Mea culpa, mea culpa! So when do you start saying Bush lies?

OK, we suffered through the New York Times' tear-jerking "we're sorry" about underplaying all the reasons we should NOT have gone into Iraq. The mea culpa supposedly exposed their dirty linen. So who the fuck cares? They didn't have the guts or the chutzpah to take on the Bush Administration when it was very clear they were lying, or at least "overselling" the need to go to war. NYT, spare me the hand-wringing and do your fuckin' job.

This just makes me angry.

So now we have an expose of the Washington Post by its media critic. Same old story: no guts by the editors. It probably should not come as a surprise. It took a while for the Watergate stories to start hitting the front page, but AT LEAST THEY DID!

Is the Washington Post sin greater than the Times? Hard to say. The Times reporter actually played it down, thus making the job for the editors easier. Question: so why hasn't that freakin' dame cashiered? Why does she still have a job there?

But in the Washington Post's situation, their reporters were warning them that the Bush Administration was pulling a Lyndon Johnson, and the freakin' - no, fuckin' - editors buried the stories.

If you have had a personal hand in creating a war that has killed more than 900 Americans and an ungodly number of Iraqis, do you sleep at night. And, yes, I think the Washington Post editors have had a hand in it.

The Post on WMDs: An Inside Story
Prewar Articles Questioning Threat Often Didn't Make Front Page

By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, August 12, 2004; Page A01

Days before the Iraq war began, veteran Washington Post reporter Walter Pincus put together a story questioning whether the Bush administration had proof that Saddam Hussein was hiding weapons of mass destruction.

But he ran into resistance from the paper's editors, and his piece ran only after assistant managing editor Bob Woodward, who was researching a book about the drive toward war, "helped sell the story," Pincus recalled. "Without him, it would have had a tough time getting into the paper." Even so, the article was relegated to Page A17.

"We did our job but we didn't do enough, and I blame myself mightily for not pushing harder," Woodward said in an interview. "We should have warned readers we had information that the basis for this was shakier" than widely believed. "Those are exactly the kind of statements that should be published on the front page."

As violence continues in postwar Iraq and U.S. forces have yet to discover any WMDs, some critics say the media, including The Washington Post, failed the country by not reporting more skeptically on President Bush's contentions during the run-up to war.

An examination of the paper's coverage, and interviews with more than a dozen of the editors and reporters involved, shows that The Post published a number of pieces challenging the White House, but rarely on the front page. Some reporters who were lobbying for greater prominence for stories that questioned the administration's evidence complained to senior editors who, in the view of those reporters, were unenthusiastic about such pieces. The result was coverage that, despite flashes of groundbreaking reporting, in hindsight looks strikingly one-sided at times.