SOFA Has Become As Mythical for Fox News as George W. Bush

To nobody’s surprise, Fox News would prefer people not know about SOFA, the Status of Forces Agreement – that little agreement Republican President George W. Bush made with Iraq that said U.S. forces – ALL U.S forces – must go home.

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It kind of gets in the way of their Obama is to blame for ISIL narrative, as Megyn Kelly and others have done.

So as Media Matters for America pointed out the other day,

Fox News’ Special Report left out necessary context when previewing former Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta’s upcoming interview with 60 Minutes in which he stated, “it was important for us to maintain a presence in Iraq.”

Ooops. Our bad, I am sure they were [not[ thinking.

Host Bret Baier could have mentioned SOFA when he referred to Panetta’s words as the latest in “a very public back-and-forth between the White House and the Pentagon,”before adding that, “Now this weekend, 60 Minutes has an interview with former CIA director and former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, in which he will say the U.S. should not have pulled out all its troops out of Iraq in 2011.”

Watch the video courtesy of Media Matters:

It’s not that Leon Panetta flip-flopped. It’s that Fox News refuses to tell the truth.

And this is the conservative news filter through which male bimbos like Kevin Sorbo say all our news must come:

The media promote chaos to boost their pathetic ratings. We should shut them all off and watch clips on the internet only when republished under fair use by a conservative media watchdog group.

Fortunately, CBS is not quite as adverse to facts as their neighbors at Fox, and you would never know what they had to say if Sorbo had his way. As Media Matters pointed out, in the actual interview with Panetta, CBS’ Scott Pelley let the proverbial and by now very angry cat out of the bag and informed viewers that Iraq “didn’t want the U.S. force.”

The one thing you will never hear mentioned by Fox News (or any other right wing “news” source, is SOFA. Heck, you can barely get them to mention Bush, that most – because he validates all liberal points about Republican governance – inconvenient of presidents. We’ve all seen the consequences of this news filtering:

• No terrorist attacks took place on U.S. soil during the Bush administration, despite Bush being president in 2001 when the attacks occurred;
• Afghanistan and Iraq are wars started by Obama;

Bush only comes up at all in the conversation when it’s necessary to prove that Obama threw away all that Bush had heroically achieved in Iraq (other than making his buddy Dick Cheney wealthier than Croesus, that is).

You might remember war criminal Dick Cheney’s June 17 Wall Street Journal op-ed, where he infamously asserted, “Instead, he abandoned Iraq and we are watching American defeat snatched from the jaws of victory.”

Cheney subtitled his piece, “Rarely has a U.S. president been so wrong about so much at the expense of so many,” and if he were talking about President Bush he would actually – for once – be telling the truth.

As the Democratic National Committee pointed out at the time, the “only rhetoric that needs a dose of reality is Mr. Cheney’s.” This lack of reality undermines everything coming out of the right wing media, and because conservatives dominate Sunday news programming, we can expect this trend to continue without letup through Election Day 2016.

In other words, you shouldn’t expect Fox News to say “SOFA” today anymore than you should expect the NFL to say “woman.”

It’s a hot mess, but then the GOP has been a hot mess for many years, and they have the Midas touch, in a manner of speaking, because everything they put their fingers to also turns into a, well…hot mess.

Let’s leave it at that.

Hrafnkell Haraldsson

Hrafnkell Haraldsson, a social liberal with leanings toward centrist politics has degrees in history and philosophy. His interests include, besides history and philosophy, human rights issues, freedom of choice, religion, and the precarious dichotomy of freedom of speech and intolerance. He brings a slightly different perspective to his writing, being that he is neither a follower of an Abrahamic faith nor an atheist but a polytheist, a modern-day Heathen who follows the customs and traditions of his Norse ancestors. He maintains his own blog, A Heathen’s Day, which deals with Heathen and Pagan matters, and Mos Maiorum Foundation www.mosmaiorum.org, dedicated to ethnic religion. He has also contributed to NewsJunkiePost, GodsOwnParty and Pagan+Politics.