Weekly Canard

Today is Tuesday, so it is once again time to fire up our trusty Canard-o-matic and see what Bob Scheer has to say. Even though Halloween is more than three months away, sit back, grab a bowl of trick-or-treat candy and enjoy the show because this week's column has more fictional elements than any haunted house movie.

The tour of the haunted house begins with the witch in the headline

The Witch Hunt Against the BBC

It then goes on to David Kelly's ghost, who is revealing secrets to Bob Scheer from the other side:

the death of British biological weapons expert David Kelly was a suicide. But if the reserved scientist took his own life, it was in response to the British Ministry of Defense outing and reprimanding him as the alleged whistle-blower behind the BBC's controversial report that the government "sexed up" its intelligence information to make the case for war.

From behind a closet door lunges Scary Blairy, the ghoul who frightens children:

what Tony Blair did was not merely hype the case for preemptively invading Iraq. Rather, he deliberately lied to his public about the certainty of his claims to frighten the people into sending their children off to war.

In the parlor we have a man who can see things that are not there and cannot see things that are there:

Remember, the BBC was not taking the safe route that so many news organizations prefer. Yet, time and again, they have been proved right with each new revelation of half-truths, outright lies and data manipulation on the part of the coalition's leaders-in-chief.

Up in the attic of the haunted house, buried in cobwebs and dust, is a pile of discarded ideas, like the belief in state-funded media that is unaccountable to the public, of the kind they had in the Soviet Union and Saddam's Iraq and still have in Great Britain:

[The BBC] should be a great advertisement for the model of a free society that we claim to be eager to export to, or impose on, the rest of the world. In most countries, publicly subsidized broadcasting is an important source of news, and the BBC serves as the premier example [of a media institution that is accountable to nobody]

In the infirmary, witness the resurrection of a dead and buried myth:

The BBC's reporting on the doctored intelligence concerning weapons of mass destruction followed its notable report debunking the U.S. military propaganda tale of the battle and rescue of Pfc. Jessica Lynch.

The crazy guy is still hiding in the basement with his butcher knife and Bob Scheer tries to reassure us that he never existed

Clearly the immediacy of the threat from Hussein was a phony claim that Blair and Bush should have known full well was not backed up by any substantial evidence.

Bob Scheer concludes his paranormal excursion by telling us he can see into the future, just like Nostradamus:

Last week in his speech, Blair smugly claimed the favorable judgment of future historians, but it is the BBC that history will celebrate for its pursuit of truth.

Posted by Stefan Sharkansky at July 22, 2003 12:05 PM