Washington Post Death Spiral Watch
Attaturk comments on the egregious Fred Hiatt, he who "speaks with excessive certainty":
Rising Hegemon: Wank more into the breech: Today Fred Hiatt writes yet another editorial exempting both Bush and himself from the Iraq War fiasco. It's rather sad and hilarious that Hiatt continues to do this...and gets away with it. Especially since many of the journalist that write for the Post such as Rajiv Chandrasekaran and Thomas Ricks (whose book was even called "FIASCO" for chrissakes) have shown Fred to be shit-pusher No. 1.... Fred goes into a full-throated defense of the Bush Administration not lying -- for the obvious reason that Fred Hiatt doesn't want to be portrayed as the incredible chump he is. With this kind of cult-like cognitive dissonance Fred might consider getting himself into his best sweat suit and sneakers and start eating those pudding cups.
The real secret to being Fred Hiatt is not reading your own paper.oday on the "Walter Pincus Page" of the Post [A15]-- just after the Car Ads and just before the Adult Bookstore Ads -- he could read this:
There is an important line in last week's Senate intelligence committee report on the Bush administration's prewar exaggerations of the threat posed by Saddam Hussein. It says that the panel did not review "less formal communications between intelligence agencies and other parts of the Executive Branch."... [T]here was no effort to obtain White House records or interview President Bush, Vice President Cheney or other administration officials whose speeches were analyzed because, the report says, such steps were considered beyond the scope of the report.
One obvious target for such an expanded inquiry would have been the records of the White House Iraq Group (WHIG), a group set up in August 2002 by then-White House Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card Jr. The group met weekly in the Situation Room. Among the regular participants (many have since left or changed jobs) were Karl Rove, the president's senior political adviser; communications strategists Karen Hughes, Mary Matalin and James R. Wilkinson; legislative liaison Nicholas E. Calio; and policy aides led by national security adviser Condoleezza Rice and her deputy, Stephen J. Hadley, as well as I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Cheney's chief of staff. As former White House press secretary Scott McClellan wrote in his recently released book, "What Happened," the Iraq Group "had been set up in the summer of 2002 to coordinate the marketing of the war to the public."
"The script had been finalized with great care over the summer," McClellan wrote, for a "campaign to convince Americans that war with Iraq was inevitable and necessary."
