Censorship!!!

[dude1394]

See-BS has decided NOT to run another bush smear. idleryet ponders why...

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This made me laugh aloud:
NEW YORK (AP) - CBS News has shelved a "60 Minutes" report on the rationale for war in Iraq because it would be "inappropriate" to air it so close to the presidential election, the network said on Saturday.
No, really -- it's freaking hilarious. This refers to the story 60 Minutes II bumped for the forged memo story -- a rehash of the old "Iraq didn't really try to buy [fissionable] yellowcake from Niger" story. So two weeks ago was not too close to the presidential election. Why is CBS really shelving the story? Is it --
a) Because it has always been completely phony to call the Niger forgeries a rationale for war in Iraq? (Bush did not mention Niger in his State of the Union address -- delivered, in any case, months after he'd already received war authorization from Congress -- but instead cited British intelligence reports about other Iraqi attempts to obtain yellowcake in Africa.)
or
b) Because the charge is not only discredited as fact, but shopworn as a smear? (The huge media effort to pump up ambassador Joe Wilson's denunciation of the administration for ignoring his "nothing in Niger" report fizzled out long before the September 11 Commission revealed that Wilson was in fact lying, and had been told exactly the opposite.)
But those aren't reasons that would sway CBS.
Try c) Because CBS would look like idiots arguing that anyone else was fooled by forged documents. (Not that the administration really was fooled, by the way -- unlike the case of CBS and the National Guard memos, the CIA had the Niger documents checked and discredited as soon as they could lay their hands on the originals. The storyline still repeated in all major newspapers has always been, I repeat, completely phony.)

So the CBS announcement is a crock, but that doesn't make it clumsy. It's beautifully designed to be spun in opposite directions for opposite audiences. To CBS's more conservative affiliates, outraged over Rathergate, it says, "See? We don't put out stories meant to affect the election," while to the mainstream media, it says, "Right-wing criticism has shut down a story that could have ousted Bush! You must defend us!"

You gotta laugh.