Bushitler and the first draft of history

'Imagine an administration that has persuaded one of the world's most opaque and troublesome regimes to negotiate the dismantling of its nukes.
President Bush has had to engage in the art of compromise
Imagine an administration has given more than $15bn towards treating HIV/Aids, mainly in Africa; that has hinted it might boycott the Beijing Olympics if China doesn't intervene to stop Burmese monks from getting slaughtered; that has tried - and failed - to force immigration reform down the throats of its own party; that obsesses about alternative fuels and talks climate change.
Imagine an administration that prefers a diplomatic to a military option in Iran, is in bed with the French, on the sofa with the Germans and in the cooler with the Brits.
Stop imagining. What I have described is the White House of George W Bush in October 2007.' Matt Frei
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/7027166.stm

Absolutely fascinating. Journalism has been called 'the first draft of history' but is very often nothing of the sort. Very often it is the 'groupthink' of large numbers of 'right thinking' journalists who believe they know the real story and are willing to change facts, ignore facts that don't fit and hunt down the few facts that do fit their narrative in the cause of their shared conviction. The George W Bush case is a perfect example. Bush hatred is endemic in both the British and American large-scale media. They believe he's a hard-right moron who couldn't think his way out of a paper bag, dedicated to killing brown-skinned people for oil. The facts don't bear this out at all, but the vast hordes of uppity journo's confident in their own superior intellects are just not willing to accept that.

Until now, that is. Matt Frei is a good journalist. He's never struck me as a fan of George W., but as this piece points out, a simple recitation of what George W has done over the last seven years shows that the caricature of him is so far from the truth thats its laughable.

Mr Frei goes on to note 'It's true, his instincts may still hail from Texas. But his actions have been moulded by Washington's Beltway. Even the most ardent Bush-basher has to admit that W has evolved.' Actually, he hasn't evolved- he was always what reasonable American commentators call a 'Broad-tent Republican'. Not mentioned for instance in Mr Frei's list is George W's consistent appeal to Latino-Americans, something which bugs the hell out of the right wing of the Republican party, who generally wish that the Latino's would all go home. The caricature of George W has not become innacurate recently- it was always wrong.

As William James said, there is nothing so absurd that it cannot be believed as truth if repeated often enough. The truth for the lazy journo's who populate our big newspapers and tv stations is that Bushitler is a raving right-wing loony bent on world domination and stealing the resources of the world. But when history comes to be written, as with Mr Frei's first draft, the story will be very different.