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June 28, 2006

Groupthink Grope

In the ever shrinking bizarro world that Bush supporting Republicans continue to inhabit, the New York Times is the poop scooping birdcage liner whose staff should be group handcuffed and frog marched to Gitmo.

Their transgressions oddly have an identical match to the Los Angeles Times and the Wall Street Journal: printing stories about government abusing power and eroding the privacy liberties of Americans.

Yet somehow the LA Times and the WSJ have flown under the radar of the groupthink zombies. Apparently its only treasonous to out the government's nasty little antiAmerican spying programs if your geography has two Democratic Senators on the East Coast. Or perhaps its the fact that they no longer employ the hack who helped sugarcoat their improper war.

Whatever the reason, they've decided that the Times' reign of informing Americans that their government is intruding on them without cause must end. Or at least they're going to talk it up a lot.

James Wolcott believes that they're backing the Administration into a corner with this ridiculous bellyaching:

They want the administration to show the Times and the rest of the press who's boss. The neocon contingent is already dismayed with the tiptoeing around Iran's nuclear program, with Ledeen and Perle lodging protests. If the pushback against the Times peters out, if the posse disbands shortly after mounting up, the White House is going to look weak in the bugged-out eyes of its mutant defenders. It'll be interesting to see if the controversy builds or fades over the next few days, and whether or not the Times-bashers will be compelled to call their own bluff.

Naw.

This is a groupthink machine. And it isn't a trickle up contingent. Its trickle down. Bush can do pretty much whatever he wants and the cool kid keyboardists and pundits won't abandon him. Not for long. Not if they want to hold on to their wee little grip on power.

If they really cared about the release of this information they'd be going after all the papers and media outlets--not just the Times. These people have a boner to see that paper ended. Its personal--but not to the point that they'll dump Dear Leader and pull the rug out from under themselves.

Posted by Carla at June 28, 2006 09:10 AM