(still from YouTube)
Anyone reading the Washington Post’s coverage of Ukraine and Russia over the past several months knows well that when it comes to fealty to the regime, the Post makes the USSR’s Pravda look like a samizdat. As long as the US administration has Russia in its sights, the Post is panting like a dog in D.C.’s summer sun.
Editorial Page Editor Fred Hiatt and his sidekick Jackson Diehl are the neocon dynamic duo who keep the hate flowing, and nothing is too sensational for its appearance as gospel on Fred’s page. Fred and Jackson, as Consortium News points out, are the same guys who solemnly assured us in 2002-2003 that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction.
In normal jobs, people get fired for being incompetent, for constantly getting it wrong. Not Washington Post propagandists.
The Washington Post’s record of bias and out-and-out lies when it comes to Russia and Ukraine, proceeds today apace. Only the Post could read the inaugural address of newly-“elected” Ukrainian oligarch Petro Poroshenko and conclude that it was a declaration of peace.
With a straight face, the Post’s headline on page one today: “Ukraine’s new president calls for an end to war.”
The speech in fact is the opposite. It is clearly a declaration of war on eastern Ukraine and possibly Russia. Those in the east who seek a federalized system are “terrorists” who must lay down their arms, the Kiev coup was legal and legitimate, Russia is leading the fight in the east, no dialogue with “bandits” in the east. And so on.
The speech was an iron fist wrapped in a velvet glove.
And as the Post fell over itself praising the velvet glove, the iron fist struck yet again.
Today in Slavyansk military units sent by Kiev again shelled the city. Again bombed apartment buildings. Again bombed people’s houses. Again used military power against civilians. The town is blockaded and is getting low on water.
The Washington Post is not reporting this because it upsets the narrative. Kiev forces are only trying to liberate the people of the east from the Russian terrorists who are holding them hostages is their line. Anything that interferes with that perspective is simply ignored.