For those who don't know, Jon Meacham is the Managing Editor of Newsweek magazine. In a meritocracy, the managing editor of one of the nation's premier weekly news glossies would be one of the most informed people in the country. He would be a rabid consumer of all kinds of news from all sources, keeping constantly abreast of every possible nuance to every important story across the entire spectrum of the media landscape.
In our system, the managing editor of Newsweek is apparently a total moron.
Meacham went on the radio this weekend and ranted about how the CIA sent Joseph Wilson on a trip to Niger in 2003, after the start of the Iraq war. If indeed the CIA had waited until after a war had begun before sending someone to investigate one of the central claims that underlay the rationale behind that war, that would definitely be worth getting upset about. The only trouble is, Joseph Wilson's Niger mission occurred in 2002, well before the Iraq war.
Meacham nonetheless said the following with a straight face:
IMUS: Who asked them to do it [send Wilson on the trip], the CIA?
MEACHAM: Well, they were trying—remember, everything was falling apart. So they’ve got to—now, one would hope that they would have undertaken this, done their homework before we had begun a war based partly on this. But things were beginning to very explicitly disintegrate and these documents were—it turned out they’d been faxed through Italy, remember this?—on the uranium. So I think it came out—it probably came out of the CIA, which is supposed to vet all of this.
There's nothing more really to be said about this shocking level of ignorance about a key story that not only is his magazine covering, but which he is on the radio to offer his "expert" opinion about. But is it any wonder that the RNC can run rings around the news media, filling it with all kinds of crap, when the people who are supposed to run things are this stupid?
1 comment:
You should call Time and try to goad them into it.
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