"Study: False statements preceded war" ( Hit piece on Bush et al. from AP)

For those who didn't get to see this jewel of investigative arm-chair quarterbacking by two "non-profits" - the Fund For Independence in Journalism ( http://www.tfij.org/) and the Center For Public Integrity: (http://www.publicintegrity.org/default.asp) - it is available from the AP here. The essence of the story is "Bush lied, people died" and everyone close to the president is implicated. A few notes about the "false statements" supposedly concocted by the Bush administration. To dispense with the rehashed arguments about intel, the fact that there were wmds and other banned weapons in Iraq (as anyone who has taken their blinders off to view the evidence knows), the moral arguments that Hussein was a murderous despot and the world is better off without him, etc. - we will cut to a few points about this "study" in general.

First of all, I am incensed that these so-called "non-profits" are being subsidized by tax payers to engage in rehashing second-rate history for mass liberal consumption. The idea that the U.S. went into Iraq for fun and oil profits has not been substantiated by any evidence, so the best thing the press can come up with are attack pieces that "prove" the AP mould that they put out there to begin with - there were no wmds (false), the war was illegal (false), the U.S. is in a quagmire (false), and Hussein had no meaningful connections with al Qaeda (false). The press contrived so-called scandals like the ridiculous "Plamegate" and Joseph Wilson's supposed "bunking" of the plausible Hussein play for yellowcake from Niger. The chemical weapons factory in Sudan was dismissed with little thought by the MSM, even though the traces of EMPTA, which was a signature for Iraqi-manufactured VX gas, pointed to suspicious activity. The factory, by the way, had connections to both Hussein and al Qaeda.

But this is old news that draws liberal "cooked" responses - including stymying, namecalling, subterfuge and distraction from the point at hand. What is even more frustrating than the chattering class drawing funds from hard-working Americans in order to carry out their socialist activities is the total lack of honesty and objectivity with which they attack their ideological opponents.

As long as we are on the subject of objectivity and fairness, where has the press been with articles such as "Neville Chamberlain made 550 factually inaccurate statements about Hitler prior to WWII"? What about "We the press knowingly made hundreds of factually inaccurate statements about Stalin during the Purges in the 1930s"? How about "We the press apologized for every socialist murderous thug in the last century"? How about "We villified Joseph McCarthy to the point that his last name has become synonomous with wrongful persecution, although he was right more often than not about the communists he was attempting to expose"? What about "We the press blew up a two-bit break-in during the Nixon administration into a pretext for a leftist coup"? How about lies like "Reagonomics damaged the U.S. economy"? If the supposed "Center for Public Integrity" and "Fund for Independence in Journalism" did studies for every factually inaccurate story the MSM regurgitated over and over again in the last 100 years (a recent example is the Hurricane Katrina debacle), then I might see a little more reason to grant these media organizations non-profit status. But as Mark Levin points out, only non-profits need public funding because they are so inept and inane they could never make it out in the real world. Thats where Newsbusters picks up the slack, by analyzing left-wing claptrap with real world insight. If anyone can think of recent news stories where the press really dropped the ball en masse, that would be interesting to note.