Disinformation, official lies and denial

Josh Marshall writes a heartfelt post today about an article by Steve Coll in the New Yorker:

There are a number of ways I could come at writing this post -- on the qualities of Coll's comment, which is taut, concise and devastating, or the contents, to the extent we know them, of the report itself or the various remaining myths it explodes.

But the heart of Coll's brief comment, or at least what it told me, is the veritable cloud of unknowing, the organized campaign of public denial that still holds the ground in discussions of our war in Iraq -- despite the fact that public support for the war, its rationales and conduct, have fallen dramatically.

The president, his key advisors and their public defenders keep looking over the horizon to history's more positive verdict on their gamble. But there's little reason -- either from what we know of this war or the evolving view of past wars -- to think this adventure will be remembered as anything but a disaster.

And yet, only last month the country was knocked off the rails into a dingbat debate about whether things were actually bad in Iraq or whether the media was just telling America things were going badly and hiding all the good news. We actually had that debate -- not more than two weeks ago. It's like the AIDS patient who desperately needs treatment but falls under the spell of some charlatan who gets him wondering whether AIDS actually really exists.

Only we're a whole country with no real excuse.

I'll let others speak for themselves. But this is why I devoted such time to skewering that clown Howard Kaloogian for his bogus picture of how well things are going in Iraq. Someone who so clearly cares more about his political party and its sacred cows than his country -- and that's the only explanation for spouting such lies -- scarcely deserves a place in public life, let alone Congress.

Read Coll's short note. It won't take you more than a few minutes. Even though public opinion has turned fairly decisively against the war, our whole public life today -- not just related to this war, but centered on it -- is awash in a sea of disinformation, official lies and denial. Indeed, lies and bad-faith obfuscation still set the terms of the public debate. We've barely scraped the surface in understanding how we got into this war -- largely because there's been no serious or independent investigation. And the dominant voices in the media are still willing to indulge the voices of liars on a par with those who are at least trying to grapple with what's happening.