Bill's war

When it comes to smug, holier-than-thou liberals, nobody can hold a candle to Bill Moyers. But smugness has a blind spot, or at least a little willful amnesia:

In his public television special Buying the War, Bill Moyers decries the tendency of the media to help the White House sell war to the public.

Moyers should know. He was quite a salesman in his day.

Moyers served as press secretary to Lyndon Johnson during the Vietnam War. In that role, he employed all the tools of modern-day public relations, from schmoozing reporters to intimidating them, to get the press to go along with a war "so poorly planned it soon turned into a disaster."

In the documentary, Moyers applies that description to the Iraq war. But the parallel to Vietnam is inescapable, right down to the arrogance and cluelessness of the Texan in the White House.

"The story of how high officials misled the country has been told," says Moyers. "But they couldn't have done it on their own; they needed a compliant press to pass on their propaganda as news and cheer them on."

A compliant press? Propaganda? Is the man having flashbacks to the 1960s?

The denunciations of smug, holier-than-thou libertarians and conservatives may now begin.