by Shaun F. for the Left Coast Rebel

Did anyone else read Tuesday’s NY Times article about the Tea Party movement? My first reaction was like many of yours, I nearly threw up on my keyboard. From the very moment I finished reading the piece I began my usual “that’s what you get when you read the NY Times” routine, which is a series of rhetorical questions like, “What do you expect it’s the Times?,” “Does anyone really read the Times anyways?,” and “What’s one to do when the liberal media is determined to carry the torch of statism forward.”

After a brief dialogue with Left Coast Rebel regarding his piece on the subject yesterday I walked away with the realization that we, too often, throw the spotlight on the institutions instead of the perpetrators. We spend too much time on the Wizard of Oz and not the man behind the curtain. Of course the NY Times is going to print a story like they did yesterday, but who is the one that wrote it. The answer is David Barstow (pictured at top, right), an investigative reporter for the NY Times. It turns out that he is both a Pulitzer Prize winner and a hypocrite.

There’s not much out there on David Barstow at least nothing easily available. So for all we know, he might be a great guy, but when you compare his 2008 Pulitzer Prize winning article about the Bush administration’s use of military news analysts for propaganda a common liberal ethos is exposed.

The main charge in Barstow’s piece can be summed up:

“In turn, members of this group (75 military analysts that were influenced by the Bush Administration through the awarding of military contracts) have echoed administration talking points, sometimes even when they suspected the information was false or inflated. Some analysts acknowledge they suppressed doubts because they feared jeopardizing their access.A few expressed regret for participating in what they regarded as an effort to dupe the American public with propaganda dressed as independent military analysis.”

It’s all a tale of propaganda and government payola. It is well written, though so long it is in two parts. You can read about it, here.

I like the piece and I think Barstow does a great job with it. It’s a reminder of the fundamental necessity of having government that is truthful to its citizens. Had these analysts bucked the Bush Administration more in the news outlets, mismanagement of the war may have come to the attention of the American people sooner.

However, I must ask Mr. David Barstow, How did you go from the premise that the government was trying to “dupe the American public with propaganda” to libeling citizens concerned with the future direction and methods of an out of control government? Mr. Barstow, don’t you think pieces like your Pulitzer Price winning article aren’t propagations fueling the mentality you so scornfully wrote about yesterday?

For the leftist elites, like David Barstow, their ethos is the result of disconnect from what is truth and what they think is truth. At the time, David Barstow and his ilk were out to prove that the Bush Administration was a wolf in sheep’s clothing, he found what he thought was the link compelling his circular reasoning, and now that Bush is gone what? Government stops being a wolf in sheep’s clothing because there is a new administration?

What is scary is not that there are citizens concerned about what goes on behind the closed doors of government, it is that there are political hacks like David Barstow that ignore the very real dangers of a government run by the ideology he subscribes to. He wrote a report exposing Bush propaganda, which took more than six years to unearth, but for the Obama administration it’s as common as Monday following Sunday.