To: Hank who wrote (440694 ) 8/10/2003 7:51:50 PM From: tejek Respond to Published on Saturday, August 9, 2003 by the Roanoke Times THE PICTURE emerging of the Bush White House is that of a radical administration so certain of its ideological rightness that it will distort and manipulate information as needed to soothe moderates and silence critics. Wilson found no basis for the report - bad enough, from the perspective of a White House building its case for war. But Wilson ran truly afoul of the administration only last month, when he wrote an op-ed article in The New York Times that revealed both his role and the duplicity of senior administration officials in contending that only low-level intelligence officials knew of his findings. Outing an undercover operative would escalate hardball politics to political suppression. And Wilson's frightening portrayal of an administration in which "spin" is spinning wildly out of control is all too credible. Every modern president's penchant for controlling the message has metastasized during this presidency into controlling the free flow of information that is the lifeblood of a self-governing society. Bush and his advisers are heading beyond partisanship onto dangerous new ground.
