15 years ago I started a notebook... and now we're up to Day 3 of the Iraq War notebook.

The top of the page says "March 21, 2003," and CNN says "'Shock and Awe' under way." I transcribe Wolf Blitzer saying "In 30 years, I've never seen anything like this on live television." (Click images — twice — to enlarge.)



On Fox News, Jim Angle says "someone is going to get hurt" — the hope was it would be Saddam Hussein:



Shep Smith waxed poetic about "white flashes... peppering the night air" (because pepper is white):

"I’ve never really stood in front of a crowd and talked to them about ‘the gay'... but I’ve got nothing to hide."

Said Fox News anchor Shepard Smith, talking to students at the University of Mississippi’s Meek School of Journalism.

Smith grew up in Holly Springs, Miss., a town of less than 8,000 people.... Partially due to this upbringing, Smith said, he didn’t consider his sexuality for most of his life. Hoping to avoid confronting his confusing feelings, he threw himself into work....

“I needed to sort of escape what my reality might have been, because I wasn’t answering my own questions or even posing my own questions to myself,” he said. “I put it in a box.... I think part of that was this other thing that I had going on. I didn’t want to ask myself that question or figure that out or learn how to deal with that.... Because to me it was antithetical to all that was okay.... A. You’re going to hell for it. B. You’ll never have any friends again. C. What are you going to tell your family? And by the way, you’re on television on the craziest conservative network on Earth. They will probably put you in front of a brick wall and mow you down. Of course, none of that was true, but that’s how it felt.... One day I found the box. Then I cried for a long time.... "

"We really messed up, and we are all really sorry. That didn’t belong on TV."

Shep Smith, after Fox News shows a man shoot himself in the head.

"Sometimes we see a lot of things that we don’t let get to you – because it’s not time appropriate, it’s insensitive, and it’s just wrong. And that was wrong."