That's a cheap and lazy argument, trying to deflect attention from the crimes of one party by discussing the crimes of another. They're both dangerous enough to kill you; both should be discussed as separate issues, not as a comparison.
GWB's first term average approval rating was 62% and at one point was as high as 90%. A lot of Americans have since found their opposition to these illegal foreign wars.
A commenter above says that it's a proven fact that Fox News is interested in nothing but propaganda, and the NYT is dedicated to truth, though they occasionally fail. When I look back on the Bush administration, and I think about how Code Pink was pushed front-and-center for 8 years by ABC/NBC/CBS, protesting the war(s), and how they absolutely disappeared once Obama took over, even though he materially continued the same policy in the middle east, I can't help but feel that every organization that is NOT Fox News was joined together in PRECISELY the same sort of propaganda that Fox is accused of. But, hey, I guess it's just me.
Hah, I'm the one arguing with those people too. People don't like to admit to themselves they consume the same thing they hate. But I'm rate limited because moderation of political discussion on this website is a joke unless you want to agree with everyone, so no more comments from me there.
NYT is still very war hawkish. Which wasn't so bad before when they were feigning neutrality. They were just a mainstream US paper pushing the 'company' line of their various connections in the gov. It was easy to look past.
But now that they've become more blatantly partisan (maybe as they infer here because it clearly sells more to be hyper partisan) it leaves me with an odd feeling that they are pushing back hard towards the Clinton-esque center left war-friendly surveillance-state Russian-boogiemen establishment politics that so many people (not just on the right) seem to be trying evolve beyond. At least the younger generations. And they say Trump is harking back to the old days...
After reading NYT daily for nearly a decade I'v moved to WSJ. It is much more expensive but I've been much happier reading it - as someone who doesn't care for either US party. I don't have to sift through vague connections to Russia or questionable accusations of secret white nationalism every time I read a political story about someone related to the current administration.
For example, I was just reading a profile of Donald Trump Jr. in NYT. Half way through the article they say he's been accused of making 'white nationalist' statements. Upon further reading it turns out to be because he made an off hand reference to 'gas chamber' in a random speech. So instead of making the obvious assumption he was referring to the form of capital punishment used in the US until the 1990s (and still used as a back up to lethal injection in some states), which is exactly what he claims to have been referring to, they decide to infer he was making some anti-semitic reference to the holocaust.
I am far from a Trump supporter but this type of weak partisan character assassination doesn't belong in a reputable paper like NYT.
So I'm not surprised to see a random swipe at Trump within the first few paragraphs of a non-political story... it's their shtick now.
Its partisan hackery any way you slice it. They made their cake by stacking the deck for Clinton. Search NYT on wikileaks podesta emails. NYT had time to be fair after they lost the election. Instead they doubled down. Who cares what their reasons are - like Trump said, their intent is to deceive and spread misinformation for nefarious and anti-proletariat motives. Fuck em
Really? I mean, it's not like the last Democrat president did anything to stop any wars. Or curb surveillance... or actually bring much transparency into government. All things he promised in his first campaign... I mean, constitutionally Obama was plainly against it, but I at least had some hope when he was elected he might actually do some of the things he'd promised. But no, more war, more bombs, more spying and surveillance.
It's not like any of this started with Trump, and isn't like any of it would really be stopped by a president for the other party, that served in the last administration over the department most directly covering spying and warfare.
Estimates appear to vary widely, with most in the hundreds of thousands range, but there's one estimate as high as a million deaths in the Iraq War (from the linked page):
"Opinion Research Business (ORB) poll conducted August 12–19, 2007, estimated 1,033,000 violent deaths due to the Iraq War. The range given was 946,000 to 1,120,000 deaths. A nationally representative sample of approximately 2,000 Iraqi adults answered whether any members of their household (living under their roof) were killed due to the Iraq War. 22% of the respondents had lost one or more household members. ORB reported that "48% died from a gunshot wound, 20% from the impact of a car bomb, 9% from aerial bombardment, 6% as a result of an accident and 6% from another blast/ordnance."
I agree that the war was based on lies. I agree it was a travesty. I honestly just wanted to know if I was correct in assuming that 1) they were indeed talking about Iraq, and 2) that they were accusing NYT of causing that war.
Ahh yes, just an honest mistake, and so long as only one million people are killed, not two, then we can promptly dismiss any concerns. Is that how it works?
I wonder if you think the NYT had a hand in pushing for the first Iraq war? How about in Yugoslavia? Panama? Libya? Syria? Or were all of those moral and noble humanitarian wars where the death and destruction was worth it?
Although the Iraq war is the best and most blatant example of the NYT's warmongering, it is far from the only one. All of these wars combined easily resulted in millions of deaths.
Nobody has claimed one million were killed. Stop trying to spread wrong information, it is the same thing as lying.
>I wonder if you think the NYT had a hand in pushing for the first Iraq war? How about in Yugoslavia? Panama? Libya? Syria? Or were all of those moral and noble humanitarian wars where the death and destruction was worth it?
Holy fucking non sequitur, batman. What does a media agenda have to do with a moral position on war? How is "NYT had a hand in pushing for" related to the question of whether your examples were "moral and noble humanitarian wars?" You can't just say a thing that's absurd, and then immediately assume they're true, so that you can jump to making a moral attack. Here's a great resource for you: http://www.webpages.uidaho.edu/eng207-td/Logic%20and%20Analy...
>best and most blatant example of NYT's warmongering
Somehow we started at outright lies about the number of deaths in the Iraq war, and concluded that the NYT is a warmongering institution with the power to mobilize the most powerful military on the planet at it's whim, and thus is responsible for every death caused by the US military throughout history.
Hey let's take it up a notch, did you know humans never landed on the moon and that Mark Zuckerberg's evil twin, Matt Zuckerberg, is running a robotic pizza factory that snoops through people's emails? Benghazi.
Yes, people have claimed over one million have been killed in the second Iraq war. And you can easily make an argument for the fact that the war has never really ended, thus if you include figures up to 2017 it is unequivocally over one million.
I'm simply pointing out that the NYT functions as a critical cog in the overall propaganda machine that provides cover for the establishment warmongering agenda. That cover, almost without exception, revolves around framing these wars as humanitarian wars that supposedly help the people and bring them freedom and democracy (by bombing the crap out of them). I'm sorry I didn't spell that out explicitly. NYT absolutely had a hand in pushing for all the aforementioned wars.
Finally, I'm not saying the NYT is controlling the military, it is obviously the other way around - NYT is the mouthpiece of the established powers. But this discussion is in the context of comparing what is more dangerous; an establishment mouthpiece propaganda outlet that provides cover for killing millions, or Trump saying some questionable things from time to time. As of right this moment, NYT's track record looks much worse to me. But hey, maybe you're on the side of people like Madeleine Albright who think that killing hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children through sanctions was totally worth it.
Well, how about over a quarter of a million bombs/missiles dropped during the Obama administration? If over half a million deaths in Iraq isn't enough, that number should be sobering.