Janeane Garofalo spot on analysis 3 years ago

[sirio11]

In Paul Phillips blog , he posted an excerpt from the book The Best War Ever that I found quite interesting and worthy of discussion in this forum:

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... the antiwar voices that appeared in the media consisted of protesters at rallies and Hollywood celebrities such as Sean Penn, Susan Sarandon, or Janeane Garofalo. These programming choices delivered an implicit message that only scruffy radicals and Hollywood celebrities opposed the war.

Even so, it is instructive in retrospect to see what those voices said then and how well it stacks up against what everyone now knows to be the truth. Here, for example, is an excerpt from an interview that Tony Snow did with Jeneane Garofalo on Fox News in February 2003, less than a month before the invasion began:

SNOW: Do you think [Saddam Hussein] is eager to obtain weapons of mass destruction?
GAROFALO: Yes, I think lots of people are eager to obtain weapons of mass destruction. But there's no evidence that he has weapons of mass destruction. There's been no evidence of him testing nuclear weapons. We have people that are in our face with nuclear weapons. We've got Iran and North Korea. We've got a problem with Pakistan... There's a whole lot of people that are going nuclear. And I think that Saddam Hussein is actually, with the evidence, the least able to use nuclear weapons and the least obvious offender in that area at the moment... But I also resent Rick -- you know, Senator Santorum's assertions that this won't be particularly costly or lengthy. This is going to be economically devastating for us. And also, the assertion that inaction breeds terrorist strikes, that is ridiculous. Action in Iraq will make us decidedly less safe.

How is it that Janeane Garofalo had a better analysis of Iraq's weapons program -- and of the likelihood of a protracted occupation -- than the combined forces of the White House, U.S. intelligence agencies, and leading U.S. news media?

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Of course some of us agreed with all of this at the time; but we were in the minority then. I wonder if there was somebody in the administration who agreed with this analysis at the time. My guess is nobody, since doing that was equivalent to admit you were a radical leftist and not even by the administration standards, even by the news media standards. I'm pretty sure when history will review all the events around the Iraq war; the U.S. news media involvement will be a shameful and disgraceful chapter.