Another great slander
Sen. John McCain, whose candidacy for the Republican nomination for President in 2008 is in freefall because (1) he tried to move from freethinker to Bush thinker, and (2), people have figured out how old he'll be (76) when he finishes even one term as President, yesterday turned on the right's favorite whipping boy, the American press. McCain, after a heavily guarded trip to a few, select locations in Baghdad, proclaimed that the American people weren't getting the "full story" on the supposed great progress the U.S. has made in Iraq.
This pernicious myth--that the American press deliberately withheld news of the good things American troops have done in Iraq, of the progress that supposedly has been made--has been a staple of rightwing talk radio and letters-to-the-editor for at least the last two years, after the Iraq War began to go really bad. It came up a few months ago when the Patriot-News did reader nights to find out what people were thinking. There were people at the one I attended who clearly believed that the press had withheld positive stories to turn America against the war.
There is probably nothing tougher than to see your most cherished beliefs shown by facts and events to be based on lies by people you trusted. How much easier it must be to believe that a cabal of elite reporters with an anti-Bush agenda conspired to suppress good news. To do this, of course, requires tuning out the daily atrocities from Iraq, the senseless bombings of a religious civil war that kill dozens. Of course, a responsible politician, which McCain is not, would not deliberately pander to that sort of frenzied delusion. And by the way, even the Iraqis say McCain was dead wrong when he said parts of Baghdad were safe.
These sorts of delusions have been shown time and again to be extremely dangerous. The "stabbed-in-the-back" myth of German rightists after World War I, the belief that forces within Germany had betrayed the German Army, led directly to Adolf Hitler, World War II, and the Holocaust. In the 2004 election, we saw the force of delusion backed by big rightwing money as the Swift Boat Veterans tore into the supposed treason of Sen. John Kerry, a legitimate Vietnam War hero, and took away just enough votes for their hero, George W. Bush, to be re-elected and give us four more years of the war he started.
The price for myth in politics is a terrible one. I don't know if we are done paying for this one.