A piece on the Huffington Post dredged up this old G. W. Bush interview with Irish journalist Carol Coleman, who is probably still the only individual ever to subject Bush to the power of capital-J-Journalism. She's definitely still too polite to him, but unlike the rest of the media, she doesn't let his condescension and pouting throw her off-subject.
It is also worth noting that, while it may be hyperbole to say it was "banned", as the title on YouTube suggests, it is still true that no major news outlets played this interview in the U.S. While I agree with you that considering our media establishment, this isn't surprising, it still deserves a rant for the sake of decency, if nothing else:
It ... just ... confounds the mind ... that to this day, after round after round of clear evidence that this man regularly (!!!) lies to this country on so many subjects of the utmost importance, that our media establishment still tiptoes around this man's huge body of misdoings, only referring to them through the most nondescript of watered-down euphemisms: "the President's low popularity rating". Low popularity rating my ass: He's a criminal. And he should be in prison, for the sake of the rule of law, our country's legacy, basic decency, ... and so on.
Another blog commenting on this video suggests that it should be required viewing in classrooms across the country, and I couldn't agree more. Don't watch it if you're in a good mood, though: just like any other media appearance by our overgrown-frat-boy-in-chief, it can ruin a perfectly good afternoon if you let it.
Over at the Mahablog, there's an admirably researched, well-written and entertaining piece entitled "The Power of (Right Wing) Myth", named, of course, after the Joseph Campbell book of similar name. The essential premise is that the purveyors of right-wing ideology such as Bill Kristol, Brit Hume, Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity, etc. are constantly reaching back into history to come up with justifications for their ideas (as we all should, I suppose), but instead of consulting actual history, the history they turn to is some cartoonized, fantastical soup of emotionally-charged-yet-fact-free metaphors only loosely based on the original events.
Those of us few high-minded masochists who take the time to parse-out their dubious assertions find that they most often work from sort of a copy of a copy of a Photoshopped copy of real events, which unfortunately ends up sounding just true enough to fool a) the media, and b) most other people who aren't paying very close attention into believing that they're experts -- and not absolutely loony, which by all rational definitions they actually are.
... but I digress again. Back to the essay at the Mahablog: Read it, it's good for you! Plus it's peppered with lots of juicy historical tidbits that are ideal ammunition for that next time your right-wing friend uses a bad, tired old analogy such as, for example, how much G. W. Bush is like Winston Churchill. (Go ahead, groan all you want -- but grown men in suits actually argue that one on live television with alarming frequency.)
