Thread by @RachelBitecofer

@ForecasterEnten's thread on @BarackObama's (safe to have) position against the Iraq War led me to realize that a fair portion of my followers were probably too young to have lived through 2000 election-about 2005, which is an under discussed, but super f'ed up period of American

politics that is part of the larger narrative you're living through now. And it occurred to me that it would have unfolded differently (although probably w the same outcome) w the media environment we have now, bc of the digital environment. 1st big thing to keep in mind is that

you saw very little critical journalism in any mainstream outlets, including @washingtonpost & @nytimes, and we forget that bc these papers served such critical roles later in the Bush Admin but there is NO DOUBT that negligence during this period occurred at both of America's

most important papers, even though each can point to 1 or 2 critical pieces. And another thing to keep in mind is that in 2001, 2002, 2003 it was not a known fact that Fox News was biased. It took years of activism to bring attention to the fact that the network whose advertising

mantra was: We Report You Decide, was in fact, making very critical, very biased editorial decisions to present a conservative frame. Now liberals may not like to hear this, but conservatives at the time were justified in their argument that the mainstream outlets

reflected a GENERAL frame that favored (small l) liberal viewpoints such as: diversity=good, gender quality=good, more secular society=good, movement away from moral traditionalism=good and those frames are still the major ideological divides between what we call conservative

(at least mainstream conservative, think @NRO conservatism and @FoxNews until the last 2 years. NOT Breitbart) and the rest of the mainstream media universe. So Fox, and later the blogs when the internet, filled that hole. But if one wanted critical, actual quality journalism

into the Bush Admin's claims about Iraq or about what an invasion there might yield, one had to largely turn to international outlets. When one did so, one could figure out quickly why our "Coalition of the Willing" was so lame. As it turns out, there was plenty of info out there

that suggested invading Iraq would be a very bad idea bc it would destabilize the region AND also would fail to yield any weapons of mass destruction. In terms of the politics though, merely suggesting on a show like @MeetThePress that there was something wrong w the U.S. case

invading Iraq invoked Vietnam-Era backlash effects and for politicians with electoral ambitions that faced competitive elections in the near future or w presidential ambitions, voting against the authorization would have been political suicide. You can get a real sense of how

nutty America was at that time by watching the @dixiechicks documentary Shut Up and Sing, which documents what happened to them when their lead singer told a foreign audience that she was embarrassed that Bush was from TX. Esp now that you can see it in hindsight and juxtapose

it with Trump standing next to Putin and telling the world he believes Putin over our CIA at the Helsinki Summit. Or with just the way that Obama was treated over hi 8 years, given that he too, was a war time POTUS.

Anyway, to be against the war outside of certain very Democratic geographic bubbles was akin to having leprosy & about 70% of the country lost their damn minds for awhile. That's how we ended up with memos about crushing the balls of terrorist's children & reelecting Dick Cheney

You really should watch VEEP by the way. It does a pretty decent job of capturing the panic