TOLEDO BLADE: Truth is, Team Bush may never come clean

Truth is, Team Bush may never come clean

http://toledoblade.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20041210/COLUMNIST13/412100318/-1/NEWS18

Marilou Johanek

Friday, December 10, 2004

DURING the recent presidential election, I saw a bumper sticker that
read, "Truth, for a change." Forget who the message was endorsing and
ponder its refreshing naivet when applied to the news of the day. The
sentiment is wonderfully refreshing on one hand. Imagine, for example,
the truth being spilled by the Putin regime about what really went
down in the Ukrainian election and what really happened to physically
deplete and disfigure opposition leader Viktor Yushchenko in the
months before the balloting was blatantly rigged.

Imagine truth for a change about the war in Iraq from the Bush regime.
The administration has never been straight with the American people
about the whole messy affair from why the United States had to invade
the country to why it can't extricate itself sooner than much later.
The strategy is to actively ignore the mounting bad news on Iraq from
expert intelligence, military, and political eyewitnesses and hope it
will all just go away.

(snip)

In Ohio the highly partisan and blindly ambitious Ken Blackwell, who
co-chaired the Bush-Cheney Ohio campaign while simultaneously
presiding as the state's chief elections officer, deserves his own
personal truth squad. The secretary of state says the final Ohio vote
that put the Republican ticket over the top by a slimmer lead than
tallied on election night is legit. But the Kerry campaign and a
number of third-party candidates want to verify it for themselves with
a statewide recount after reports of numerous Election Day problems in
Ohio - and can you blame them?

Honest to God answers on war and peace and election outcomes would be
quite the switch from the circuitous semantics that too often clutter
the plain truth. In the old days we could count on the media to lay
bare the truth for all to see no matter how much it afflicted the
comfortable. It was the media one could rely on for just the facts,
ma'am. But now there's FOX News, which never lets a fact get in the
way of its partisan diatribe, followed by a majority of news
organizations too timid to practice journalism or step out of
corporate bounds.

Fact is the malleable media and the newsmakers they purport to cover
can't handle the truth because it comes with too many strings
attached. So the public lives with half truths or outright lies and
imagines a time when reality will reign supreme again - for a change.


CONTACT INFO: letters@theblade.com

Northwest Ohio to print something negative about Bushco is amazing. Most of the hack papers where I grew up (Kenton Times & Lima News) can only repeat the bushco mantra word for word as the absolute truth.