mparent7777: The Bob Woodward version: “The Bob Woodward version
Sidney Blumenthal
18 – 10 – 2006
The tangled story of investigative journalist Bob Woodward’s relationship with the Bush administration reveals the White House’s subtle entrapment of his form of reportage, says Sidney Blumenthal.
As soon as President Bush finished the first-year commemoration of Hurricane Katrina he turned to the fifth-year anniversary of the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks in order to restore his faltering popularity and set the themes for the Republican Party in the campaign for the mid-term elections on 7 November 2006.
Through a series of speeches he proclaimed that he would ‘stay the course’ in Iraq, which he conflated with his war on terror. Polls, after all, showed that his standing on Iraq was sliding while his standing on terror was steady. His effort to merge one into the other, as he had done since before the invasion, was an act of political alchemy. Speaking at a Republican fundraiser on 28 September, he proclaimed: ‘The party of FDR and the party of Harry Truman has become the party of cut and run.’
But on 5 October, an unimpressed Senator John Warner, Republican chairman of the armed services committee, declared that Iraq was ‘drifting sideways,’ and that if Bush’s policy was to continue it was time to ‘change the course.’
On 8 October, James A Baker III, the former secretary of state, a close associate of the elder Bush and now the chairman of the bi-partisan Iraq Study Group that will report its recommendations in early 2007 to the president, declared his support for Senator Warner’s call to ‘change the course’ – ‘Yes, absolutely. And we’re taking a look at other alternatives.’
On 10 October, a New York Times/CBS News poll reported, according to the NYT”
::Tullycast:: 