You didn't...

Faux News reporting on the Scooter Libby verdict lists one thing on the screen crawl, which said, "Scooter Libby Found Not Guilty of Lying to FBI Investigators."

ummmmmm..... Talk about selective journalism. I'm sure the fella doing the actual story reported that indeed, yes, Libby was convicted on the other four counts of the indictment (see post below), but really, if you're like me, and only get your news filtered through the "liberal" lens, this particular infographic just shoots another hole in the "Fair and Balanced" crap they keep saying about themselves. Sandy Berger (the Clinton National Security Advisor who plead guilty to misdemeanor charges of walking off with classified documents) was once shown on this network with the name "Sandy Burglar" under his face, and I do believe someone in the Infographic Department at Faux is just sittin there gigglin like a schoolgirl about how funnnnny that is.

Actually, it could really BE a schoolgirl doing the infographics with art direction by Roger Ailes. Who knows!

What is it, exactly, that tells these people at Faux that it's good for business to constantly put out BS and call it news? Isn't there a special room in Hell for these people? Some people say "the Fox News Network produces nothing but crap, and everything they say is lies."

Just using the Faux News ploy of "some people say" - kind of a catchall for, this is what our people say, which must mean that other people would say it, too, if we tell them it's what they could be saying, which means we can report it as something that some people are saying. Hannity, O'Reilly, even Bush uses it all the time, as a way of spouting some particularly heinous opinion or ridiculous position as being from "some people say." Known in the Wiki world as "weasel words."

At this point, I need sound effects. Or a barf bag.

Anyway, I'm having the time of my life listening to the deafening silence from the right-wingers that usually choke up the airwaves where I work. All of the normal standards of debate and decency go flying out the window. If there's a controversy, it's because some liberal media source has said it's so, therefor it's biased - but Bill-O is an unimpeachable source of data. I'm still hearing about aluminum tubes, and mobile bio-weapons labs, the five hundred rounds of useless shells, and the report from Rummy's special ops group at the Pentagon (which of course is more reliable than those bastards at the IAEA, and their terrorist-coddling masters, the UN).

Now, something has been proven in a court of law, prosecuted by a Bush appointee, no less, and a jury that managed to deadlock on one count of the indictment, but still managed to come up with a unanimous guilty verdict on the other four counts. Stick that in your loofah and smoke it!


INTERVENTIONS

Nicaragua - 1980s When Jimmy Carter withdrew support for the Somoza dictatorship on "moral grounds", the Sandinistas finally had their chance to take over the country. Somoza was out on his ear. Our government (under Ronald Reagan) illegally supported the Contras, a paramilitary organization composed primarily of former Sandinista revolutionaries and Somoza's personal bodyguards. Congress and the Senate eventually passed the Boland Amendments, cutting off funding for the Contras (as they were doing death squad-style killings and generally behaving very badly), so Iran-Contra was born.

Oliver North, Adm. John Poindexter, Eliot Abrams, et al, set up a secret method of funding the Contras that allowed President Reagan to plausibly deny that his administration was breaking the law. This included arms sales to Iran, who was at that time an avowed enemy of the United States and at war with Iraq (an ally of the US at the time - insert picture of Donald Rumsfeld shaking Saddam Hussein's hand). All of this eventually unraveled very publicly, with the major players convicted of a variety of things, but then having their convictions thrown out on technicalities. In other words, they broke the law, but couldn't have their own testimony used against them, as they were under an umbrella of immunity.

There were plenty of stories about the Contras funding their little insurgency by selling crack in California, North being very cozy with Manuel Noriega, and a couple of planeloads of guns and cocaine going down, people working for the State Department getting caught, etc.

Since then, some of them have reappeared in the political arena, most notably John Poindexter, who was for a time heading up a little department called Total Information Awareness. The TIA was to data mine everyone's records for anything. By which i mean everyone. About everything. Medical, dental, phone, internet usage, e-mail, travel, work. Surprisingly, as soon as people heard about it, there was a bit of an outcry, Rumsfeld said something like, "don't get all bent out of shape, we wouldn't do anything baaaad..." Uh, huh... riiiiiight.... And the TIA (supposedly) died on the vine. Poindexter still works for the Bush administration doing... something....