At least, enough of them and enough of the power structure refuse to tell the Aemrican people the truth, and so we are lied to, given a rosy picture, in spite of everyone’s insistence that “we’re not trying to sugar-coat anything”. That is exactly the pattern of this administration. Yesterday, the head security offcier in Iraq told us exactly what the Bush administration has been desperately attempting to deny and to give us instead, that “sugar-coating”. And somehow, an eery denial and out-of-touch-with-reality defense of this administration continues, buttressed by right wing media, Churches (those that call themselves that), and to a disgusting extent, the mainstream media, to whom giving the news has become a political maneuver, and so they pass on the propagandadized versions as “balance” and “fairness”, and repeatedly in so doing, aid in the deception of the American people, and effectively re-elect Bush again. Do they really think that a second Bush term will enable them to more effectively serve. It most certainly will not, especially given the lack of backbone and integrity they’ve shown over the past 4 years, a nd in their failures to report how tens of thousands of Florida voters were purged from the voter registration roles, and how a full recount, which is what the Supreme Court stopped, woudl have, under any standard, resulted in the election of Gore. My mind resists the temptation to imagine how many things could have been different had that happened, becuase it is too painful to emerge from that daydream and realize what we have instead, and what failures of this administration are yet to be revealed, a nd what the consequences of those might be.

James Carroll , as usual, is excellent in this article:

Afraid To Look in the Moral Abyss

The performance of US intelligence has been consistent: Its strategic failures caused the war, and its tactical ignorance of the enemy is losing the war….

But it takes a disciplined imagination to acknowledge that the less personal savageries of bombs, missiles, artillery, and heavy weapons are, to those blown to smithereens, also barbaric. The main horror of what the “coalition” is doing is not a matter of the occasional soldier who, in the heat of battle, commits a war crime, but the steady destruction rained on cities, villages, the Iraqi people. This violence is wreaked calmly, from a distance, within the rules of engagement.
The war itself is the American war crime. But that is lost in the “normalcy” of the news.
On the other side, it is the proliferation of suicide-bombing that has come to seem normal. Soldiers commonly risk their lives for nation, honor, or buddy — but they will not kill themselves with forethought, in large numbers, except for the most transcendent of reasons. The United States has given itself an enemy that shows by its central tactic that it is fighting for God.
Americans, meanwhile, are so confused about religion that we have just been through an election in which “religious values” were defined as key, but precisely in ways that kept the war out of the discussion. America’s purpose in Iraq is a compound of such deflection, self-deception, half-measures, and shallow thinking. The opposition, meanwhile, is absolute and unblinking. That difference partly answers the question with which this column began, but mainly we avert our eyes because the war is a moral abyss. If we dare to look, as Nietzsche said, the abyss stares back.