Over at Mother Jones, there’s a highly informative article revisiting 18 of the more egregious inconsistencies and blunders the mainstream media in the U.S. have been responsible for, since the start of this whole “war on terror” thing¹.

I freely admit that my views of the U.S. political machinery and the war itself have changed, as things have gone along. But the Mother Jones article was a wake-up call, nevertheless. How quickly we forget the weasely words of the people in the magic box.

Second favorite:

The day before the invasion, Bill O’Reilly said, “If the Americans go in and overthrow Saddam Hussein and it’s clean, he has nothing, I will apologize to the nation; I will not trust the Bush administration again, all right?”

As if we needed more evidence that Bill O’Reilly was an especially heinous, right-wing-ratings puppet. And, though it’s more of a mockery of the media, rather than a media blunder, per se, here’s my favorite:

Stephen Colbert’s routine at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner in April 2006 is remembered for the in-his-face mockery of President Bush—but he also spanked the press, perhaps one reason his mainstream reviews were mixed at best. Addressing the correspondents directly, Colbert said, “Let’s review the rules. The president makes decisions; he’s the decider. The press secretary announces those decisions, and you people of the press type those decisions down. Make, announce, type. Put them through a spell-check and go home. Get to know your family again. Make love to your wife. Write that novel you got kicking around in your head. You know, the one about the intrepid Washington reporter with the courage to stand up to the administration. You know—fiction.”

Yeah.

The democratic machinery of the nation, by its very nature, is always “broken” to some extent, but there are functional measures of how much it’s broken. Currently, I think a strong case can be made that it’s more broken than it’s been in ages. Mainstream media organizations have often been the Bush Administration’s willing minions in this process.

It will take a long time to fix what we’ve broken in the past couple of decades (especially the last 7 years). Assuming we ever get around to fixing things.

1. It just occurred to me… is a “War on Terror” pretty much the same as “Attacking the Darkness?” Surely someone else has seen this parallel of meaningless abstraction in nomenclature before now [↩]

Since I haven’t done enough work today, I might as well share the fruits of my goofing off:

1. Video of Rick Nash making a freaking amazing goal
2. Now Amanda and I can finally be videogame friends
3. Interesting map of the U.S. by dominant religion

The last bit of webbiness is a page of fun words that allow statements such as the following to be made:

My darling, when I tell you I was overcome by mammaquatian melolagnia watching you at the the Fly Girl auditions, dancing to M.C. Hammer, clad in the most bifurcated of spandex unmentionables, please do not think I consider you a colpocoquettish slattern,  nor that I am some sort of eunoterpsian brassirothesauriast. Your dancing jolted me from my inveterate noeclexism and left helpless in the grip of cingulomanic, basorexic typhlobasian fantasies. Your firm handshake afterward awoke in me the most acute hirsutophilic tripsolagnophilia, with none of my former terror of amychesis. Nay, this timotrudian  demon is now a mere shadow from my youthful tartarology — much like those lost years of imparlibidinous ozoamblyrosis — with no power to dim the horripilating thoughts I dare to dream of our future together. Alas, these desires hinge on the slim possibility that you might find in this polylogistic erotographomania some counterintuitive cacocallia.