"Obama, Republicans And The Media Concur: It's Time For War With Isis"--Guardian
Obama, Republicans And The Media Concur: It's Time For War With Isis
It’s sounding like the Bush years all over again: the administration and Congress want a war and the media’s happy to cover it as the government prefers
By Trevor Timm
February 19, 2015 "ICH" - "The Guardian" - After more than six months of virtually ignoring the fact that the war against Isis was illegal by almost anyone’s standards – given Congress’s cowardly refusal vote on it and the White House’s refusal to ask them first – the Obama administration has finally submitted a draft war authorization against Isis to Congress.
That means the media can go back to doing what it does best: creating a “debate” over how many countries we should invade, without any discussion of how our invasions created the very situation in which we feel we have to contemplate more invasions. It’s like the early Bush years all over again.
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The only thing more farcical than the White House’s position is the Republican party’s: after months of hyperbolic grandstanding over Obama’s supposed abuses of executive power when it comes to immigration, health care, net neutrality or anything else, his political opposition has suddenly decided that they won’t agree to pass anything that doesn’t give the president absolutely unlimited authority to engage in a forever war with Isis.
But if there’s not Congressional action on the war – which many are now predicting, since Congress can barely even name a post office these days – you can almost guarantee it’s because John Boehner will only give unilateral power to do whatever he wants to the same president he’s literally suing for executive overreach, and nothing less. If only Obama was more like a dictator is the new Republican talking point – and it’s being repeated by some in the media.
CBS News’ Bob Schieffer, for instance, on Sunday disturbingly called on Obama to act more like Jordan’s unelected king, who Schieffer also bizarrely commended for executing two prisoners immediately after it was made public that its captured fighter pilot was killed by Isis. Over on Fox News, their conservative commentators have been increasingly becoming enamoured with the Jordanian King, the military dictator of Egypt and Vladimir Putin for weeks. It’s like they’re unable to comprehend we are literally dropping thousands of bombs in Iraq and Syria per month right now, and the numbers continue to go up.
Meanwhile, the featured guests on those major network sunday shows – many of whom have never met a war they didn’t like anyway – tried to out-tough each other this week for who would go to war with Isis harder. It’s their standard script: Just six months ago in the lead up to the first bombs dropping on Iraq and Syria, those shows had 89 guests on to talk about the prospective Isis war. Only one of them was decidedly anti-war.
Television punditry is, as it always has been, all war all the time. No second guessing the administration or the war hawks: just shut up and get out of the way.
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More with quotes from our usual MSM Pundits at:
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/feb/18/obama-republicans-media-concur-war-with-isis
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