My second Martini ... reply

martini_2olives said...
I guess it all boils down to we see what we want to see.

Depending on your party affiliation, you either see someone who has at least attempted to take some responsibility or someone who is using PR as a means to avoid responsibility.






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Dear Martini 2 Olives;


You are, of course, partially correct. And it is a good point, thank you for stating it. I often ask myself, "Am I simply looking at the data that supports my view point? Am I missing something because of ideological blinders?"

And, without context, it would seem I'm being churlish or childish. "I don't care if he DOES claim he is responsible! I'm going to hold my breath until he also admits he has made mistakes and resigns!"

But Context and historical actions MUST be taken into consideration. Especially with this president where we HAVE the ability to look at his past behavior.

A number of good hearted people on the left said, "I'm going to give this president the benefit of the doubt on his response to 9/11. He couldn't have known! We weren't in those briefings. He was new to the job!" Then when we found out that there WAS data that said, "OBL determined to attack in US" and that there were multiple times that Condi and Bush KNEW that planes might be used to attack (most notably the G8 conference. I did a whole video with a jazzy spy music sound track about who told them and when they told them.) We found out that what he says and what actually happened were not the same.

Then there was the whole WMD debacle. Forged Yellowcake anyone?
So he and Condi say, Mushroom cloud! And it turns out that info is based on forged data. Data that they knew was discredited. So that is yet another instance where what they say, when looked into, is simply not true. And then, as I pointed out, Rummy's actions on Abu Ghraib, they talk about responsibility but there actions are not what a reasonable person would expect. Now we could get into a discussion of WHAT we should have expected, but to demote only ONE high level person for Abu Ghraib is really a sham.

In the famous words of the president "Fool me once shame on you, fool me twice...you can't be fooled again."

The days of giving them the benefit of the doubt are over.

I see the lies behind the "news" every day. I know how it is created and I know how the spin is developed, spun and placed. Yes people see what they want to see. That is why I will acknowledge bad things done by democrats. But I also know that Rove and the media love to set up false equivalencies so that the media can appear "fair".

I won’t spend a lot of time lashing out at Nagin and others at the local level, if you want to find a place to see them bashed I'm sure there are plenty of places for that.

Do you hear Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity saying, "You know we have to consider that Nagin was overwhelmed and did ask for help."?
No. They feel no obligation to see the other side of the story. I will at least acknowledge it, but maybe even that isn't necessary. Why? Because in this kind of discussion the right just doesn't care to consider the context. To them that would be admitting failure. You want to talk about seeing what you want to see, watch the clip of Hannity arguing with Shepard Smith, "But we have to put this in perspective..." Sean didn't want to see, didn't want to listen because it was practically impossible to see what he wanted to see in the face of images and a devastated man on the ground. But he did anyway.

And if they can scream at the left, “Yeah but you didn't give the president credit for saying ‘I'm responsible’”, they will. They use this tactic directed at the left all the time, yet it is never incumbent on them to do the same.

The fairness doctrine doesn't exist in the broadcast media anymore. The legit media clings to a structure of
"This side says this and then this side says that“ as a way to appear balanced. But if you have:
- multiple, full-time paid spokesperson (Hoover, Heritage, AEI, etc. etc. etc.)
- most of the "experts" on your payroll
- an army of people harassing the media every day for so called "liberal bias"
- bogus extreme cases developed for the express purpose of making less extreme positions seem fine.
It's not a fair game.

Now I don't want to say, "Mark my words!”, because you actually did (which was very nice of you, btw). But based on what we have already seen and based on experience with this administration, I expect to see the same crap in the reconstruction here as in the reconstruction of Iraq.

Watch for:
No-bid contracts
Work going to outsiders instead of the people in the region who could benefit from the jobs.
Lots of unaccountable missing money.
Cost plus contracts where a 3 dollar hammer costs 300 dollars.
Focus on getting oil going before people's lives (we have already seen that with a story about a hospital going with out power for 24 hours so that an oil refinery could get going first)

I even expect some covering up of real environmental data like the EPA did on 9/11. "That air is fine to breathe!” Will become, “That sludge if just fine to play in!"

I think the media might do its job this time, but I'm sure that with each story that they run about corruption, incompetence and still horrific conditions, we will hear from that idiot Hannity, the sexual deviant O'Reilly and the drug addict Limbaugh that we aren't hearing about "The positive stories! All the schools that have been reopened! The families that have been reunited with their loved ones!"

I'm not against some happy stories from the zone, goodness knows we need some, but if you have 900 crappy stories to tell about shit that hasn't been fixed and contractors that are getting contracts because they know the president's college roommate and aren't really qualified for the job, One story about little Mary Sunshine getting a new bike, is just mathematically, percentage-wise wrong.

But Rush and Hannity will demand it because the just don't want to hear any bad news that can be attached to the president or FEMA (unless they can blame "Big Government"). They will talk about “The buses!” (Driven by whom? Evacuated women drivers, who left with there families?) They will repeat discredited info about who did what when. “She never asked for help!” And they will mischaracterize the role of the various agencies are whenever they can (as our very own dear Jim picked up on about FEMA).