Media Bias? What Media Bias?

The fascinating story of the day, as reported by CNN, appears to be that Ramsey Clark, former US Attorney General under Lyndon B. Johnson, is being added to Saddam Hussein's defense team.

Of course, this is rather old news; Clark himself announced this with much fanfare in February of this year, publicly complaining in April about how his innocent" client was being "demonized", before being canned in August.

At any rate, it shouldn't be surprising; this is the same man who is still in complete and total denial about Slobodan Milosevic and Fidel Castro. Ramsey Clark's record of supporting every nasty regime under the sun as long as it's anti-American is well-known to the world and can be obtained faster than you can Google "World Worker's Party".

However, the amusing thing is that, when you look at those articles I cited above about Clark's choice, one of the things for which Ramsey Clark is noted -- the founding and ongoing guidance of the antiwar organization International ANSWER following 9/11, when it opposed the invasion of Afghanistan, and to today -- is NOWHERE to be found.

Simple answer why: International ANSWER is something widely known and recognized by the American public as the core of the antiwar movement and is associated with Democratic politicians.

A prime example of this is liberal columnist and gadfly Eric Alterman. In his work published in the November 21 issue of The Nation, he calls International ANSWER "Stalinist androids" who support "Saddamite dictatorships" and ostensibly calls on liberals to reject them and their views. However, Alterman had previously admitted in September that he supported ANSWER's presence at antiwar activities because it would make for larger rallies and that liberals should just stomach ANSWER's antics and extremism.

The irony, of course, is that Alterman argues that "most of the media and most people have the good sense to understand that people who oppose the war are not these Stalinist androids". However, he and his fellow media members are apparently doing their best to make certain that those "Stalinist androids" that he flatters, cultivates, and tells liberals to stomach for the good of the cause to get more people out to his rallies elsewhere don't have THEIR name smeared by association with Saddam denialists, even when it's their own leader.

What makes this even funnier is that Alterman is demonstrating the convolutions required to make his irrational hatred of Bush publicly acceptable. He can't be truthful about Saddam's crimes because it would push public opinion in the opposite direction of where he wants it, but he can't be truthful about the fact that the backbone of the antiwar movement is antiwar because it denies Saddam Hussein's human rights abuses. The only solution is to hide information and manipulate the truth to mislead -- exactly what he and his fellow antiwar activists accuse the Bush administration of doing, only with far less evidence on their part.