From The Boston Globe, 6/19/05:
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2005/06/19/conservative_spin_befuddles_the_media/

Conservative spin befuddles the media

By Thomas Oliphant, Globe Columnist


WEAK IN THE face of The Great Conservative Attack Machine, two of
America's more beleaguered institutions are now struggling with its
equally ugly sibling, The Great Conservative Retreat Machine.

From pre-Iraq War British government memos to an autopsy report in
Florida to the release of all the scraps of John Kerry's military
records, conservatives are attempting to argue the opposite of what
they recently claimed .

In the political world, the consensus is that it's working and that
those beleaguered institutions, namely the news media and the
Democratic Party, are once again flat-footed or worse.

The Bush administration insisted three years ago that war with Iraq
was essential to halt Saddam Hussein's program developing weapons of
mass destruction.

Faced first with no evidence after the war and now with documents from
Tony Blair's government detailing US hype, deception, and lack of
preparedness for the war's aftermath, the same people are now using
almost identical words to mask today's absurd realities.

Administration and Republican congressional leaders also spent
virtually all of March in rhetorical unison, spreading the lie that
the late Terri Schiavo was a responsive, feeling, communicative person
and thus worthy of federal intervention to fix a legal case against
her husband so that her feeding tube could remain in perpetuity.

Sworn testimony and unanimous rulings to the contrary from judges were
then used as the basis for a vicious attack, again by the right-wing
chorus, on the very concept of an independent judiciary.

Faced with elaborate medical evidence of a person with half a brain
and no eyesight, there was a skillful combination of the preposterous
claim that only the truth was being sought and unctuous assurances
from Senate majority leader Bill Frist, who told a national television
audience last week that he had put the episode behind him and moved
on.

For nearly a month during last year's presidential campaign, the news
media and conservative activists trumpeted ''charges" that Senator
Kerry's record for valorous service in Vietnam was a fraud.

The absence of evidence, except to the contrary, was no hindrance to
the attack machine's operation; and the presence of Kerry's records is
no hindrance to a decision by all those parties to last year's outrage
to simply stand mute today.

Today's political and media silence would appear to suggest that both
players realize that last year's real fraud by Swift Boat Veterans for
Truth was just politics.

And we wonder why so few people bother to vote.

Democrats and their progressive allies fume and blog, and the news
media, having largely repeated the attack machine's lines, switch
roles and ''report" the opposite.

In the case of the Downing Street memos -- a thick package of detailed
accounts of top-level Bush administration plans and thoughts -- there
is first silence and then a chorus of the worst excuse in journalism:
I did something on that in 2002 and this is old news.

It took one of Congress's best analysts of the absurd, Representative
Barney Frank, to define Bush's Downing Street response.

As a reading of the White House record this month shows, the
indications of an artificial blending of intelligence analysis with
war-making intentions and negligence where the war's aftermath was
concerned were false, but anyway it's old news and not important.

At a rump hearing by Democrats looking to give the memos more
publicity, Frank didn't have to wonder aloud how both statements could
be true.

The only things that appears to matter politically is that both
statements are repeated.

Except for a few holdouts on the loony right, the Schiavo autopsy was
so definitive there was no refutation possible, no room for ''I'd do
it again."

But neither has there been any acceptance of responsibility, much less
apology from Frist for offering a phony diagnosis based on her staged
hospital video, or from House majority leader Tom DeLay for his claim
that speech-therapy was what Schiavo needed.

Where Kerry is concerned, the right-wingers behind the slander
directed at him all hid, while the news media demonstrated their
fervor for seriousness by emphasizing that his military files included
his Yale grade-point average.

What too many people don't realize is that the Retreat Machine is
simply the pause before the next round of attacks.

According to the buzz there's a ''hot" book coming in days that will
''destroy" Senator Hillary Clinton's plans to be president.

Can't wait.