People ask why the press didn't press the WH on his build up of troops for invading Iraq. Two words: Ari Fleischer. This punk refused to answer questions If he didn't like the question, he called press members traitors and terrorists. He insidiously created such an aura of impenetrable secrecy around the Bush admin, no one dared ask anything controversial. By the time he left, half the press was censored by him or self-censored out of fear. I remember reading press members lamenting they'd never seen anything like it. And they were scared.
Yes, he did leave in July, to trade on his notariety earning big bucks in the private sector - teaching others to lie, deceive and evade answering anything. Your post of Ari and the press clearly demonstrates this.
After Bill Maher spoke out of turn about 9/11 (Of course Ann Coulter's hideous remarks were forgiven) Fleischer used his press briefing to directly attack Maher and anyone else who dared to challenge the patriotic and militaristic hysteria that was being whipped up in the aftermath of the World Trade Center tragedy. “They’re reminders to all Americans that they need to watch what they say, watch what they do” he declared. “This is not a time for remarks like that; there never is.”
Perhaps more than any other single event, this witch-hunting remark set the tone of intimidation and repression that has since become the hallmark of American political life. It was meant, in particular, as a warning shot to the mass media, which meekly complied with the government demand for the suppression of dissenting views and inconvenient facts.
In the run-up to the Iraq war, Fleischer routinely made claims of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, a Saddam Hussein-Al Qaeda nexus, and mass popular support in Iraq for a US invasion—all of which have since been exposed as crude lies. Giving voice to the gangster mentality that pervades the Bush administration, he replied on October 1, 2002 to a question about the cost of a war to oust Saddam Hussein with an incitement to political assassination: “I can only say that the cost of a one-way ticket is substantially less than that. The cost of one bullet, if the Iraqi people can take it on themselves, is substantially less than that.”
Cover-up of government culpability, if not outright complicity, in 911; white-washing of right-wing/defense establishment links to the anthrax attacks that followed; promotion of propaganda and lies to justify aggressive wars against Afghanistan and Iraq and conceal US war crimes in both countries; defense of policies directing attacking the democratic rights and social conditions of the broad mass of the American people—such is the record of Fleischer in his White House post.
His undisguised contempt for the press and his refusal to answer journalists’ questions provoked grumbling within the White House press corps. However, the reporters, under pressure from their pro-Bush corporate paymasters, kept their misgivings to themselves.
Tom Rosenstiel, executive director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism, made the following apt characterization of Fleischer and the Bush White House: “They are the most controlling, the most stingy, the most paranoid White House we’ve had in modern times. This is a White House ... that does not seem to believe in the function that the press serves.”
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