Searching for Truth in the Karl Rove Story

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By Danny Schechter, Posted by Rob Kall (about the submitter) Page 2 of 2 page(s)

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Coulter for example blames a tendency by some Democrats of trying to out bush Bush by posturing as more patriotic and concerned with national security than their adversaries. This was the strategy of the hawks in the DLC and Kerry campaign--and it failed.

The mini-skirted marauder Coulter suggests many of them are "driven by that weird obsession liberals have of pretending they are Republicans in order to attack Republicans..."

More importantly, Rich dismisses the false ground that this while debate is being fought on--i.e. on the question of which side is really protecting the identify of CIA undercover agents. He puts it in the political context that most of the media, the partisans and even the investigative bloggers miss.

"This case is about Iraq, not Niger. The real victims are the American people, not the Wilsons. The real culprit is not Rove but the gang that sent American sons and daughters to war on trumped-up grounds and in so doing diverted finite resources, human and otherwise, from fighting the terrorists who attacked us on Sept. 11. That's why the stakes are so high: This scandal is about the unmasking of an ill-conceived war, not the unmasking of a CIA operative who posed for Vanity Fair."

Writing in the Christian Science Monitor, NPR's Daniel Schorr seconds the thought: " Let me remind you that the underlying issue in the Karl Rove controversy is not a leak, but a war and how America was misled into that war."

The Houston Chronicle's Michael Goodwin says we are in another war, a civil war is but of a different kind: "It's a civil war in Washington. The combatants have an eye-for-an-eye mentality. The partisanship is heated and nasty. Republicans versus Democrats? Nah. This one pits the media against the White House."

But actually the media is late to the battle, having served this Administration for so long and so well. And it too is divided if not incapable of really taking on the administration or the war in Iraq which is at the unspoken center of this Modern Peyton Place horror movie starring archetypes: Bob Novak, Judy Miller, Joe Wilson and wife Valerie and now the real evil-doer Karl Rove.

It's a drama in which everyone shtups everyone else but in which no one can or will be satisfied.

Look to James Walcott in Vanity Fair to get at some transcendent truth:

"It is no doubt a reductive fallacy to anthropomorphize the mediato personalize them as an individual with a quick mind, a padded ego, a shallow depth, and a professional case of A.D.D. Yet watching the news, reading the op-ed columns, and snorkeling the Internet, one gets the impression that Mr. Medialet's not kid ourselves, the media are white-middle-aged-male-dominated at the executive levelwould be much happier if Iraq would resolve itself or, better yet, go away ... recede like Afghanistan into the hazy distance, reduced to three column inches on page A18. It's hard for cable-news networks to amp up the umpteenth American soldier killed by a roadside explosive or another bushel of Iraqi recruits blown to scatteration when it's so much juicier chasing the latest "Amber Alert" for an abducted white girl, choppering over a tense hostage standoff,"

Many of us like the arcane details of the Rove drama so much better than Iraq because the story, however confusing, is in the end "all about us." As Greg Palast puts it: "The great poison in the corpus of American journalism is the lust for tidbits of supposedly 'inside' information which is more often than not inside misinformation parading as hot news."

News Dissector Danny Schechter is the blogger-in-chief of Mediachannel.org. His new book "When News Lies" incorporating his film WMD (Weapons of Mass Deception) will be out at summer's end from Select Books. (http://www.wmdthefilm.com)

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