END THIS WAR
We've obviously had many elements of representative government taken away from us in the last seven years. The occupants of the White House are almost certainly war criminals, under even the loosest definition of the term. Karma will have its' way.
But in the meantime, while those authoritarian unAmerican greed-driven dipshits invoke executive privilege and top-secret clauses for the sole purpose of saving their sorry asses, what about actual human beings giving up their lives? We need to get this carnage ended, and the sooner the better. Raise your hand if you want to end up a mental patient, lose a limb, or die in order to save the face of the constantly law-breaking and never-accountable cheney and bush.
Mr. Rich in the NY Times has this to offer:
The Iraq war’s defenders like to bash the press for pushing the bad news and ignoring the good. Maybe they’ll be happy to hear that the bad news doesn’t rate anymore. When a bomb killed at least 51 Iraqis at a Baghdad market on Tuesday, ending an extended run of relative calm, only one of the three network newscasts (NBC’s) even bothered to mention it.
The only problem is that no news from Iraq isn’t good news - it’s no news. The night of the Baghdad bombing the CBS war correspondent Lara Logan appeared as Jon Stewart’s guest on “The Daily Show” to lament the vanishing television coverage and the even steeper falloff in viewer interest. “Tell me the last time you saw the body of a dead American soldier,” she said. After pointing out that more soldiers died in Afghanistan than Iraq last month, she asked, “Who’s paying attention to that?”
Her question was rhetorical, but there is an answer: Virtually no one. If you follow the nation’s op-ed pages and the presidential campaign, Iraq seems as contentious an issue as Vietnam was in 1968. But in the country itself, Cindy vs. Michelle, not Shiites vs. Sunnis, is the hotter battle. This isn’t the press’s fault, and it isn’t the public’s fault. It’s merely the way things are.
In America, the war has been a settled issue since early 2007. No matter what has happened in Iraq since then, no matter what anyone on any side of the Iraq debate has had to say about it, polls have consistently found that a majority of Americans judge the war a mistake and want out. For that majority, the war is over except for finalizing the withdrawal details. They’ve moved on without waiting for the results of Election Day 2008 or sampling the latest hectoring ad from moveon.org.
Perhaps if Americans had been asked for shared sacrifice at the war’s inception, including a draft, they would be in 1968-ish turmoil now. But they weren’t, and they aren’t. In 2008, the Vietnam analogy doesn’t hold. The center does.
The good news for Democrats - and the big opportunity for Barack Obama - is that John McCain and the war’s last cheerleaders don’t recognize that immutable reality. They’re so barricaded in their own Vietnam bunker that they think the country is too. It’s their constant and often shrill refrain that if only those peacenik McGovern Democrats and the “liberal media” acknowledged that violence is down in Iraq - as indeed it is, substantially - voters will want to press on to “victory” and not “surrender.” And therefore go for Mr. McCain.
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And, reinforcing my last post, here's Alexander Cockburn, also a bit less than fully-enamored of Pope Russert:
In the old days, when a journalist met his final deadline, friends would gather round the grave, toss in a few memories, then make off to the bar for liquid comfort and disrespectful stories about the dear departed. Contrast this with the send-off for Tim Russert, NBC’s Washington Bureau Chief and 17-year maestro of “Meet the Press”, who dropped dead of a heart attack last week.
He got funeral ceremonies a pope and most U.S. presidents would envy: a private funeral with this year’s two presidential nominees sitting side by side on Russert family orders, with the Congressional leadership in the neighboring pews; George and Laura Bush at the public wake; thousands at the memorial in the Kennedy Center, with Washington and New York’s media and political elites massed in respectful homage.
Was Russert so extraordinary a fellow, to elicit so tumultuous a farewell? Surely not. He could be a sharp interviewer, but I can’t remember any occasions when I said to myself, “ Russert has given me a whole new insight into the way the world works.” There are many journalists and broadcasters I would put miles ahead of him.
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We’ve had seven years of craven, culpable journalism - across the mainstream board. No one honors the reporters at Knight Ridder newspapers, who were among the few ones in the mainstream press, pre-war, to hammer away at the WMD lies. They never led off Russert's or anyone else's show. Russert was managing editor and host of Meet the Press, host of The Tim Russert Show on MSNBC, senior vp of NBC News, NBC Washington Bureau Chief, and regular political analyst on the Today Show, The Nightly News. So he was as responsible as anyone for the press collusion with the Administration. But now that the administration is looking bad, he's not a collaborator but a tenacious knight, jousting with them, 'truth-telling', getting 'the bad guys' for 'we, the people.'
Final question: Since NBC had a huge stake in Tim Russert’s future (“Meet the Press” brought in $50 million a year and they paid him around $5 million a year) you’d have thought the network’s executives would have taken a look at the tv screen and raised the alarm. Across the past three months he looked in increasingly awful shape, bright red in the face, overweight and sometimes with a slightly glazed, sad look. I told people I thought he was set to die of a heart attack right there in the studio, which is exactly what happened. On one sighting recently he didn’t take his loafers off in the gym, and when pressed about this casual approach to vitally needed exercise, gave a wink.
But in the meantime, while those authoritarian unAmerican greed-driven dipshits invoke executive privilege and top-secret clauses for the sole purpose of saving their sorry asses, what about actual human beings giving up their lives? We need to get this carnage ended, and the sooner the better. Raise your hand if you want to end up a mental patient, lose a limb, or die in order to save the face of the constantly law-breaking and never-accountable cheney and bush.
Mr. Rich in the NY Times has this to offer:
The Iraq war’s defenders like to bash the press for pushing the bad news and ignoring the good. Maybe they’ll be happy to hear that the bad news doesn’t rate anymore. When a bomb killed at least 51 Iraqis at a Baghdad market on Tuesday, ending an extended run of relative calm, only one of the three network newscasts (NBC’s) even bothered to mention it.
The only problem is that no news from Iraq isn’t good news - it’s no news. The night of the Baghdad bombing the CBS war correspondent Lara Logan appeared as Jon Stewart’s guest on “The Daily Show” to lament the vanishing television coverage and the even steeper falloff in viewer interest. “Tell me the last time you saw the body of a dead American soldier,” she said. After pointing out that more soldiers died in Afghanistan than Iraq last month, she asked, “Who’s paying attention to that?”
Her question was rhetorical, but there is an answer: Virtually no one. If you follow the nation’s op-ed pages and the presidential campaign, Iraq seems as contentious an issue as Vietnam was in 1968. But in the country itself, Cindy vs. Michelle, not Shiites vs. Sunnis, is the hotter battle. This isn’t the press’s fault, and it isn’t the public’s fault. It’s merely the way things are.
In America, the war has been a settled issue since early 2007. No matter what has happened in Iraq since then, no matter what anyone on any side of the Iraq debate has had to say about it, polls have consistently found that a majority of Americans judge the war a mistake and want out. For that majority, the war is over except for finalizing the withdrawal details. They’ve moved on without waiting for the results of Election Day 2008 or sampling the latest hectoring ad from moveon.org.
Perhaps if Americans had been asked for shared sacrifice at the war’s inception, including a draft, they would be in 1968-ish turmoil now. But they weren’t, and they aren’t. In 2008, the Vietnam analogy doesn’t hold. The center does.
The good news for Democrats - and the big opportunity for Barack Obama - is that John McCain and the war’s last cheerleaders don’t recognize that immutable reality. They’re so barricaded in their own Vietnam bunker that they think the country is too. It’s their constant and often shrill refrain that if only those peacenik McGovern Democrats and the “liberal media” acknowledged that violence is down in Iraq - as indeed it is, substantially - voters will want to press on to “victory” and not “surrender.” And therefore go for Mr. McCain.
-clip-
And, reinforcing my last post, here's Alexander Cockburn, also a bit less than fully-enamored of Pope Russert:
In the old days, when a journalist met his final deadline, friends would gather round the grave, toss in a few memories, then make off to the bar for liquid comfort and disrespectful stories about the dear departed. Contrast this with the send-off for Tim Russert, NBC’s Washington Bureau Chief and 17-year maestro of “Meet the Press”, who dropped dead of a heart attack last week.
He got funeral ceremonies a pope and most U.S. presidents would envy: a private funeral with this year’s two presidential nominees sitting side by side on Russert family orders, with the Congressional leadership in the neighboring pews; George and Laura Bush at the public wake; thousands at the memorial in the Kennedy Center, with Washington and New York’s media and political elites massed in respectful homage.
Was Russert so extraordinary a fellow, to elicit so tumultuous a farewell? Surely not. He could be a sharp interviewer, but I can’t remember any occasions when I said to myself, “ Russert has given me a whole new insight into the way the world works.” There are many journalists and broadcasters I would put miles ahead of him.
-clip-
We’ve had seven years of craven, culpable journalism - across the mainstream board. No one honors the reporters at Knight Ridder newspapers, who were among the few ones in the mainstream press, pre-war, to hammer away at the WMD lies. They never led off Russert's or anyone else's show. Russert was managing editor and host of Meet the Press, host of The Tim Russert Show on MSNBC, senior vp of NBC News, NBC Washington Bureau Chief, and regular political analyst on the Today Show, The Nightly News. So he was as responsible as anyone for the press collusion with the Administration. But now that the administration is looking bad, he's not a collaborator but a tenacious knight, jousting with them, 'truth-telling', getting 'the bad guys' for 'we, the people.'
Final question: Since NBC had a huge stake in Tim Russert’s future (“Meet the Press” brought in $50 million a year and they paid him around $5 million a year) you’d have thought the network’s executives would have taken a look at the tv screen and raised the alarm. Across the past three months he looked in increasingly awful shape, bright red in the face, overweight and sometimes with a slightly glazed, sad look. I told people I thought he was set to die of a heart attack right there in the studio, which is exactly what happened. On one sighting recently he didn’t take his loafers off in the gym, and when pressed about this casual approach to vitally needed exercise, gave a wink.
posted by Sir Gumbo at 10:28 PM
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