Washington Post: Stupidity Got Us Into This Mess Stupidity will get us out.

This editorial is a festival of weasel words - an attempt to be on all sides of an issue about which there are two sides: you are with George Bush and his policy of invading Iraq as the means to fix America's economic problems and establish a permanent Republican Party State, or you are against them. Bush has shown that he will take any grant of power, and use it as he sees fit. Iraq is simply one example, the use of a PATRIOT Act provision to fire attorney's who were not partisan enough is another good example. The Washington Post editorial rationalizes, lies, engages in logical fallacies and has, as its premise, the undemocratic assumption that elites, now matter how badly the lie, cheat, steal, bungle or just out right fuck up - are supposed to be in charge, and the question is how to pass the ruin on to others. This is an attitude that leads to the collapse of a powerful nation, and eventually to revolution, of the violent kind. Either the ordinary people of a country are so spineless and stupid as to march over the cliff - or they rebel and slaughter the elites that they blame for what happen. History has shown the revolutions often target the wrong people as much as the right ones.

If these seem like strong statements, they are complete supported by a reading of the text at hand. The first assertion that the Post makes is that four years is an appropriate time to take stock. No, not in war and politics. The time to take stock was after the elections, when power was fluid. Bush, isntead, grabbed the moment by going double or nothing on an already bad bet. While the Post is pretending that there is some discussion to be had with Bush, Bush is already proving that either he is forcibly stopped from doing what he wants, or he does what he wants.

The second assertion the Post makes is a logical fallacy - it asserts that not doing what Bush wanted would have meant "leaving Saddam in power". For a paper that pleads that "we can't know", it then procedes to assert that it knows, with absolute certainty, that Saddam would have remained in power if we had not gone to war when, where and how Bush wanted. There are several logical blunders here.

The first is equivocation. It demands of critics of the war that they have oracular powers to criticize the war - that is, knowing beyond a shadow of an insane person's doubts that Iraq will turn out badly - while, at the same time, asserting as absolute truth "Saddam would be left in power" an outcome from one of a host of different paths which are far less certain than the outcome of Iraq.

The Post then compounds a lie, a logical fallacy, a poor assertion about policy, an attack on those who disagree with it - with the royal "We".

This crosses the line from obsequious courtier arrogance into meglomania. We - many of us - predict that Iraq would be a disaster, a disaster because Bush was entering into the war for greedy and partisan motives, and as part of an overall policy which included a massive bail out of the wealthy. A series of policies which the owners of the Post benefitted from personally, and yet, this is not revealed in the editoral. Thus after welcoming in the hard right to the discussion by petting their talking point that history may vindicate the war, they do not reveal their personal financial interest in Bush, and hence their interest in slanting the discussion to the right.

They do this by not admitting to the discussion those who predicted a bad out come - not part of the "We" who predicted better - and by admitting the most insane collection of meglomaniacs ever to mount power in Washington DC. They do this for their own personal gain. Young men die, civilians die - so that the owners of the post can have their delusions of rationality, and their tax cuts. Their tax cuts. Their tax cuts. Their tax cuts.

Having admitted that they are partisans of the right wing, though perhaps squishy, then then procede to whinge that questions weren't answered, and perhaps they were a bit to light in their questioning. This is garbage. The election of George Bush set us on the course to Iraq. Now it may surprise the editors of the Washington Post, but they run, a newspaper. The word newspaper is a compound of two words - news and paper. In this electronic age, the paper is vanishing, but the word news has long since vanished.

The function of a news paper is to print, let me wait for you to guess this next part.

Ready?

News.

News is not the reprinting of press releases, but the uncovering of information which is not blindingly apperant. People who are informed understand the motives, for example of political candidates. Politica campaigns are not games by which candidates take certain stances, and, like debuntantes, pass if they cannot be shaken from those poses by simple questions.

The Washington Post, as the news paper of record in Washington DC, where our nation's government resides, has a peculiar duty to uncover the motives and abilities of those running for President. Should one of the major parties put up an immoderate and unfit individual for the Presidency - which has happened often in our nation's history, by more than even two major political parties - then the job of a news paper is to uncover this, and present the facts before the public. George Bush is called arrogant in the editorial, his handling of the war incompetent. George Bush has not changed as a person materially since becoming President - if he is so obviously unfit to do the one foreign policy thing he wanted to do, then a news paper should not mildly criticise itself for not thinking hard enough about the Iraq adventure, but it should make heads roll for not having uncovered the larger, and more obvious, truth that George W Bush is not fit to be commander in chief.

But clearly the Washington Post, in no small part because of the personal benefits of Bush's domestic policy of not taxing the wealthy, will not take this step. They have been bribed. And their conclusion, like most people who have been bribed and found out later that the results are worse than was promised - what a surprise - is to whine and plead for clemency for both themselves, and, of course, the people who are still paying the bribes, each and every year, in the form of deregulation and massive tax cuts which benefit the owners of the Washington Post substantially.

In short, their financial interest - both in selling newspapers to right wingers, and in the massive financial benefits of the tax cuts that Bush has given them - cloud their judgement to the point of making it useless. They are incapable of logical argument - setting one impossibly high standard for critics of the war, and another, impossibly low standard, for supporters. They exclude from the discussion the very people who were right about the war. They then plead that elites who have been paid more than the rest of society combined, indeed more than the rest of the world combined not be in any shape manner or form accountable for clear criminal acts and obvious blunders. The Iraq War was both a crime, and a mistake. And yet the WEshington Post would exclude form consideration the policy which the American Public now supports - leaving Iraq as quickly as possible, and stripping Bush of as much of the extraordinary powers of a war President as possible.

Having failed in their job of uncovering the truth about Candidate Bush, and having, by their own admission, failed to oppose a war when they felt there were unanswered questions, having profitted heavily from both of these blunders, having failed to remind people of the personal benefits that Bush has given them - there is no ground for discusison here. There is absolutely nothing that the Washington Post's editors could do, that is in the realm of possibility, that would materially improve the fortunes of the country. In Japan, the person writing this editorial would be expected to resign, or if he was old school, take his own life. Here in the US, he pisses on the critics who were right about Bush and the War and demands that he be left in place to take another fat paycheck.

Clearly, personal responsibility only applies to little people, and not to the powerful. So I must ask, having read the Post for years, I must ask - Why Does the Washington Post hate Democracy?