MEDIA WHORES ONLINE: RIGHT WING PRESS SHOWS NEAR TOTAL LACK OF SKEPTICISM ABOUT PADILLA CASE
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WING-NUT WOUND-UP
No Skeptics On Right Over Padilla Affair
"Huge Victory," Shills Lucianne's Boy
While most of the mainstream press and commentariat, including The New York Times's Maureen Dowd, expresses a healthy skepticism over the great Bush ballyhoo about the alleged "dirty bomb" caper, the right wing is out there cheering, as best it can.
Leading the pack, not surprisingly, is Lucianne's wuzzums, Jonah Goldberg, who has precipitously announced that the apprehension of Jose Padilla marks "a huge victory for American intelligence officials."
Well, Jonah-boy, that remains to be seen, doesn't it?
Michael "Yosemite Sam" Kelly is more measured, acknowledging that it may yet come to light that Padilla is "innocent and should not have been locked away." But that would be fine with Kelly, for whom an ounce of preventive detention in "wartime" is worth a pound of cure. [[RD: Recent CNN online polls shows 75% of Americans agree that's it time to throw out Habeus Corpus rights!]]
He writes that Padilla "is accused, based on what is believed to be credible intelligence, of plotting to explode a radioactive bomb in the United States." Note the passive voice. Then get this from Kelly: "No one outside the government really knows what the evidence is against al Muhajir [that is, Padilla]." [[RD: Just like no one knows what the government was doing on 9/11!]]
So if nobody knows outside the government, who could believe the evidence is credible -- except members of the government, who aren't saying much? Not to be cynical -- but can't Kelly muster one-tenth of the sense of disbelief about the Bush Administration that he regularly displayed -- no, sprayed -- about the Clinton Administration?
Over at the Weekly Standard, managing editor Claudia Winkler taketh away and then giveth the most she can to credit the Bushies. She does mock the FBI and CIA (though not the White House) over "weeks of embarrassing headlines about leads flubbed." Still, she insists, the Padilla arrest "usefully refocuses attention from the errors of the past to present challenges...."
MWO agrees, though not for the same reasons Winkler provides. For her, Padilla's arrest announcement refocuses attention on the necessity for "sensible" ethnic profiling and the need for preemptive action.
We suspect that the "refocusing" may have more to do with Karl Rove's efforts to refocus attention away from the mounting news of White House and administration incompetence and cover-ups. Which is useful enough -- for Karl Rove. |
