Preaching to the choir...
It appears that finally, after five years of scandal, abuse of power, propaganda and censorship, the media is finally turning on the Bush administration. Even the A.P. is carrying the story about how the live teleconference between Bush and several troops in Iraq was staged. Each soldier was coached on what the president would ask them and how to respond, ensuring that only what the administration wanted to hear would be said. Of course, this is likely too little too late.
President Bush is going to go down in history, not only for being an incompetent warmonger, but also for having more of a legacy than the vast majority of other presidents. He'll be leaving the White House having filled two Supreme Court positions, changed forever US foriegn policy and domestic security, rolled back years of environmental and social progress and given corporate America and right-wing religious groups unparalleled power.
What makes this fact truly disgusting is that the Bush administration is in no way representitive. Currently among African-Americans, Bush's approval rating is at 2%. The third largest ethnic group in America is almost universally opposed to what the president is doing, yet Bush will have a larger impact on civil rights than any president in recent history.
A few days ago, Bush told reporters that the reason he nominated Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court was because of her religion. On the same day, it was revealed that Karl Rove had contacted James Dobson (head of Focus on the Family and world-renowed child abuse advocate) two days before Bush revealed his choice to reassure him that she was sufficiently conservative and Christian and therefore opposed to abortion.
It is also interesting to note that president Bush is attempting to gain support to overturn the Posse Comitatus act which prevents the military from acting as a domestic police force and in the aftermath of Katrina allowed mercenaries hired by the government to take over peoples' homes and use them for bases of operation and bunking which is a blatant reintroduction of the Quartering Act (which was one of the primary reasons we seceded from England in the first place).
Also, Jimmy Carter, whose foundation is one of the most respected election watchdog agencies in the world has come out and said that he is firmly convinced that Al Gore actually won the 2000 election. Speaking of which, Jeb Bush just promoted one of the judges who was responsible for his brother's ascendency.
So here we have the president with potentially the biggest impact of any president since FDR and the entire black community is against him, he's against women's rights and gay rights, he's trying to set up a fundamentalist Christian theocracy and a police state, he's responsible for thousands of deaths and the torture of unknown numbers of prisoners, and he was never actually elected president in the first place.
So while it's very good to see that the media is actually starting to call Bush on his bullshit, it's important to remember that the compliance of the mainstream media was instrumental in allowing Bush to get away with much of this in the first place. They allowed him to dissemenate covert propaganda, accepted what they were told and repeated it without question and helped get him into the White House both times, the first time through passive failure to do their duty, the second by actively working to bolster his image and project the image of Bush as the great leader.
Independent and critical journalism is necessary for a representative electoral system to work. Fortunately, it still exists in some places, but rarely in the mainstream. Perhaps what we need is some way to raise awareness of the problems with mainstream media and the existence of independent media.