By Bruce B. Brugmann
I ask this question week after week when I read Rich’s splendid column in the Sunday NewYork Times.
Perhaps, if he were on the Sunday talk shows or in the White House press corps, he would be asking the tough questions that are so painfully needed nowadays as the surge doesn’t surge and the Iraq war escalates. .
For example, he writes in his lead, “By this late date, we should know the fix is in when the White House’s top factotums fan out on the Sunday morning talk shows singing the same lyrics, often verbatim, from the same hymnal of spin. The pattern was set way back on Sept. 8, 2002, when in simultaneous appearances three cabinet members and the vice president warned darkly of Saddam’s aluminum tubes. ‘We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud,’ said Condi Rice, in a scripted line. The hard sell of the war in Iraq–the hyping of a (fictional) nuclear threat to America–had officially begun.