My Gut Hatred Of People Who Use The Term "Gut Hatred" To Marginalize People

I'm glad that the Tom Ridge revelation about FEAR Unit is getting the pickup it deserves - we shouldn't forget the kind of place this country was after 9/11 and during the bulk of the Bush regime (By the way, Ridge has been hinting at this for years). Maybe if Democratic leaders understood that more they wouldn't be stubbing their toes right now. The facts are that the Republicans at that time were willing to politicize national security, and lie to terrorize the public, all to win elections. The fact that Ridge refused to raise the terror alert level one time (in response to the bin Laden message right before the 2004 vote) doesn't excuse him for doing Bush's bidding numerous times beforehand, like holding press conferences right after the Democratic National Convention raising fears of terrorism. And the spin from Frances Townsend, that they only discussed if raising threat levels would HURT Bush, makes no sense at all.

It was clear just by recognizing the pattern - that even election year came with a whole slew of terror alerts - that this was a coordinated effort to scare people into trusting Daddy Bush and the GOP with their lives. When Marc Ambinder tried to call those who recognize this pattern motivated by "gut hatred" of Bush and admitted that "journalists are going to give the government the benefit of some doubt," he really summed up the state of the modern media. Ambinder's apologized for the term "gut hatred," but not the underlying fallacy supporting his beliefs. Glennzilla:

Just as is still commonly said about opponents of the Iraq War (even though they were right, they were still wrong and unSerious because their motives were bad), Ambinder acknowledges that Bush critics were right that the terror alerts were being manipulated for political ends (he has no choice but to acknowledge that now that Ridge admits it), but still says journalists like himself were right to scorn such critics "because these folks based their assumption on gut hatred for President Bush, and not on any evaluation of the raw intelligence." As always: even when the dirty leftist hippies are proven right, they're still Shrill, unSerious Losers who every decent person and "journalist" scorns [...]

The reason journalists such as Ambinder saw no such evidence wasn't because it didn't exist. It existed in abundance; you had to suffer from some form of moral, intellectual or emotional blindness not to see it. It's because they didn't want to see it, because -- as Ambinder said -- they trusted the Bush administration as good and decent people who might err but would never do anything truly dishonest. It's because only loser Leftist ideologues distrusted Bush officials and the overriding goal of establishment journalists is to prove that they are not like them, that they're much more Serious and responsible and thus would never attribute bad motives to government leaders such as those who ran the Bush administration.

As Krugman says, "it’s really sad that those who missed the obvious, who failed to see what was right in front of their noses, still consider themselves superior to those who got it right." But then, they wouldn't be modern journalists if they didn't act that way.