When Did the Media Flip-Flop on the War(s)?

I sometimes wonder if the media thinks the public has a universal case of amnesia. Like we can’t remember what they were saying way, way back in the days when George W. Bush was president.

Bush was president right after Grover Cleveland, I believe.

You remember Bush, don’t you? The media hated the guy. They hated him because he started two wars. He started them because this guy named Saddam Hussein (who became nicer the more they hated Bush) picked a fight with Bush’s Daddy and it was basically that simple (oh, there was some oil mixed in there too, so you can pick either reason). There was also a Good War and a Bad War. Afghanistan was Good, Iraq was Bad.

Today the same people who hung on every word said by anti-war Cindy Sheehan during the Bush presidency can’t find Cindy anymore and there are only Good Wars.” We actually have three wars going on now and they are suddenly all good. One is kinetic, which means it just happened and nobody could help it or stop it. We certainly can’t blame anybody for it. Besides, nobody is really getting killed in this latest war (somewhere in Africa, I believe) because we don’t see them being killed on TV anymore. It’s tough to get video signals for those live shots out of Libya these days, and cameras don’t work well in the deserts of North Africa. There’s sand and all that stuff. You know what happened the first time you took a camera to the beach.

Since Bush left the White House more than a century ago, there is a new Commander in Chief. Barack Obama. Way back in 2005, this Obama guy was right there with the media hating everything Evil Bush was doing with the wars. He said this on the Daily Show.

Iraq is sort of a situation where you’ve got a guy who drove the bus into the ditch. You obviously have to get the bus out of the ditch, and that’s not easy to do, although you probably should fire the driver.

This was before “The Beast” got stuck in Ireland, so he probably wasn’t talking about that.

I’ve heard that line about driving the car into the ditch somewhere before, so it must be one of his favorites, but in this case he talks about Bad Wars and says the driver should be fired. I think he’s talking about Bush here, but since Bush was president during the Dark Ages, I can’t be really sure. Besides, I believe we’ve won that war in Iraq, so it’s probably a good thing we stayed there and got the job done. You remember Iraq, don’t you? My memory is fading. I think it was called Mesopotamia back then and the Mongols, Turks, and Ottomans were involved. Not sure, don’t quote me on that. I’m just a little ol’ media guy and I know it was a long, long time ago.

Oh…there’s more here, I dug very, very, very deep (it took :07 seconds to google search: “Obama war quotes”) and I came up with this gem from Obama on Jan 3, 2007.

There is no military solution to the war in Iraq. Our troops can help suppress the violence, but they cannot solve its root causes. And all the troops in the world won’t be able to force Shia, Sunni, and Kurd to sit down at a table, resolve their differences, and forge a lasting peace. In fact, adding more troops will only push this political settlement further and further into the future.

Maybe that quote was from a different Obama, Fred Obama from San Francisco. I’m going to have to check on that.

I’m not 100% sure what actually happened to help end that Evil Bush Iraq War for Oil and Revenge because it was so long ago, but I believe it was something called a “surge.” A surge of troops, or something like that. I wonder if the media heard about the surge? Probably not, because about that same time they were busy cheering over Evil Bush’s Vice President’s Assistant (somebody named Scooter) getting busted for a process crime in the case where a guy in an entirely different department (called “State,” I believe) leaked the name of a non-covert CIA agent. But that was all sooooo long ago. How could the media possibly remember all this? Besides, maybe that war was won because of a Kinetic Surge that just happened because motion just happens.

It’s also nice that the media has forgotten about that prison called Gitmo being closed. I remember them saying that Gitmo was creating terrorists. Putting people in prisons made otherwise nice people angry so we should close the prisons, was the argument. Like if somebody steals your car, if they didn’t have prisons that person would not have gone bad and stolen your car. This makes perfect sense and Obama agreed with the media on this as well, or they agreed with him, it’s hard to know which came first because it was so long ago. Too bad the internet wasn’t created way back then, so the media can’t search for those quotes.

I saw a news show recently where the media called Obama a “Cowboy, like Cary Grant or Matt Dillon.” My memory is not very good, but I think that Bush guy and another guy called, Reagan, were also called Cowboys by the media back in the day, but they were Evil Cowboys, and now we must have a Good Cowboy (did you hear he shot bin Laden? Ask him nicely and he may show you the picture in his wallet) because they love him so, even when he starts wars and drops bombs from Predator drones on innocents. Nowadays somebody called NATO is to blame. A funny name for a warmonger, but since the recession closed the library near my house, I can’t walk there to check to see who NATO is. I worked with a weather guy name NATE once, but he would never start a war.

So, since there is no way to verify much of what has gone on here since reel-to-reel tape recorders weren’t invented while all this was happening, I just have to go by my gut instincts and figure that the media flip-flopped on the Evil Bush Wars Started Because Cheney Used to Run Halliburton when their Good Cowboy took over. I guess it is that simple.