Bush Hears Voices

But hey! At least he has started reading newspapers. One day he might even get past the front page:

"I hear the voices and I read the front page and I know the speculation," the president told reporters in the Rose Garden. "But I'm the decider and I decide what's best. And what's best is for Don Rumsfeld to remain as the secretary of defense."

So it seems the "voices" are telling Bush that Rumsfeld must stay. Otherwise the terrorists have won, see?

Here's how Donny explained it to Rush Limbaugh:

Zarqawi and bin Laden and Zawahiri, those people have media committees.

They are actively out there trying to manipulate the press in the United States. They are very good at it. They're much better at (laughing) managing those kinds of things than we are...

So all those stories George reads on the front page have been planted by these cunning terrrrsts, see? I guess that explains why the USA has to pay for propaganda pieces in Arab newspapers, just to get some balance. So does that mean that we should all start reading the Arab media if we want to know what's really going on?

Juan Cole today takes a look at this clever media trickery:

American sources say that in the northern Baghdad district of Adhamiyah, a neighborhood militia fought a 9-hour-long pitched battle with Iraqi troops and police, with the Americans coming in to settle it.

But Arabic sources suc as Al-Zaman, al-Hayat and Aljazeera reported in such a way as to make it look like the brave stand of local (Sunni Arab) men against the predations of (Shiite) death squads masquerading as police. The latter were accused of coming into Adhamiyah in order to kidnap, kill and pillage. The special police commandos of the minstry of the interior are widely believed to comprise Shiite militiamen.

Hmmn, now I am just plain confused. Fortunately, Dahr Jamail has some eyewitness accounts from Adhamiyah. Based on these, he concludes:

Disturbingly, this obvious US-backed Shia militia invasion of a Sunni neighborhood may well be a prelude to what the US military is calling a "second liberation of Baghdad" which they will carry out with the Iraqi army when a new government is installed.

Maybe we should print that on the font page, eh?