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This has to be one of the most pitiful things I've seen in a long time, even by Fox's "standards" -- if they had any. Brit Hume jumped the shark on Bret Baier's show this Monday and tried to conflate their drummed-up Benghazi non-scandal to George W. Bush lying about Saddam Hussein and fearmongering to get us to invade a country that was not a threat to the United States.

HUME: Long experience teaches that highly anticipated Congressional hearings often fail to meet expectations. Witnesses don't quite say in public what they told investigators ahead of time. Congressional interrogators prove inept and unfocused. But if Wednesday's Benghazi hearing lives up to its billing and the truth about what happened that night and the administration's efforts to disguise it, might at last begin to come out.

Yet for this case to become the scandal it surely deserves to be, will require another ingredient – relentless news coverage of the kind the media typically avoid when the subject is someone or some cause they favor. That's why the Gosnell abortion horrors were played down for so long. And that's why the now-discredited Benghazi talking points are treated as just an honest mistake.

Each new advance tidbit from Wednesday's witnesses makes it clear that the State Department, CIA and White House deliberately concocted the Benghazi cover story that was false in nearly every particular. Now, think back to the disputed claim by President George W. Bush that Iraq had tried to buy uranium in Africa. It amounted to sixteen words in his 2003 State of the Union Address and it was arguably true.

But it triggered a media firestorm that did much to advance the notion that Mr. Bush had lied to the U.S. into Iraq. Now, suppose that administration had done what this one has on Benghazi.

It's hard to say what's more disgusting and reprehensible: The revisionist history on Bush lying us into invading Iraq, or the fact that he thinks his audience is stupid enough to believe four people being killed in a country that they knew full well was dangerous and in turmoil is in any way akin to the hundreds of thousands of lives that were destroyed and God knows how much money flushed down the toilet due to the actions of the Bush administration.

Every time I think Fox can't sink to a new low, they outdo themselves once again.

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Thom Hartmann takes our corporate media and the cheerleaders for war with Iraq to task and ten years after our invasion, asks 'Where are the apologies?'

Via Truthout: How the Media Fueled the War in Iraq:

Yesterday, the U.S. marked the 10th anniversary of the start of the Iraq War. And, over the course of the past ten years, we've learned more and more about how the war with Iraq actually started.

It's incredibly easy to blame the Bush administration for its lies that led us into Iraq. But Cheney, Rumsfeld and company weren't the only ones who played an integral role in convincing this nation that Saddam Hussein was a threat, and that WMD's were a forgone conclusion.

In the days and weeks leading up to the invasion of Iraq, corporate media – and even NPR and PBS - were abuzz with the talking points of the Bush Administration, echoing claims that Iraq had its hands on "yellow cake uranium" and that it had a massive arsenal of "weapons of mass destruction."

Thanks to the media's repeated claims that Iraq and Saddam Hussein were immediate threats to our nation, in the weeks leading up to the invasion, nearly three-quarters of Americans believed the lie promoted by Donald Rumsfeld that Saddam Hussein was somehow involved in the attacks of 9/11.

One of the biggest proponents of the Iraq War was Bill O'Reilly.

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On the ten year anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, there has been an awful lot of naval gazing by our media, sadly with most of it being revisionist history on what happened during the run up to that invasion and occupation, with a lot of glossing over just how complicit the media was in helping the neocons beat the war drums. And as Jeremy Scahill noted during this interview on Martin Bashir's show, there's still a lot to answer for by our politicians on both sides of the aisles -- but in particular, the neocons and Bush administration.

It's too bad there wasn't any accountability for his fellow guest on the program, Michael O'Hanlon, who supported the invasion and who was as guilty as the rest of them with enabling the neocons. Scahill sadly didn't go after O'Hanlon, but I appreciate what he was given a chance to say during the segment.

SCAHILL: People like Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith should not be able to show their faces in public in this country without being confronted with what they did to Iraq. I mean, the reality is... having spent time in Iraq throughout the '90's... many of the Iraqis I knew are dead. Many of the Iraqis that survived the war are displaced and with the millions of others that have been displaced.

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After Sen. John McCain gave his most recent excuse for opposing the nomination of Chuck Hagel for Secretary of Defense, which is that Hagel was "disagreeable" to George Bush and was mean to him after we found ourselves lied into invading Iraq, Rachel Maddow took on McCain for his history revisionism and for wanting to re-litigate the fact that everything we were told about why it was necessary to go in there and how things were going once we did was wrong.

Maddow has a new documentary which will be airing this Monday titled: Hubris: Selling the Iraq War and it seems John McCain inadvertently has done his best to do a promotion for the special with his behavior this week, because as Maddow pointed out in this segment, if we allow the likes of McCain to pretend that going into Iraq wasn't a disaster and one of or biggest foreign policy disasters since Vietnam, we're going to see it happen again.

Here's more on Rachel's special next week: Rachel Maddow To Probe Lies That Led to Iraq War in TV Special 'Hubris':

Perhaps you think you’ve read or heard it all. Hell, I even wrote my own book about it, So Wrong for So Long,. But now Rachel Maddow is promising surprising revelations in her MSNBC special Hubris: Selling the Iraq War, next Monday night in her regular time slot.

It will be President’s Day, but it looks like she sure won’t be celebrating George W. Bush. Or the mainstream media.

The special marks the opening of what will surely be a slew of tenth-anniversary programs and other media revisits. If you want to go back yourself now: Ten years ago today Hans Blix made another fateful presentation to the United Nations on his team’s search for WMD in Iraq. It was said to bolster both opponents and proponents of a US invasion, since he still found no evidence of such weapons but Saddam was still not cooperating fully with inspections.

Why does this all matter? Well, consider this major Washington Post piece last night on Iran allegedly boosting nuclear program by pursuing certain…magnets. It never ends. [...]

It will be interesting to see if she covers her colleagues, such as Chris Matthews, backing the war, and her network’s move to oust Phil Donahue partly for opposing it.

Given the deference we generally see her give David Gregory, I doubt it. Go read the rest and Greg's got some excerpt clips embedded along with links to a few others. I read Michael Isikoff and David Corn's book, which her documentary is based on, shortly after it came out, but I haven't picked it back up since. Apparently there are going to be some new revelations that weren't in the book as well. It sounds like it will be well worth tuning in.

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The more things change, the more they remain the same. It's now almost ten years later, and Colin Powell is still defending going in front of the United Nations and pushing the faulty intelligence to justify our invasion of Iraq. Of course don't expect any introspection from host David Gregory who decided to treat this as merely some policy disagreement between Powell and former Sen. Chuck Hagel, who he was defending as President Obama's pick for Defense Secretary during this segment on Meet the Press.

It's no wonder all of the neocons don't seem to mind re-litigating the invasion of Iraq if this is the type of coverage that we're going to get from our corporate media once those hearings start.

GREGORY: The renewed debate about Iraq is also occurring, the New York Times write about-- writes about that today. And his-- in his memoir, he writes something very pointed about the Iraq war. He writes, "it all comes down to the fact we were asked to vote on a resolution based on half-truths, untruths and wishful thinking. I voted for this resolution that gave the president the authority to go to war in Iraq if all diplomatic efforts were exhausted and failed. Unfortunately, it was not his intention to exhaust all diplomatic efforts.” He is talking about the diplomatic efforts you were engaged in as Secretary of State in the run-up to the war in Iraq.

GEN. POWELL: I would disagree with this characterization. We were basing all of our actions on a national intelligence estimate that the Congress asked for and was provided to the Congress by the CIA. And all of us in the Bush administration at that time accepted the judgment of our 16 intelligence communities. I presented it to the U.N. Three months before I presented it to the U.N., Congress passed a resolution, also supported by Senator Hagel and many other senators that would give the president the authority to go to war. They weren’t half-truths is what we were being told by the intelligence community. We subsequently found out that a lot of that information was not accurate and that is very unfortunate but that’s the way it unfolded.

GREGORY: Was he wrong on Iraq?

GEN. POWELL: With respect to what?

GREGORY: With respect to what he ultimately called a huge foreign policy blunder?

GEN. POWELL: He-- that’s his characterization and if people want to challenge his characterization, they will have that opportunity during the confirmation.

GREGORY: In your judgment, was he wrong on Iraq?

GEN. POWELL: I would not have called it that. I would have said that what I think was wrong was the president had more than sufficient basis to believe that there were weapons of mass destruction that were a danger to the world and the possibility of those weapons going to terrorists. And so, he undertook military action. I think that was the correct thing to do and it was well supported by the intelligence. I think we did not execute the operation well. Once Baghdad fell, there was a feeling that well that was the end of it. It was not the end of it. That was just the beginning of it.

Here's a little reminder about just what Powell knew and didn't know when he made that presentation to the United Nations: The U.N. Deception: What Exactly Colin Powell Knew Five Years Ago, and What He Told the World

(Daniel Ellsberg debates Bill Kristol on C-SPAN, Mar 28, 2003)

Now that all of the neocons are worked up over the possibility that former Sen. Chuck Hagel might be nominated to be our next Sec. of Defense, it seems there's a little dust up going on between documentary film maker Michael Moore and Iraq war cheerleader, Bloody Bill Kristol.

I Want to Give $1000 to Bill Kristol's Favorite Charity – If He'll Just Tell the Truth About Iraq, Oil and Chuck Hagel:

I just sent this to Bill Kristol, the editor of the Weekly Standard magazine and one of the most influential advocates of our invasion of Iraq. He posted something this morning about my post where I found an old quote from Chuck Hagel about how the Iraq War is all about the oil. I'll let you know when Bill gets back to me. (If you don't know much about Bill, you can find a good introduction here about his pre-war debate with Daniel Ellsberg.)

Dear Bill,

Thanks for your post mentioning me! I didn't realize you visited my website so early on Saturday mornings. Man, I wish we had cleaned up after the party last night.

Anyway, I see you're mad that back in 2007 former Sen. Chuck Hagel said that we were obviously "fighting for oil" in Iraq. You explain this was "vulgar and disgusting" and "could be the straw that breaks the back of Hagel's chances" to be Obama's next Defense Secretary.

Since you feel so strongly about this, I wanted to make sure you heard about four other prominent people who've said the same thing. (I should have mentioned them yesterday with the Chuck Hagel stuff, I apologize.)

• "I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil." – Alan Greenspan, former Chairman of the Federal Reserve, in his 2007 memoir. (Read about it here. Greenspan then lamely tried to walk this back, when he found out just how politically inconvenient it was…while admitting a Bush White House official told him "unfortunately, we can’t talk about oil.")

• "Of course we should go to war for oil. It's like saying, you're going to war just for oxygen, just for food. We need oil. That's a good reason to go to war." – Ann Coulter, author, April 11, 2011. (Watch her say that here at 37:30.)

• "Of course it’s about oil, it's very much about oil, and we can’t really deny that. From the standpoint of a solider who's now fought in the middle east for six years – my son-in-law's fought there for four years, my daughter's been over there, my son has served the nation – my family has been fighting for a long time." – Gen. John Abizaid, former commander of CENTCOM, October 13, 2007. (Watch Abizaid say this here.)

• "We're not in the middle east to bring sweetness and light to the whole world. That's nonsense. We're in the middle east because we and our European friends and our European non-friends depend on something that comes from the middle east, namely oil." – Midge Decter, author, May 21, 2004. (Listen here, at 35:55.)

I like to think the best about people. I know all you're looking for is an open, honest debate about Chuck Hagel's qualifications – with absolutely no smears or bullying. And because you feel that way, I'm sure you'll want to update what you wrote about Hagel with these quotes, and explain that Alan Greenspan and Ann Coulter and John Abizaid and Midge Decter are vulgar and disgusting and far-left too. Read on...

Digby has more on Moore's post and Midge Decter here: All the neocon Hippies:

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