MSM, Downing Street Memo, Review

I got an Email from a friend asking about the Downing Street Memo, which seems to get a lot of play in England from the left as some sort of horrible proof that Bush is just a big fascist who was going to invade Iraq no matter what. This prompted me to review some things about the media and leftists attitudes toward Bush. This is by no means a complete review, but I was just answering the Email.
Here's the Mail.

In an effort (probably hopeless) to educate me politically, my
brother-in-law has introduced me to the Downing Street Memo, which I'm
sure you politically savvy types know all about.

He and his Democrat cohorts are upset over the implication that the
Bush administration had already decided to go to war with Iraq at a
time when publicly they were claiming war would be a 'last resort' and
they were still pursuing diplomatic options. The memo also states they
were trying to find legal means to justify this decision, knowing that
no one would back them for merely the desire for a regime change (I
hope I'm getting this right).

I snooped around the 'Net a bit and so far, every version of the memo
I've read has been the same, which strengthens the possibility of its
legitimacy, and can't find any denials of its legitimacy. It's a big
deal in the UK, but doesn't seem to be getting much coverage here.
Why is that?... if it's really so damning to Bush you'd think the media
would be splashing it all over the place. I find it confusing that my
Republican friends think the media avoids news that strengthens their
positions and my Democratic friends express the same complaint in
reverse.

It does strengthen it's legitimacy, but I don't think that Democrats, or leftists more specifically, will get much out of this, which is probably why the press isn't pushing it. The tendency for "memos" to be routed out by the internet community, ruining the reputation of some reporter is all too fresh in the minds of many American journalists.
The memo is pretty dry and neutral in it's subject matter and tone. I think the implications the writer came up with are his own. It's easy to see why the US had already made it's decision. Diplomacy, up until that point, with Iraq had failed time and time again. Remember, we had been playing this game with Saddam for 10 years, and I think that the Bush administration made up it's mind and then played the diplomacy game in order to keep Saddam guessing as to our intentions.
Leftists who think that we didn't give diplomacy a chance have long term memory loss.

We had no patience with the UN route because it became evident (and becomes more evident with hindsight) that the UN would not have acted no matter what. France and Russia, veto holding members of the UNSC, had under the table dealings with Saddam and would never pull the trigger themselves.
A last minute attempt was made to convince the UN that it had to act because all available intelligence said that Saddam still had WMD, which for the UN meant that he would have been defying UN resolutions left and right, and would have been enough reason for the UN to intervene.
But that certainly wasn't the only reason. I believe I have heard no less than 5, but as many as 11 or 12, depending on how you group them, reasons for invading and forcing a regime change in Iraq. One point that liberals purposefully forget is that Bush was trumpeting the freedom of Iraqis and for a democratic Iraq far before the invasion, as one of his reasons for going down there. It was well understood that Saddam was a brutal dictator and frequently tortured and killed many of his own people.
Sure there are countries just as bad as Iraq regarding treatment of internal peoples. Sure there are countries that have weapons we would rather they didn't. Sure there are countries not in good standing with the UN. Sure there are countries that house and finance terrorists. Iraq just had the good fortune of being all of those. It was also a great staging point for region wide regime change. Iraq is kind of central in the Arab world and is allowing pressure on many countries to change. The US being in both Iraq and Afghanistan is putting pressure on Iran to change. Iraq's liberation is putting pressure on Syria and Jordan and the other Arab countries to change or suffer similar fates. Invading Iraq was strategic.
I've just given 5 reasons for the invasion above.

The last issue, about the press, is an on-going one. Republicans and Democrats sometimes lose perspective about what is moderate and what is "just reporting the news." Most of the time, I think that the media tends to attack the party in power, and during the Clinton years the Democrats could argue that the media was slanted against the President.
But not as much as I think it is now. The hate shown to the sitting President by the left has seemed to reach a new high, and I think that the media is trying to play off that. Perhaps because it makes them more money, or perhaps because the think they can get away with it in the current climate.
It's becoming evident just how much the press invents facts and slants news coverage, more than it ever has been, because of the depth of the internet and the rise of independent pundits in the internet universe (blogs are the main thrust of that phenomenon). Like never before, the facts of certain events are just a Google search away, so one can look at several news accounts of a story, including personal accounts of people with Email, internet access and blog sites. And one can see where certain journalists are shorting the public on those facts or changing them.
Often it's not the journalists, but the editors. I have a few thoughts on this which make the press out to be much less dastardly than some would make them out to be, though.

One is that newspapers are basically businesses, and the bleeds/leads mantra still applies. Doom and gloom, and attacking politicians, is basically thought, eternally, to sell papers, while good news is ignored. I'm not sure I see an end to this, as shock value does indeed sell. But the issue has been pretty much all doom, and reality is quite different, and that fact is causing people to notice that there's only one perspective coming out of the media, so people make their own conclusions as to why that is.

Two is that reporters and journalists are not the investigative gumshoes they once were. As media outlets have become more business oriented and bottom line driven, reporters are often sent to where the action is, many times without the background to adequately report on what they are covering. The old-time "beat" reporter is replaced with an group of reporters that migrate to where the big stories are. This is done to save money, as you don't need as many journalists. But the cost is that the reporters don't have the background knowledge to understand what they are reporting. They have to substitute their own biases and assumptions to fill in the gaps and analyze the situations in order to be able to write a complete story.
As an aside to that, I do think that reporters are generally more liberal than conservative. I donÂ’t think that they purposefully slant the news coverage all the time, but because of point two that just happens anyway. Conservative journalists and publications probably have this unconscious bias too.

Three, another friend sent me a great article on just how news gets to us from Iraq. It's a fascinating chain of events, and underscores the fact that bad news generally gets reported because that's all the American reporters see, as they rarely roam from the security of their hotels in the green zone. They just pick up military event logs, which tend to be dominated by reports of fighting or roadside bombs.

So these things, plus a world of evidence, tend to make me think that the main stream media is tilting to the left. Currently.
I have seen that people on the left have really lost perspective on where the middle is. I think of Bush as being moderate on many topics. On some, like judges and abortion, gay marriage and the like, he is very conservative. On government programs, and democracy promotion world wide he is quite more liberal than conservative politicians previous to 9/11. Many of the programs he advocates and the foreign policy he is promoting were very similar to Clinton's same positions and ideas.
On the whole I would call him a moderate. But of course to the left he is a stark raving fascist Christian. Overall I see the Democrats and the left intolerant to opposing viewpoints, more so than the Republicans.
I hear the opposite from Democrats about Bush, because Bush has tended, over the course of his administration, to let go people who don't seem to agree with him and hold close those who do.
That's not uncommon for Presidents, it's just that they typically do that around election periods, so it's less noticeable. Bush kept several people from Clinton's administration, and then later realize it was a dumb thing to do and started cleaning house. It appeared that he was just being intolerant of people with opposing viewpoints.
In some ways that's also true, but from what I understand of Bush, it's not that he won't listen to opposing viewpoints, it's just that he's not wishy washy about his decisions. Some cabinet members and politicians aren't comfortable with that. They've spent their lives developing decisions around the results of polls. Bush is not like that.

OK, I've gone on long enough.

UPDATE:
A reader sends this additional perspective on why the administration might have appeared to already have made a decision.

It seems to me that the thing the Dems are fussing about is that, while
still going thru the UN, and laying down ultimatums to Saddam, the
administration (US) had very little faith that these measures would convince
Saddam to change his ways. It is not a shock that, given the long and
fruitless history of the UN trying to get Saddam to follow world mandate,
both militarily and diplomatically, the Bush administration, thinking war
was likely, would plan accordingly.

Indeed. There was Iraq invasion planning going on during the Clinton administration. She also sends this link to an article that addresses the lack of a smoking gun quality to this memo story - with a look at the differences in American and British use of language to express meanings of things like the bit about "fixing" the intelligence.