Be embarrassed. Be very embarrassed

What might we find at the top of the homepage of the Foremost Newspaper of the Carolinas? (Aside from a lot of football and basketball, which is the firmest ground most of your big regional dailies can stand on anymore?) Why, it's an important news story! Things I might not know about the Bush record! Let's have a look, shall we?

First thing we'll see is a title page: "100 Things Americans May Not Know About The Bush Administration Record" (Oops. Contents must have settled during shipping.) Next thing we'll see is the presidential seal. Do you suppose that might tip you off, just a tad bit, that what follows might not be the sort of thing we expect from the workings of the news machine?

But onward. The first thing I "may not know" about the Bush record is that Bush "waged the global war on terror"! Gawd. What planet do you people think your readers live on? We just sort of missed the whole GWoT thing amid the basketball, football and banking news?

But there are, of course, bullet points: Bush "removed threatening regimes in Iraq and Afghanistan, which freed 50 million people"! It's interesting that the unnamed propagandists put Iraq, which in no conceivable way was "threatening" US security, ahead of Afghanistan, which was allowing safe haven to a genuine security threat. In the longer term, we might want to ask the "50 million people" what exactly they've been freed from -- or perhaps more appropriately, what they've been freed into. Endemic violence and foreign military occupation don't generally produce happy, stable, peaceable democracies. Or does the Observer just assume its readers have the same sort of zero attention span its editors have when it comes to ongoing stories like Gaza?

You could go on and on, as the PDF does for 41 relentless, disingenuous, morally vacant pages. I tend to look first at the stunningly Orwellian lies about international issues, because that's my area of interest, but that doesn't mean stuff like
Appointed Judges Committed to Ruling by the Letter of the Law
Appointed Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts, Associate Justice Samuel Alito, and more than one-third of all active Federal judges, who will not legislate from the bench.
... gets a free pass. Please: On what planet, under how many funny-colored suns, did this thing look like news? And how do you propose to assure any of your readers who still put some faith in the market-based model of journalism that you can be trusted to make competent judgments about things that public officials do and say?

Somebody -- more than one somebody -- should be deeply embarrassed by this. What's the point of doing journalism if you can't do it right?