Following up on Dennis G’s post on Fred Hiatt’s bizarre movie review, it’s worth revisiting Josh Marshall’s take down of Hiatt’s original coverage of the Plame affair:
The Post also sticks to the up-is-down claim that Wilson’s trip to Niger supported rather than undermined the Niger-uranium claim. That is a viewpoint that can only be maintained if you are willfully ignorant of the backstory to the Niger canard. Wilson’s report didn’t add a lot to what most in the intelligence community already thought about the pretended Niger story. But that was because it tended to confirm the reasons why most in the intelligence community didn’t find the story credible in the first place.
For whatever reason, the Post has chosen to throw in its lot with the flurry of mendacious rhetoric and the white-washed investigations, all of which amount to a grand pen and paper and word game truss barely holding together the body of official lies that is still governing the capital.
They’ve made their deal with power. They should justify it on those grounds rather than choosing to mislead their readers.
There’s not much else to say here, except that this seems to have gone beyond a deal with power now: neocons no longer control our foreign policy and it is not clear why Hiatt deems it necessary to continue to repeat neocon lies. But he does.
In other Kaplan news, Melinda Gates quit the Post board, presumably because she disapproves of the company’s for-profit college scam. Reader D writes in to report on the Post’s current subscription policies: they’re giving the Sunday paper away more or less for free.
Augie
Ahh parody. DougJ makes the joke of the day!
Oh wait, you meant that???
Corner Stone
Why are you writing about this? I want you to write about that!
Mike in NC
Fred’s hoping for some new neocon overlords in 2012 should the GOP take the Senate and/or White House.
Corner Stone
Speaking of blasts from the past.
Far From Driven
Great Pantera album, or Greatest Pantera album?
Discuss.
AhabTRuler
Speaking of giving the Post away for free, like many newspapers and periodicals of late, if you purchase a sub and then cancel or let it lapse, delivery tends to continue for some time afterward. I think the last time I had a sub, the deliveries continued for somewhere upwards of 6 mos to a yr after I canceled and told them to stuff it. I imagine that it boosts overall circ numbers to have papers go out regardless of revenue collected.
Hell, we all know that cover price only exists to cover the distributions costs, not operating costs, although I do note that it now costs $0.75 for a copy of the post, as opposed to $0.35 at the beginning of the decade.
DougJ
@Augie:
They don’t, they are still powerful but less than they were before.
El Cid
You didn’t even need Joe Wilson’s visit to know that the allegation that Iraq would travel to the middle of the Niger desert in order to purchase low grade uranium (of which it already had thousands of tons but not the capacity to make weapons from it) from a French controlled and guarded facility in order to transport it back on some massive aircraft group and/or over land via trucks.
It was absolutely, patently absurd from the beginning. It should have been laughed out of discourse at the beginning, but since our billion dollar news media is filled with disingenuous warmongering hack ass-kissing bosses and editors (and occasionally reporters who actually fabricate stories, I mean, unquestioningly and unsupportedly report the official sources they like), it was treated as a deadly serious threat.
arguingwithsignposts
I thought of this for Dennis G.’s thread, but it still seems appropriate: Yellow cake!
Corner Stone
Can we get a college football open thread? The uni’s on Oregon State look like something out of Frank Miller’s Sin City.
AhabTRuler
OTOH, Toles captures perfectly my feelings about the whole Rangel censure issue.
WyldPirate
I don’t think it is necessarily that Hiatt thinks it’s necessary to repeat the neocon lies. instead, he’s just filling in a portion of the Inside the Beltway Narrative coloring book.
This at No More Mister Nice Blog sums it up pretty well. (h/t S. Benan at Washington Monthly):
As Steve M. at points outin this other really good post at No More Mister Nice Blog, it’s all just a little lovely narrative that the Inside the Beltway crowd—including all Dems— has all bought into. It’s sickeningly Pavlovian, out of touch and damaging to the rest of the country.
Corner Stone
@Corner Stone: Oregon is killing the Beavers. Currently.
Sit down son!
MikeJ
The yellow cake is a lie.
Corner Stone
@Corner Stone: Ok. I’m going to go with Greatest.
Corner Stone
@MikeJ: How did I miss that softball?
Nicely done.
Paris
Is the Post subsidized by a religious cult of personality too, also?
arguingwithsignposts
OT, but the latest lady smudge. She’s chillaxin in her drawer.
Delia
@Corner Stone:
Phil Knight went and bought himself some football team, didn’t he?
On the other topic, I’m holding out for when Kaplan finds out that we won the Vietnam War.
Maude
@arguingwithsignposts:
What a beauty. She stands out against the colors.
Keith G
As expected (from the Times):
JGabriel
DougJ:
You just answered your own question there.
Hiatt, and WaPo in general, deems it necessary to continue supporting the neocon/GOP agenda because Obama and most Democrats oppose the type of for-profit “higher education” scam that is WaPo’s only source of profit.
.
eemom
you go, girl.
tee hee. they send me bills I don’t pay, and still the rag lands in my driveway each morning.
I confess though, I keep resisting eedad’s exhortations to woman-up and cancel the thing.
Cuz I been getting the damn thing delivered since I moved to DC in 1987, back when it wasn’t a piece of shit…….hell, back when the entire dystopia that is 21st century america was as yet unthinkable.
So I guess it’s kind of like being unable to sign the final divorce papers, even though the marriage is long gone and you’re living on separate continents.
eemom
@Keith G:
huh?? what fucking “triumph”??
This game is far from over, as we’ve been discussing on the “ice queen” thread.
They ain’t triumphed worth a shit unless and until they get what they want for their fat-ass whoremasters.
Chuck Butcher
If I could make sense out of what has happened to the WaPo I could probably make a shit load of money fixing it. That would seem a general statement. It seems the disintigration of the paper’s quality and its revenue flow all happened at about the same time and in a particular political environment. I’d say a conspiracy of events with a bit of revenge for Watergate? You could laugh at such an idea, but memories are long and a lot of players are still players. It doesn’t pay to forget that WaPo played a big role in the only Presidential resignation and a GOP President and who exactly the GOP represents.
Keith G
@eemom: Well, “Their” whoremasters remain both fat-ass and masters of whores because they have a way of getting their needs met rather nicely.
I do not see a person ’round these parts equipped to serve them up some disappointment. But, I’m always welcome to surprises.
Tom M
Wilson’s trip to Niger supported rather than undermined the Niger-uranium claim. That is a viewpoint that can only be maintained if you are willfully ignorant of the backstory to the Niger canard.
Or, that could be what the SSCI report said. From Bob Somerby (7/20/04) quoting from the Senate report:
SENATE INTELLIGENCE REPORT (page 73): Conclusion 13: The report on the former ambassador’s trip to Niger, disseminated in March 2002, did not change any analysts’ assessments of the Iraq-Niger uranium deal. For most analysts, the information in the report lent more credibility to the original Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) reports on the uranium deal, but State Department analysts believed that the report supported their assessment that Niger was unlikely to be willing or able to sell uranium to Iraq.
I understand how many people think Wilson a hero, but he’s got mud all over his shoes.
eemom
@Keith G:
please see my “prosthetic spine” theory on the “ice” thread.
Keith G
@eemom: Your point is well taken. After 3 years of hope, my default setting has been fixed to pessimism.
Don
That’s my article about the subscription cost. It’s not just the Sunday, it’s the whole paper. Their “oh please don’t leave us” price on all 7 days averages out to under $0.15 a paper – I just rejected it because I can’t subject myself to the disappointment on a daily basis.
I have to think it’s an effort to keep their numbers of paying subscribers up, a key metric for ad sales, but I can’t imagine advertisers aren’t wise to this. Around 20-30 years ago the papers had to own up to how much of their circulation was freebies. How long till they have to admit what percentage is paying regular subscription price?
Tim in SF
RE Melinda Gates leaving over the college scam, that’s a real issue.
One of my web-design clients is http://protectstudentsandtaxpayers.org/ which is trying to organize to fight against the Kaplan (and other) scam artists who rip off students every year.
Augie
Please @DougJ, name me a recent example of American foreign policy action/behavior that is not supported by neo-cons. Honestly, just one. The only difference between Clinton/Obama foreign policy and Bush/Cheney foreign policy is the height and safety regulations on the naked torture pyramid.
Steve Finlay
As a Kaplan Test Prep teacher, I occasionally defended Kaplan in comments here. But as of the end of January, I’ll be an ex-Kaplan teacher: I gave my notice two weeks ago.
The test prep wing of the company announced some drastic changes in September, which included firing the entire management team in our centre. The changes all looked bad from the viewpoint of providing good test prep training (which isn’t higher education). But I thought I would try to work with them.
Then the regional academic manager decided that it was better to deprive a student (who paid $1200 for the course) of a properly supervised practice test than to pay another teacher ten extra bucks to start an hour early.
That told me all that I needed to know. I don’t think Stanley would have put the ten bucks ahead of the student. Fortunately for him, he’s no longer with us.
eemom
@Steve Finlay:
passed away just within the last year, didn’t he? IIRC he seemed like a decent person, from what the obits said.
Perhaps he and poor Katherine Graham, weary of spinning in their graves, are comforting each other in the afterlife.
DougJ
@Steve Finlay:
Assholes.
Steve Finlay
Yes, those are the actions of assholes. I’m becoming more convinced, however, that many of these asshole actions don’t happen because the people are inherently assholes. It appears likely that they happen because large companies inherently have certain environments and incentives which motivate asshole actions.
John deLorean argued for this explanation in On a Clear Day You Can See General Motors. I see evidence for it frequently at the office. I’m still researching.