Free Press "Bites" Bush

Cover the children's faces -- the New York Times is on the attack. Er, sort of.

A story in the October 5 Times demonstrates that the Bush Administration knowingly inflated pre-war estimates of post-war Iraqi oil production capabilities.

The Times bites Dick Cheney's hand, for example, in noting that "when Vice President Cheney was asked about Iraq's oil during an appearance before newspaper editors, he cited higher numbers rather than the [Energy Infrastructure Planning Group] task force's more sober findings."

The issue is of some import because the Bush Administration had, prior to the war, assured that "Iraq's oil wealth, not American taxpayers, would cover most of the cost of rebuilding Iraq". Or, in the words of Deputy Secretary Wolfowitz: "We are dealing with a country that can really finance its own reconstruction, and relatively soon."

Now, reality has shewn that it is the American taxpayer, after all, that is having to foot the bill -- and that the Bush Administration was more less aware all along that this would be the case. Scandalous indeed.

Yet the reader will search the piece's nearly 2,000 words in vain for even the slightest questioning of the logic of us obliterating Iraq and then making the Iraqis pay for the pleasure of "rebuilding".

If a mal-content rampages through a proverbial China Shoppe, smashing up all the inventory in sight while killing a goodly number of the employees and releasing asbestos particles (or what have you) into the air, is it anywhere suggested that the Shoppe-owner should pay to clean up after the mal-content's depredations?

Yet this is precisely the logic that the mainstream media accepts without so much as a blink. If one can turn up even a single example of such a "blink" in all of America's mainstream press, this blogger would dearly love to see it.

Posted by Eddie Tews at October 6, 2003 03:41 PM