If Bush says that the earth was flat, the headlines on the mainstream media stories is, “The Shape of the Earth: Views Differ." Its always, here's what Bush says, here's what the other side says. It sounds good. He's promising great stuff. You can find it more recently, in unemployment reports. In this case, the last jobs report was really, really crummy. It was crummy enough if you were watching CNBC, which has the 8:30 in the morning when they have the traders in Chicago pit when the number came out, the traders starting chant, Kerry, Kerry, Kerry. But to read all of the newspaper stories the next day, it was well, the Bush people say it's a good number, it's a good report and the other said says it was a bad report and you never would have known the difference.
What do we do? This is really much bigger than Bush. It's a movement that's been building. The one thing that I think you really have to day is that people -- say is that people -- on the left, the position formerly known as the center, people like myself -- people like myself have been asleep for a long, long time. We just didn't -- we didn't take it seriously. We sat through the Clinton scandals and said, probably, you know, funny stuff going on there. Didn't really understand that the extent to which this movement was being built.
The answer, I think, my great hope now is what we need is an enormous unearthing of the scandals that we know have taken place. We need a mega Watergate that rocks them back for enough time so that we can build a counterweight to this thing. Otherwise, this won't be the country we grew up in.
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=04/09/01/1439231 Paul Krugman