The winner this month of the Armstrong Williams School…

posted by Bill Arnett @ 3:19 PM Permalink

…of Propagandistic Stenographers Award goes to Kyra Philips of CNN, who else?

This morning she flatly stated, without qualification, that all the Iraqis whom she had interviewed were scared that if American troops did leave Iraq there would be a great increase in suicide bombings. So I went looking for what actual polls taken of Iraqis really say.

This poll is from Think Progress on March 18th and reveals:

This week marks the fifth anniversary of the U.S. invasion in Iraq. While security has improved, there are growing concerns by both Iraqis and U.S. military officials that it will rise again in the near future. As has been widely noted, this lull in violence has not led to political progress. It also hasn’t led to an increase in services in Iraqis’ everyday lives.

McClatchy reports on these “worms in the water” five years after “liberation”:

To them, the real crime is that five years after the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, they still swelter in the summer and freeze in the winter because of a lack of electricity. Government rations are inevitably late, incomplete or expired. Garbage piles up for days, sometimes weeks, emanating toxic fumes.

The list goes on: black-market fuel, phone bills for land lines that haven’t worked in years, education and health-care systems degraded by the flight of thousands of Iraq’s best teachers and doctors. […]

In some poor areas of Baghdad, militias or Iranian-backed charities have become the main source of propane tanks, food staples, garbage collection and other services that the government should provide.

A new poll for BBC, ABC, ARD and NHK finds that a majority of Iraqis think their lives are good, “more than at any time in the last three years.” Yet at the same time, 72 percent oppose the presence of coalition forces in Iraq and 61 percent believe that these troops are making the security situation worse. Additionally, 53 percent say that Bush’s “surge” has “made overall security worse.

So it's crystal clear that any reports coming from Iraq by CNN personnel really demonstrate that they have their finger on the pulse of Iraq, so much so that they know what is better for Iraq than Iraqis, and that they are able to speak for all Iraqis based upon informal interviews by a single reporter stenographer who is undoubtedly unqualified to conduct polls and determine margins of error, right?

Much better than empirical evidence when you're cheerleading the war that bush has said,"…is good for our economy," eh?

Why don't they just give her pom-poms and a catchy cheer, like, "Rah, rah, ree, let's bomb them to their knees! Rah, rah, rass, let's steal their oil to make our gas!"

I feel so much better and informed now, don't you?

Labels: bush war doctrine, Conservatives, conspiracy, corruption, disinformation, foreign policy, propaganda, snark