July 14, 2003 - Right Wing commentators took great delight when The New York Times was revealed to have employed a writer who copied other journalist’s work and, when he couldn’t find something to copy, simply made up the news as he went along. They delighted in the Gray Lady’s discomfiture. When Jayson Blair got the axe and then the editors he had charmed into accepting his fiction as fact followed they licked their chops with relish. It was, they trumpeted, a vindication of what they had been bleating for years about the “liberal media”. The credibility of America’s Newspaper of Record had been destroyed, they blared. The irony that one of the Blair’s fictional stories was an ersatz interview with the parents of Jessica Lynch, the involuntary heroine of one of the Right’s favorite works of official fiction, Saving Private Lynch.

Now then there is that other Blair, Prime Minister Anthony Blair, whose loyal toeing of the American administration line in Iraq subjected him to being pointed out as “Bush’s Poodle” at home. It was the Blair government that produced the now infamous September Dossier that provided some cover to the Bush Administration’s October public relations offensive telling us that we could not afford to wait for proof of the Iraqi possession of fearsome weapons lest the smoking gun turn out to be a mushroom cloud. The dossier turned out to be an amalgam of passages plagiarized from Jane’s and an American student’s 12 year old master’s thesis with the Niger uranium forgeries. Somehow the “Conservative” commentators were quite conservative with comments about the other Blair’s plagiarism and inventiveness.

Both of the Blairs have come in handy for the Bush administration. Jayson struck a blow against the credibility of the news media at a time when the Bush Administration needed to divert investigative reporting from looking too closely at its assertion that the nation and, by extension, the free world was at immediate risk of devastation at the hands of the toothless tyrant of Baghdad. Tony’s fiction provided the rationalization for reviving the nuclear terror that had served the Right so well in the years of the Cold War and gave color to the rush to start a new hot one.

When the President wanted the people to see an engaged and involved President in the act of leading he published a photo essay on the official Whitehouse website showing him hard at work crafting the State of the Union Message. Now that it is necessary to duck responsibility for the content of the message he has taken refuge in four of the offending 16 words, “British government report said” having been “technically correct”. First the administration pointed the finger at George Tenet saying nobody told the President and when that exercise proved that the deputy national security advisor had been told in October of the Niger uranium fraud it moved the finger to point across the Atlantic. It would all be amusing as a spy thriller and worthy of the inventive genius of a Ken Follett were it not the story of our times. Perhaps the Whitehouse can score a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.