Reality Seeps Through on Hardball

You should definitely check out David Shuster's report from tonight's Hardball about the White House Iraq Group and the selling of the war in 2002. It's familiar stuff to most of us who have been paying attention, but it's truly a fantastic summary of exactly how the mighty Wurlitzer press organ was played for fools by a government intent on invasion.

They detailed how reports went from Scooter Libby, Ahmad Chalabi, and the rest of the neocons right into the hands of Judy Miller, who would dutifully report on them in the New York Times. That done, Administration officials would rush the airwaves and quote at length from Miller's stories (for which they were the source). "Even the New York Times" is saying X, Y, and Z. They play out the timeline of events, how the Administration knew the claims it was quoting in the Times were flase, yet hyped them anyway. It showed the speeches, the marketing push for war, the scare tactics, everything.

Of course, Tweety Bird Matthews appeared not disgusted, but wowed by how "tremendous" the WH marketing project was, and was all too quick to allow John Fund to blame the whole thing on the Democrats (perversely) for rolling over on the resolution, as well as the media. Although Matthews was willing to take the blame on behalf of the media's poor job in the run-up to war, Fund tried to insanely portray himself as some kind of outsider, as if the Wall Street Journal exists on the fringes of the Fourth Estate.

Then Matthews, in one sentence, summed up the state of today's modern media. "I believe everything I've heard tonight."

The transcript will eventually pop up here.