

Operation Hose America
by John Young


No mulligans for this war president. George Bush says he’s staying off the links so that it not appear that he’s taking lightly the sacrifices of so many.

That doesn’t mean, however, that this White House has given up its No. 1 wartime pastime: misleading us.

To that end, day after day since shortly after 9/11, it has polished up and deployed a bag of big clubs. Shiny and steely, they have lent credibility to policymakers lacking it.

We speak of retired military officers who became as central to telling the war story on TV as reporters themselves — telling Americans that everything was as planned, that the claims leading us to war were right as rain.

These military TV analysts continue to be central to the story, portrayed as they are on TV news as independent voices.

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Little outrage has been summoned about the increasing privatizing of something — war — that once was a joint national endeavor with accountability measures built in. So, too, with the seizure of power by the executive branch and the subservience of the legislature branch.

Maybe it’s all because this executive has been so skilled in attaining the subservience of the “fourth estate,” the messenger.