Stalking the Neonuts- Bush's (Yellowcake) Speechwriter Hired By WaPost

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September 15, 2006


Smoking Gun: Washington Post Hires Top Bush Speechwriter
by Jeff Cohen

Few media marching bands have beat the Iraq war drums more frantically and with more influence than the editorial pages of the Washington Post. On Monday, the Post announced the hiring of another drummer boy, one who played a key propaganda role inside the Bush White House.

The Post editorial pages were an echo chamber for pre-war distortions and paranoid fantasies originated by the White House Iraq Group (WHIG). So it’s grotesquely fitting that the Post would hire as an op-ed columnist, Michael Gerson, Bush’s top speechwriter who – as a key wordsmith within WHIG – helped originate the flights of rhetorical fancy that so dazzled the Post’s laptop warriors. Gerson spun the deceit; the Post peddled it. Now they’ll operate under the same roof.

In explaining why the Post was adding yet another pro-war voice to its op-ed page, hawkish editorial page editor Fred Hiatt described Gerson as being “a different kind of conservative from the other conservatives on our page.” Thanks, Fred, for all the diversity.

In their new book “Hubris,” Michael Isikoff and David Corn write that it was Gerson who –

* inserted references to the yellowcake-from-Niger tale into various Bush speeches, including the 2003 State of the Union.

* helped prepare Secretary of State Colin Powell’s dishonest and bellicose speech to the U.N.

* conceived Team Bush’s trademark paranoid “soundbite” warning of a potential Iraq nuclear program: “The first sign of a smoking gun might be a mushroom cloud.”



According to “Hubris,” the “mushroom cloud” line was intended for a Bush speech, but was too good to hold. http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003121401 It was first deployed in September 2002 by anonymous White House aides in a New York Times front-page scare story (by Judith Miller and Michael Gordon) warning that Iraq had “stepped up its quest for nuclear weapons.” On CNN that day, Condoleezza Rice declared: “We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.” And Gerson’s line became a standard and manipulative war cry from then on.

http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=21&ItemID=10966

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1. beyond redemption

:puke:

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2. .