On Sunday's "NBC Nightly News," correspondent Pete Williams previewed details of a new book, The Terrorist Watch: Inside the Desperate Race to Stop the Next Attack, by Ronald Kessler, in which Kessler revealed information obtained by the an FBI agent who extensively interviewed Saddam Hussein and found, among other things, that the former Iraqi leader had deliberately tried to "fool the U.S." into believing he had weapons of mass destruction because "he wanted Iranian leaders to believe that he had nuclear and biological weapons." The FBI agent, named George Piro, also reported that Saddam Hussein "hoped the post-Gulf War sanctions on Iraq would dissolve, allowing him to pursue a nuclear capability." (Transcript follows)

Canadian news magazine Maclean's photoshopped George Bush into the familiar black beret, mustache and pseudo-military garb that defined the late Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. This photo illustration accompanied a September 20 cover story that claimed Bush is the new Saddam because he's “reaching out the the late dictator's henchmen.”

In "How Bush Became the New Saddam," writer Patrick Graham described a decaying civilization that is doomed to fail in this rambling, disjointed article. He traveled around Iraq separately from the US military and even criticized journalists embedded with them because they “learn mostly about Americans...and end up sounding like a visiting columnist for the New York Times“ (my emphasis throughout). Ah yes, Canadians wouldn't want to echo that notoriously pro-military, pro-war and pro-American voice of the NY Times.

We Get it: You Don’t Like Fox

In an interview with Playboy magazine, MSNBC host Keith Olbermann actually fulminated that "Fox News is worse than Al Qaeda." He then went on to compare his cable rival to the Ku Klux Klan and rail against Rudy Giuliani. And this is the guy who is hosting football coverage on NBC? Live?

Live From the Bathroom

Speaking of Fox News, the network proved this week that it’s not always "fair and balanced." FNC reporter Laurie Dhue anchored a segment entitled "Lavatory Lust" that re-enacted the infamous Larry Craig bathroom incident. Before ending the "Geraldo at Large" piece, Dhue editorialized that it was sad Craig "had to go to a public place, and that’s the shame of homosexuality in this country right, today — at least the shame that the Republican Party puts on it."

As wacky theories go, it might not be quite up there with the stuff the "steel doesn't melt" truthies put out. But the Associated Press's Tom Raum has had a stunning little meltdown of his own.

In an "analysis" piece the AP put out today, "After 4 years of errors, Bush definition of ‘victory’ in Iraq is far more modest," Raum flatly states:

Bush’s decision to wage a vendetta against Saddam Hussein as retribution for the Sept. 11 attacks — six years ago Tuesday — led to many miscalculations and mistakes.

And what evidence does Raum offer in support of his astonishing theory that the Iraq war was Pres. Bush's "vendetta" against Saddam "for the Sept. 11 attacks"? Uh, Tom will have to get back to us on that . . .

On Monday’s "Good Morning America," correspondent David Wright highlighted an ABC poll which claims a "stunning" 100 percent of Iraqis in Baghdad and Anbar Province view the troop surge negatively. Wright offered this rather amazing statistic during a dour preview of the Iraq progress report that General Petraeus will give to Congress this week. In October of 2002, the veteran journalist highlighted another nearly unanimous poll. Showing extreme naivete, he famously observed on "World News Tonight that in a 1995 Iraqi election, "... Saddam Hussein won 99.96 percent of the vote. Of course, it is impossible to say whether that's a true measure of the Iraqi people's feelings."

While discussing the ABC survey of Iraqi households, Wright didn’t question the fact that not one person could be found who viewed the troop surge positively. After comparing Petraeus’s testimony to that of General William Westmoreland at the height of the Vietnam War, Wright went on to discuss how the poll indicates that Iraqis believe the prospects for the future are "grim at best." He then closed the report by stating the obvious: Unlike ABC, General Petraeus will actually mention signs of progress, in addition to discussing the struggles. "And no doubt we're going to be hearing a starkly different assessment today from this chair by General Petraeus," he concluded.

For the past five years, CBS’s “60 Minutes” has been a safe haven for any Republican to voice his or her displeasure with the Bush administration. In fact, the program has been a walking billboard for such sentiments.

With that in mind, given former Sen. Bob Kerrey’s rather eye-opening op-ed in today’s Wall Street Journal (h/t Allah at Hot Air), it seems safe to assume the outspoken Democrat will be on an upcoming installment of “60 Minutes” to share his disagreements with the foreign policy positions of many members of his Party.

I for one am looking forward to seeing the look on the face of whichever “60 Minutes” host gets the assignment when Kerrey says the following (emphasis added throughout):

For the second day, The Washington Post rounded up hostile global opinion toward America’s gun culture in a Molly Moore story headlined "Va. Killings Widely Seen as Reflecting a Violent Society: World Reaction Mixes Condolences With Criticism of Policies." But Moore’s article turned unintentionally comic when she quoted an Iraqi praising the gun-control policies of....Saddam Hussein. "But America has terrorism and they are exporting it to us. We did not have this violence in the Saddam era because the law was so tough on guns."

Perhaps it’s not surprising for a liberal newspaper to use a terrible mass shooting as an opportunity for pro-Saddam Iraqis to condemn how the United States has ruined their paradise. But it’s hardly a poster for the Brady Campaign’s gun-control aims – and Saddam’s dictatorship is hardly a model of nonviolence. (It can, however, illustrate the gun-rights crowd’s belief in guns as a bulwark against dictatorship.) Moore’s Iraqi section came about halfway through the article:

The Associated Press reported rallies celebrating the fourth anniversary of the liberation of Iraq from Saddam Hussein -- without ever mentioning Saddam Hussein. Lauren Frayer's article makes it sound like the American forces deposed a city, not a dictator: "Tens of thousands marched through the streets of two Shiite holy cities Monday to mark the fourth anniversary of Baghdad's fall." Nowhere in the article is Saddam even mentioned. The headline was also "Rally marks anniversary of Baghdad's fall."

The reader quickly learns the rallies were organized by Moqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army as an anti-American event, which would explain why it broke through the media's resistance to hopeful-sounding news:

Seymour Hersh of “The New Yorker” has been an outspoken critic of the Bush administration and the war in Iraq for many years. This certainly should come as no surprise to folks familiar with his name, his work, and his style of dangerously activist journalism.

On March 11, Hersh added a new wrinkle to his résumé by not only doing a radio interview with the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting, but also actually discussing what he believes is the American military strategy towards Iran including what he called "an intensive planning for an air strike" and  "some sort of on the ground operation."

I kid you not.

The shocking interview was transcribed at the IRIB website (h/t NRO’s Michael Rubin, emphasis added throughout):

Lately it seems that HBO’s “Real Time with Bill Maher” has become the place for left-wing politicians and media members to go on Friday evenings to say whatever disgraceful thing they want about the Bush administration without regard for accuracy or prudence.

Does that make it HBO’s answer to ABC’s farcical morning coffee klatch “The View,” and Bill Maher is suddenly just an intelligent version of Rosie O’Donnell with a Y-chromosome and better clothing?

The March 23 installment certainly suggested so, with the unabashed and unashamed host leading a herd of disgruntled liberals to slaughter conservatives much as Rosie now despicably does on almost a daily basis. In fact, Maher began this most recent episode with a monologue featuring ten out of eleven jokes about Bush, his family, the Administration, and seemingly any politician with an “R” next to his name.

Most disgracefully, the first josh of the evening actually mocked the First Lady (video available here):

For three years, President Bush has been portrayed as stubborn on Iraq, so defiant that it’s disturbing, perhaps even a sign of delusional certitude. There’s a mirror image at play: those doing the portraying, i.e., the media have been every bit as stubborn when it comes to their defiant insistence that everything that happens in Iraq, no matter how positive, is another peg for bad news coverage.

We acknowledge that the daily drumbeat of death pounded by the media is based on facts. That does not mean that all death is bad. In war, it is a tragedy to learn that your countrymen have fallen. It is cause for celebration when the enemy dies. But for the American news media, all news is bad news if the theater is Iraq.

One of the most overused anti-Bush analogies at this point in 2007 is Hurricane Katrina. Geoff Dickens found it even surfaced last Wednesday in reference to the rough cell-phone video of Saddam Hussein's execution. MSNBC's "Hardball" crew found this comparative analogy to be not only logical, but delicious enough to repeat, as Geoff Dickens reported after watching last Wednesday's show. Reporter David Shuster found "critics" to make this odd connection:

"A White House spokesman later said President Bush has not yet seen the Saddam video. The images have been part of an international discourse for days. And critics say the President`s detachment is reminiscent of Hurricane Katrina, when the President didn’t appreciate the aftermath or public uproar until an adviser showed him a tape several crucial days later."

The new year may have just begun, but members of the media are relying on time-tested bias to attack conservatives and Republicans. Chris Matthews recently slimed Fox News host Bill O’Reilly by linking him to such despotic leaders as Kim Jong Il and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

During the funeral of President Gerald Ford, Katie Couric attacked the Reverend Billy Graham for being "remarkably partisan." A "Time" magazine correspondent slammed the departed Ford for not criticizing the Iraq war publically, calling it "unpardonable."

MRC Times Watch man and NB blogger Clay Waters appeared again Thursday on Fox's "Your World with Neil Cavuto" on the subject of the constant and ongoing New York Times wailing and lamenting the botched execution of Saddam Hussein. Clay was joined in the Cavuto segment by James Carafano of the Heritage Foundation. Waters offered this take:

“Everyone of course has some misgivings about how it was, especially with the leaked videotape. But what struck me was the tone of the coverage. It could not give him Bush or the U.S. a single positive thing out of it. Even Slate, which is no one’s idea of a right-wing rag, they said ‘a distinct strain of grudging admiration’ that ran through the Times coverage of Hussein's trip to the gallows.” And if Slate says it, there must be something fairly obvious about the Times.”  Video Clip: Real (2.39 MB) or Windows (2 MB) Plus MP3 (948 KB) 

No good deed goes unpunished?

Fallout from the execution of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein still dominates the New York Times, and it's not just conservatives who see some definite themes emerging from the massive coverage.

Slate's "Today's Papers" column noticed even back on Sunday:

"TP couldn't help but pick up on the distinct strain of grudging admiration that ran through the NYT's coverage of Hussein's trip to the gallows. An early edition of the paper's lead story said that although the witnesses it interviewed were enemies of the dictator, 'their accounts of the execution were redolent of respect for the way in which their former tormentor died.' The final edition version of the story omits the prior passage but says the widely broadcast videotape of the event suggested that he 'lived his final moments with unflinching dignity and courage, reinforcing the legend of himself as the Arab world's strongman.' An accompanying front-page piece about the dictator's final moments relates that he 'looked strong, confident and calm." A fitting final performance, I suppose, for a master propagandist.'"

Are the moralists of the Washington Post Style section really the kind of people who believe Kenneth Lay, the CEO of the collapsing racket of Enron, is a viler historical figure than Saddam Hussein? A review of the documentary evidence would suggest yes. Rich Noyes remembered Style essayist Henry Allen's rather savage take on Mr. Lay last July 6 after he died before justice kicked in:

But now that he's died of a heart attack in the luxury of his Colorado getaway while awaiting sentencing for his crimes, none of his victims will be able to contemplate that he's locked away in a place that makes the Baltimore Harbor Tunnel look like Hawaii; that he might be spending long nights locked in a cell with a panting tattooed monster named Sumo, a man of strange and constant demands; and long days in the prison laundry or jute mill or license plate factory, gibbering with anguish as fire-eyed psychopaths stare at him for unblinking hours while they sharpen spoons into jailhouse stilettos.

Then compare that to Style essayist Philip Kennicott on New Year's Eve, feeling only a marginal distaste for Saddam, who was apparently just a paper tiger manufactured by Team Bush. He was a bad guy, yadda yadda, but he has nothing to do with Iraq now:

Assume for a second that it is 1945, and it has just been learned that Adolf Hitler is dead. Would America’s media offer this madman the respect of referring to him as “Mr. Hitler?” Well, if the newspaper in question was the New York Times, the answer might definitely be “Yes,” for in a New Year’s day article about the supposed “rush to hang” the former genocidal leader of Iraq, the Times regularly referred to the now demised despot as “Mr. Hussein” (emphasis mine throughout):

With his plain pine coffin strapped into an American military helicopter for a predawn journey across the desert, Saddam Hussein, the executed dictator who built a legend with his defiance of America, completed a turbulent passage into history on Sunday.

Like the helicopter trip, just about everything in the 24 hours that began with Mr. Hussein’s being taken to his execution from his cell in an American military detention center in the postmidnight chill of Saturday had a surreal and even cinematic quality.

Fascinating. So, in the Times’ view, “Mr. Hussein” is a legend? How marvelous. The article continued:

It should never amaze media watchers when a press member finds fault in justice being doled out to the clearly guilty, even when the party in question is a genocidal despot. With that in mind, it didn’t take long for NBC to question the integrity of Saddam Hussein’s hanging, and espouse to viewers a downside for America as well as the country the tyrant once ruled with an iron fist.

Adding insult to injury, correspondent Richard Engel so editorialized on the final “Nightly News” of 2006 (video available here):

It was a major public relations blow for the US administration and the Iraqi government which have been trying to show the world that Saddam Hussein received impartial justice. Now with this brief video, that's being called into question as today Saddam was laid to rest.

At the site of Saddam’s burial, Engel chose to first interview a grieving Hussein loyalist even though Iraq is dominated by Shia Muslims who passionately despise the former dictator:

This previous post from Friday night shortly after his hanging noted that CNN was giving Saddam Hussein the "Deceased Statesman" look.

The NY Times (HT Hot Air; scroll down, and look on left; direct link to pic is here; pic below is from my host's hard drive) has in a sense outdone CNN by giving Saddam the look of a charismatic, and from all appearances beloved, leader:

One suspects that this is just a warm-up for Castro when his time comes.

Here's another angle on a story previously covered by NB's Tim Graham.

Friday's New York Times editorial (requires registration) makes it clear, without having the courage to specifically say it, that it opposed the impending execution of the Iraqi dictator, even characterizing the three-year legal process as "The Rush to Hang" him.

The Times may have taken it too far this time. I would think more than a few in the Manhattan wine-and-cheese set, even those who oppose the war, will be astute enough to substitute the name "Osama bin Laden" and his "orchestration of the 9/11 attacks" for "Saddam Hussein" and his "vile and unforgivable atrocities" in the Times' Friday editorial. Here are a couple of easy examples:

CBS broke into programming at about 10:18 Eastern time to report that Saddam Hussein had been executed. The short Special Report was drily anchored by Katie Couric, but included a brief interview with the typical Democratic expert: Richard Holbrooke, an Assistant Secretary of State and U.N. Ambassador under Bill Clinton. Couric left out the worked-for-Clinton part. Unsurprisingly, Holbrooke said the execution of Saddam would have absolutely no effect on the dire situation in Iraq for President Bush:

“In the long term, it doesn’t change anything…He was a dead man walking. And so in the end for President Bush, Katie, the crisis, this emergency he’s facing, the policies he has to announce shortly, are not going to be changed by what happened today.”

MRC's Times Watch man and NB blogger Clay Waters appeared again on FNC's "Your World with Neil Cavuto" on Friday afternoon to discuss the New York Times and its unhappiness with the trial and execution of Saddam Hussein. Substitute host Stuart Varney began: “In an op-ed piece enti