William Rivers Pitt: The Missing Piece Meets the Big O

[babylonsister]

The Missing Piece Meets the Big O

Saturday 31 July 2010

by: William Rivers Pitt, t r u t h o u t | Op-Ed


(Image: Lance Page / t r u t h o u t; Adapted: Douglas Mappin, Angela Wolf)


I've been trying to wrap my mind around the dispiriting sense of failure that seems to have enveloped the Obama administration on the eve of the November midterms. The right hates him because he won, because he's Black, and because he won. Their utter intransigence has completely upended Obama's knee-jerk instinct for compromise and bipartisanship, making it appear that he's not getting anything done, and so the middle of the electorate feels a deep sense of disappointment exacerbated by unrelentingly bad coverage in the media. The left is up in arms because he hasn't met the lofty goals set after his election, and because he's allowed himself to get rolled by the right and their corporate paymasters on half a dozen occasions, resulting in several half-a-loaf pieces of legislation that look more like giveaways than accomplishments.

snip//

A light went on in my head while reading the words "Age of Revisionism" and "qualifying the performances of the Bush era." For USC, that means Reggie. For the rest of us, those lines can just as easily apply to George W. and his own disgraceful tenure as president. That's the missing piece, and though it should be obvious, we seem to have forgotten how much of a wretched impact his years in the Oval Office had and continue to have on this nation and the world.

Part of the reason we've managed to forget, of course, is that he's been gone for almost two years now. Under normal circumstances, that tends to put the onus on the current president; Obama has been holding the reins with a Democratically-controlled congress on Capitol Hill for eighteen months, and therefore all eyes tend to fall on him. The problem is that no president in American history has done more damage and screwed us worse than George W. Bush did. In the nearly 3,000 days he spent in office, Bush cut the country to ribbons in ways that have never been seen before, and the impact of that era lingers to this day.

The main reason for our forgetfulness, however, can be found on your television and in the pages of your newspaper. The media has completely redacted the impact of the Bush era from their coverage of the Obama administration, a continuing act of deception that I believe is completely deliberate. The entire Bush administration is a lesson in media cowardice and complicity; they rolled over for him for virtually every one of those 3,000 days, and would now like to have us all forget it happened. If as Bush falls in the forest and the media doesn't cover it, did it happen? Certainly, but when the daily grind of the 24-hour news cycle omits the idiot elephant that remains in the room, the narrative of the present becomes skewed and distorted.

more...

http://www.truth-out.org/the-missing-piece-meets-big-o61887