Eric Boehlert: Bush doomed Afghanistan when he invaded Iraq; pro-war press won't say so

[RVN VET71]

23. And Bush/Cheney killed more Americans than did Osama bin Laden

That is something I will never forgive or forget. The body count of American military personnel in Iraq alone exceeded the 3,000 that bin Laden murdered. I think the combined Afghan-Iraq body count was above 5,000.

And Cheney got an $800,000,000 windfall for his company, Halliburton, in a non-compete contract -- and many millions more in other sub contracts in Iraq. The son of a bitch got paid for his new found wealth in the blood of American troops.

But the media! They totally failed, absolutely, for ever and all time, failed to do their goddam jobs. While 100s of thousands of people protested in Europe, our media was tittering over moron waiters in New York City pouring French wine down the sewer for the cameras. The asshole Republicans -- while our sons and daughters were unnecessarily in harms way, getting killed, wounded, and traumatized by the violence of an illegal war -- showed their “patriotism” by renaming French Fries. And the blind support of republicans and many, many Democrats for the carnage Bush/Cheney unleashed in Iraq -- leaving Afghanistan hanging in warfare-limbo while they did so -- in no way hurt their donor base. Without NPR, I would not have known about the overseas protests against the war. Without NPR I would not have known that the inspectors sent to Iraq by the U.N. had determined, without any doubt, that Hussein had no nuclear program, that he had no weapons of mass destruction. And all it took was a freaking IQ in triple digits to know that Hussein and bin-Laden were, if anything, bitterly in opposition to each other in religion, in politics, in military goals. But our vaunted and excruciatingly overpaid media was focused on how cool were our weapons, and how powerful our military, and how dirty and evil were Husseins troops.

Sorry for this rant. I was so furious at the media for sucking up to Cheney/Bush by ignoring evidence and heaping praise on the savage bastards who destroyed Iraq at the cost of thousands of lives and trillions of dollars, that I hit the roof when I noticed today the same sort of lock-step action by them now, this time in the attacks made on President Biden for getting us out of the mess that was started by a Republican Administration.