Always at war with... wait, what?

There seems to have gone out a decree from Caesar Augustus: Be scared! No, scarederer! Could we suggest that, if they really want to make the fear appeal work, certain media outlets need to spend a little more time in the files?

Not to say no one's going into the files at all -- the Fair 'n' Balanced Network, for instance, is recycling a photo from February 2014 to illustrate the "DANGER AT SEA" posed by Iran. Interestingly, in that case, the story it illustrated was there to point out that the two Iranian dreadnoughts headed straight for our precious bodily fluids electric grid were in real life "a pair of 'rust buckets' Tehran is using to prove to its people it can project power around the globe."

The Washington Times documents a different outcome of Kenyan fecklessness:

The United States is now Iran’s air force.

Good thing we've already sent them the antiaircraft missiles, huh?

The recycling-without-reading prize, though, goes to Times Editor Emeritus Wes Pruden. After a few did-this-in-Caesar-seem-ambitious paragraphs that cover the golf, the Islam and the bust of Churchill comes this:

The president even loves Israel, but in his way. It’s tough love to bring the Jews to heel. Just as Secretary of State John Kerry is topping up a deal to satisfy the mullahs in Iran, comes the news that the United States has declassified a 386-page report that reveals in minute detail Israel’s super-discreet nuclear program. Everybody knows Israel has one, but until now Israel, with American support, has never acknowledged it. To do so, all mature hands have agreed, could set off a nuclear arms race in the Middle East.

Is there a fixed number of times the party press has to be reminded of this?* The prize for unveiling the "super-discreet nuclear program" goes to ... the party press itself: Rupert Murdoch's Sunday Times. Unless you want to give a few points for effort to Ehud Olmert in 2006:

“Iran openly, explicitly and publicly threatens to wipe Israel off the map. Can you say that this is the same level, when they are aspiring to have nuclear weapons, as America, France, Israel, Russia?”

As Fox itself noted -- in a rather detailed explanation of the Nixon administration's frustration over Israel's nuclear program -- Olmert's aides said he was describing responsible states, not nuclear ones. Oddly, though, there doesn't seem to be any record of the Times calling for any Fox reporters' heads on plates. No doubt that's because we were still at war with Eurasia Eastasia.

* The link suggests the original hed: wesley-pruden-obama-reveals-israels-nuclear-progra/