The Bush Gang

David Frum via Andrew Sullivan.

31 May 2008 12:03 pm

"George W. Bush brought most of his White House team with him from Texas. Except for Karl Rove, these Texans were a strikingly inadequate bunch. Harriet Miers, Alberto Gonzalez, Karen Hughes, Al Hawkins, Andy Card (the last not a Texan, but a lifelong Bush family retainer) — they were more like characters from The Office than the sort of people one would expect to find at the supreme height of government in the world’s most powerful nation.

McClellan, too, started in Bush’s governor’s office, and if he never belonged to the innermost circle of power, he nonetheless gained closer proximity than would be available to almost anyone who did not first serve in Texas. That early team was recruited with one paramount consideration in mind: loyalty. Theoretically, it should be possible to combine loyalty with talent. But that did not happen often with the Bush team."

Never Forget: We Were Lied To

Not just by the Bush administration, but by nearly all the media. Except the folks at McClatchy (at the time, Knight-Ridder).
The inside baseball folks on the progressive side of the media, print, broadcast and 'sphere, know who told the truth and who went along with the game plan in the build-up to the Iraq War, but unless you were paying close attention and looking for alternate versions of reality, or subscribed to one of their newspapers, you didn't know.
The McClatchy folks themselves decided to remind us again this week after taking about as much as they could stand of the media's uniformly defensive response to Scott McClellan's indictment of their reporting in his book.
It's worth a full read, but here's a snippet.

We confess that here at McClatchy, which purchased Knight Ridder two years ago, we do have a dog in this fight. Our team - Joe Galloway, Clark Hoyt, Jon Landay, Renee Schoof, Warren Strobel, John Walcott, Tish Wells and many others - was, with a few exceptions, the only major news media organization that before the war consistently and aggressively challenged the White House's case for war, and its lack of planning for post-war Iraq.