Jeff Koopersmith

Blurred and Schizophrenic
The Washington Post blasts the Administration's lies -- but continues to bash Al Gore
by Jeff Koopersmith

August 15, 2002 -- NEW YORK (apj.us) -- I attempted to check my nausea while reading Sunday's lead editorial opinion in the Washington Post, "Mr. Gore's Blurred View" -- inasmuch as I had, just beforehand, finished reading the Post's brilliant and well-organized piece by Walter Pincus and Barton Gellman in the same issue: "Iraq's Nuclear File." Pincus and Gellman had powerfully laid out each and every perjury told to us by the President, Secretaries Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Powell, and even National Security Advisor Rice -- in stunning and colorful clarity.

Yet one is forced to ask the question, "Do the senior editors of the Post bother to read their own best reporters?"

Here the editors were again fretting over Al Gore's potential to "lead the Democratic Party in a dangerous direction" that will lead them "off the cliff" for questioning our President's motives and veracity surrounding Iraq.

Why? Because Mr. Gore, largely agreeing with several of their best reporters and most everyone else, believes that President Bush and his cabal of ill-advisors lied straight-faced to the American people -- knowingly lied, although few have the gumption to say the "lie" word, including the former Vice President.

The Post somehow seems to believe that it and the American people were not "bamboozled" into war with Iraq -- yet myriad stories, researched and written by its best reporters, seem to demonstrate that we were.

Lifting old quotes from Al Gore and Senator Richard Durbin decrying Saddam begs the point of Mr. Gore's speech in New York, and one wonders whether the Post is defending its own lack of timely incredulity at the White House's preposterous fabrications based on "handy" half-truth leading up to the Iraq war.

Yet the Washington Post, better than most papers of record, understands full well that Democrat and Republican leaders were not only deceived but steamrolled under the threat of being labeled "un-American" by nationalistic Administration hawks.

With the concerted and almost unanimous help of the neoconservative-controlled media -- all beating the tom-toms of war in hope of increased viewership and ad revenues -- President Bush and his minions made certain there would be no room to make, as you say, "a cogent case" against the war.

In fact, any elected official who "dared" speak up against an Iraq attack was summarily dismissed by the right as a near traitor.

You know it, and I know it.

Mr. Gore did not portray, as The Post suggests, "everyone else as poor saps duped by wizardly Bush propaganda."

In fact, we have endured far worse than hoodwink. Americans and our elected officials have been bullied, railroaded, browbeaten, coerced, intimidated and dragooned by a band of hooligans in the White House with able help from the mainstream media, including the Post, who did not do and continue not to do their jobs -- protecting the American people from the very propaganda it suggests does not exist.

There is nothing "wizardly" about propaganda. It is a almost a science, the power of which was most unbearably demonstrated in modern times by Adolf Hitler and his henchmen when addressing "The Jewish Question."

A lie is a lie. Propaganda is one cunning method to make lies appear as truth. This is what the White House pulled off. It was up to them to be honest, to make the case against Saddam with truth. They failed, and now they continue to stack lie upon lie even as their pies in the sky are exposed, one by one, day by day.

It is not Mr. Gore who lied in 1998 saying that Saddam was evil and it is not Mr. Gore who lies today suggesting that President Bush has some explaining to do.

It is also not Mr. Gore who has sent nearly three hundred young, beautiful, eager, brave, and patriotic men and women to their parched and lonely deaths based on what seems largely hocus-pocus and lately fallback positions and "restatements of fact" now convenient to rebut the ever-seeping specifics that confound them, and that will eventually expose the truth and drown this Administration in its own guile.

JEFF KOOPERSMITH is a political consultant, opinion research authority, policy analyst, and self-described "renegade lobbyist."