Re: Malaysian Airlines MH17 crashed in Ukraine
Reply #47 –
I'm trying to imagine there not being some political cartoons like that. 1988 was an election year, President Reagan was still in the White House but it was his last year. George H W Bush was "heir apparent" to the Republican nomination if not to the Oval Office, and then as now many news organizations were undisguised shills for the Democrat Party. Not trying to stick Bush with the Iranian Flight 655 incident would go against the grain of a lot of political pundits of the day.
Then of course there's the foreign press. Even if you could have a total news blackout here in the US on the incident, how do you stop the various news agencies around the world from posting political cartoons that show the US in a bad light. A thing like the Flight 655 incident would be a "gimme" for a news outfit that has an axe to grind with the US, and there's more than a handful of such organizations worldwide I would think.
We didn't have such ready access to the Internet back then. Posting to forums like this one didn't happen regularly yet, it wasn't until GHWB was warming the chair in the Oval Office that you could even buy a personal computer that would do more than play a couple of games, and DOS was still in its infancy as an operating system. But--- editorial cartoons showing something similar to the one above, except with the American president holding a broken plane in his hands? Yeah, they just about had to exist somewhere.