Brilliant opening to Adam Curry’s Daily Source Code (www.dailysourcecode.com) this week-a “Welcome to the Terrordome”mashup. We are entering into a Public Enemy sort of world-where the whacked out conspiracy theories are suddenly not so whacked out any longer. Then he merges into Roy Orbison doing “Pretty Woman” from 1964. God, I love the Internet.
Brit Hume, who used to be a sensible person before he was assimilated by the Borg at Fox News, was on CSPAN being interviewed by Brian Lamb. Conversation naturally turns to Fox' conservative bias, and Hume tries to point out that, when the White House issued a report saying that the Iraq government had met 15 of 18 Congressional benchmarks, no one else covered it except Fox. "Gee, if that's true," I thought, "that's quite notable. I sure didn't know that."
Well, I did a little bit of checking, and well, that mostly isn't true. First of all, the Washington Post covered it, Time covered it, USA Today covered it. It was covered.
Second of all, while the White House did, in fact, say that, it's mostly not true. First of all, the "progress" is incomplete-they've passed legislation, but not implemented it. Second of all, the three missing benchmarks? Oh, nothing big-only the oil law, disarmament, and the police. That's all. Oh, and third of all? Bush said all 18 would be achieved by the end of 2007.
Jeepers.
I remember reading about this progress report, and how little of the promised milestones have been met.
ReplyDeleteIt still puts the Iraqi government ahead of Congress. (That is not quite as partisan a jab as you think: I'm including the Republicans in Congress in that too).
The number of Iraqis who want the U.S. to stay in Iraq is similar to the number of Americans who approve of the job Congress and the President are doing: somewhere around 30% or 40%. (numbers from various sites including Media Matters and WPO).
Not sure what conclusion you can draw from that.
Indeed. Maybe we can swap governments?
ReplyDelete