skippy the bush kangaroo: reality-based study is biased towards reality

Wednesday, January 23, 2008

reality-based study is biased towards reality

upsetting the hardly-ever-right quite a bit is the release of the news that awol lied:

a study by two nonprofit journalism organizations found that president bush and top administration officials issued hundreds of false statements about the national security threat from iraq in the two years following the 2001 terrorist attacks.

the study concluded that the statements "were part of an orchestrated campaign that effectively galvanized public opinion and, in the process, led the nation to war under decidedly false pretenses."

the study was posted tuesday on the web site of the center for public integrity, which worked with the fund for independence in journalism.

the hardly-ever-right wing points out that the center for public integrity is partially funded by the streisand foundation, which makes it suspect. we kid you not.

nowhere in these articles do either news organization bother to inform their reader of the partisan nature of the cpi. besides soros, it gets financing from the streisand foundation, the ford foundation, and the los angeles times foundation.

oh, no! the los angeles times? the ford foundation? barbra streisand???

but it gets better. after the captain dismisses the information because of funding bias, he goes on to point out that all the information was already available:

dafydd at big lizards does a good job of pulling apart the supposed quotes that cpi used to blow some hot air into the limp "bush lied" meme, but even the new york times wasn't impressed:

there is no startling new information in the archive, because all the documents have been published previously.

that's right. the information is suspect because lefty's put it together, and everybody knew it already anyway.

which is it, captain? suspect information because lefty's funded the folks that compiled it, or old information that everyone already knew? is the info invalid because of who signs the paychecks, or is it valid but redundant?

one might think that the premise of one arguement destroys the validity of the other.

or not, we suppose. the hardly-ever-right wing bravely continues to guard against old, sorry, we mean suspectly-funded, information! they must protect the people! the people who need people!

they're the luckiest people in the world!

Labels: aWol, iraq, right hypocrisy

posted by skippy at 9:38 AM |

3 Comments:

Don't forget George Soros. Why, to read the Rightie Blogosmear™ you'd swear that Soros is not only Mephistopheles himself, but personally held the whip while CPI journalists were forced to resurrect "discredited" lies, like the "sixteen words" that have, in Wingnuttia's Magic Ponyland, amazingly become true.

Swiftboating, anyone?

commented by

Hart Wms, 4:05 PM PST

Nobody distrusts Bush more than me, but if he wasn't smart enough to imagine the WMD weren't really there, his false staements weren't actually lies. Even many smart people believed there were WMD.

commented by

David Weisman, 6:01 PM PST

Uhm, please name the smart people who believed there were WMD.

Because I sure as hell didn't. At first I thought there might be. But then the United Nations inspectors went in and found... circa 1920's infrastructure. You can't build WMD without infrastructure, and Iraq's crumbling infrastructure was at USA 1920's level. There was no there there, and all the "smart people" knew this by the end of February 2003 after the U.N. inspectors discovered that Iraq *might* have some desires to some day build WMD but actual WMD? Nope, nosirree. Which of course is why Bush had to invade in March, before the rest of the world figured out a way to stop him.

commented by