Our president and his crew of new world architects — slogan: “Blowin’ shit up as fast as we can for freedom” — are out on the road with a new message about Iraq: It’s a good war. It’s a necessary war. And if you’re agin’ it, you’re nothin’ but an ol’ appeaser of fascism. (The new pronunciation for “Iraq” is “Sudetenland.”)
That’s nice.
CNN, like everyone else, is covering the story. Reading through one of their newsfeeds, I discovered that someone’s having a little fun, at the president’s expense, in a headline: “Bush 3.0 releases patch for Iraq war.” A good, sharp piece of commentary worthy of The Onion, but markedly different from the story’s actual headline: “Bush begins new push to shore up fight on terrorism, Iraq.”
So what happened? Either someone at CNN is getting playful with headlines, or somehow the page was hacked. I’ve got doubts about either scenario, but whatever happened, it wasn’t an accident. Screenshots below (click for larger images).
[Update: I saw the “Bush 3.0 headlines sometime between 9 and 9:30 a.m. Pacific; it’s now 10:15, and all evidence of the headline has vanished in the updated version of the story. I’ve sent messages through the CNN site asking what gives, but so far no answer.]
Maybe the editors at CNN decided they needed to climb down from a caustic piece of writing. Or maybe the guys at 1600 Pennsylvania got in their faces, but you’re right about it reading like the Onion. That paper has good headlines but the stories sometime fall apart after the first paragraph or so. As for the president, he can dress up his masterpiece anyway he wants to, but it still looks like a pig wearing a silk hat.
As you know, The president is going to make a series of speeches between now and September 19, in an attempt to shore up the Iraq effort. It looks like similar approach he(they)took when touting Social Security reform in 2005.