Richard Gates–Someone involved with Iran-Contra. Scandalicious! ;)

As for ye olde one, could he now be ripe for prosecution for war crimes?

There’s an interesting op-ed on Rolling Stone’s website about mass culture and how it has shifted during the course of the Iraq war.

This part I found the most telling is in bold below…

Look, there’s nothing mysterious about any of this. It’s pretty obvious what’s going on. We saw this same kind of cultural shift in 1968, after the Tet offensive (an analogy so obvious that even Tom Friedman saw it recently), when the American political establishment soured on the Vietnam War. Despite the conservative propaganda that for decades has insisted that it was the media that lost the war for us in Vietnam, in fact the media didn’t turn on the Vietnam war effort until the war was already lost. And the reason the media soured on that war had nothing to do with it being wrong; it had to do with the post-Tet realization that the war was expensive, unwinnable and politically costly. America is reaching the same conclusion now about Iraq, and so, like Dave Letterman, a whole host of people who just a few years ago thought we “had to do something” are now backing off and repositioning themselves in an antiwar stance.

What’s dangerous about what’s going on right now is that an electoral defeat of the Republicans next week, and perhaps a similar defeat in a presidential race two years from now, might fool some people into thinking that the responsibility for the Iraq war can be sunk forever with George Bush and the Republican politicians who went down with his ship. But in fact the real responsibility for the Iraq war lay not with Bush but with the Lettermans, the Wolf Blitzers, the CNNs, The New York Timeses of the world — the malleable middle of the American political establishment who three years ago made a conscious moral choice to support a military action that even a three-year-old could have seen made no fucking sense at all.

Indeed, much of the mainstream media cheered on the Bush administration as it decided to get its war on in Iraq. (Fox News still does; I’m sure. ;)) And while you have some who are still (IMO) blindly cheering on the Bush and his cronies wearing their rose-tinted glasses and whatnot, there are those who’ve thrown them off and deliberately broken them, who’ve realized–even if it is three years later–that this war was a mistake. I think they ought to be commended, personally.

More (emphasis is, once again, mine)…

It doesn’t take much courage to book the Dixie Chicks when George Bush is sitting at thirty-nine percent in the polls and carrying 3,000 American bodies on his back every time he goes outside. It doesn’t take much courage for MSNBC’s Countdown to do a segment ripping the “Swift-Boating of Al Gore” in May 2006, or much gumption from Newsweek’s Eleanor Clift to say that many people in the media “regret” the way Gore was attacked and ridiculed in 2000. We needed those people to act in the moment, not years later, when it’s politically expedient. We needed TV news to reject “swift-boating” during the actual Swift Boat controversy, not two years later; we needed ABC and NBC to stand up to Clear Channel when that whole idiotic Dixie Chicks thing was happening, not years later; we needed the networks and the major dailies to actually cover the half-million-strong protests in Washington and New York before the war, instead of burying them in inside pages or describing the numbers as “thousands” or “at least 30,000,” as many news outlets did at the time; and we needed David Letterman to have his war epiphany back when taking on Bill O’Reilly might actually have cost him real market share.

It seemed to me that the only outlets covering the anti-war protests–especially the ones that took place on February 15, 2003 (a month before the war), when people came out in droves (IIRC, around 100,000 or so in New York City (protesters took up about five city blocks because organizers didn’t have a permit to hold it in Central Park) and London (their largest anti-war rally ever) alone!)–were C-Span (I remember watching their coverage of the NYC rally) and the independent media (on television via Free Speech TV and World Link TV, and online via Indymedia.org and whatnot). I think only BBC’s news site had any major coverage of the day’s events.

But here’s the real kicker of the piece…

If the Iraq war was not ever going to be worth 3,000 American lives (and countless more Iraqi lives), then why the hell did we go in in the first place? If you make a decision to fight, you had better not be scared of blood. And if you’re suddenly changing your mind about things after you lose a few teenage lives, you’re a hundred times more guilty than the guys like Bush who are actually sticking to their guns about this war.

Because Bush and the rest of that crew sent young men to die for something they believed in, fucked-up as their reasoning might be and have been. But these shitheads in the political middle who are flip-flopping right now sentenced teenagers to death for the cause of expediency and careerism. There are young men coming home now without arms and legs because the Wolf Blitzers of the world were too afraid to lose their jobs or piss off advertisers bucking the war hysteria of the times. Remember, CNN and the rest of the networks did great business in the run-up to the war. They had artists cooking up fancy new “America’s New War” graphics and they were selling lawn fertilizer and soda and male-enhancement drugs by the metric ton right up to the time when the Saddam statue came down. But the war isn’t selling anymore; the war is a bummer. And so these guys are changing their minds.

Fear sells. That’s for certain.