CommonPrejudice

Must See TV

Tonight Bill Moyers.

This, btw, is WPo's Style (?) columinst Tom Shales commenting:

It's always depressing to learn that you've been had, but incalculably more so when the deception has resulted in thousands of Americans dying in the Iraq war effort.

Maybe it's just me, but my first reaction would be - if I hadn't lived in a bubble and didn't know this four years ago - that it would "incalculably more depressing" to consider the hundreds of thousands of innocent, dead Iraqis. But as I say, that's just me.

Update:

Digby on Bush's press conference before the war:

A whole bunch of America sat there watching these sycophantic performances with our jaws agape, wondering if we had lost our minds. Bush was barely articulate, as usual, mouthing the worst kind of puerile platitudes (when he was coherent at all) while the press corps slavered over him as if he were Cicero. Bush, the clearly in-over-his-head man-child was molded into a hero and cheered by the media as he led this country into the dark, morass of an illegal war in the middle east. It was the most disorienting thing I've ever experienced in my life.

Of course, this isn't a new problem.

Thomas Jefferson:

The most effectual engines for [pacifying a nation] are the public papers... [A despotic] government always [keeps] a kind of standing army of newswriters who, without any regard to truth or to what should be like truth, [invent] and put into the papers whatever might serve the ministers. This suffices with the mass of the people who have no means of distinguishing the false from the true paragraphs of a newspaper.

Mark Twain:

It is far better that you fear the media, for they will steal your HONOR. That awful power, the public opinion of a nation, is created in America by a horde of ignorant, self-complacent simpletons who failed at ditching and shoemaking and fetched up in journalism on their way to the poorhouse.

A horde of ignorant, self-complacent simpletons ... no kidding.

The Stupidest Argument in the History of Time

Glen Greenwald said:

Although it is a heated competition, I think the single dumbest and most intellectually dishonest rhetorical tactic -- wielded most prominently by Drudge but with plenty of followers doing the same -- is from those who cite cold weather conditions on a given day in order to impliedly discredit the worldwide consensus of climatologists and other scientists on global warming. It would be as if someone constantly linked to individual obituaries as proof that world population is not really growing. It is that dumb and dishonest.

I profoundly disagree. It's far dumber than that.