No guts, no grace
Press, including Bob Novak, kneels before King George
SAN FRANCISCO -- Do you think the Bush administration is going after the press? The San Francisco Chronicle says on the front page this morning, "Cameraman Jailed for Not Yielding Tape," whereas The New York Times is reporting, "U.S. Wins Access to Reporter Phone Records." I'm feeling like a bunny trying to outrun a pack of wolfhounds.
Sometimes the press enjoys scaring itself or pretending it is about to be made into a bunch of martyrs. This is not one of those times. We are under full attack now, and it is time to fight. I am not infuriated by the performance of the press so far, but I am disgusted. Bob Novak is the most notable traitor, but others are leaping for political favors as they rush to insist The New York Times shouldn't print the news (and occasionally, quite old news at that). I fail to see how Fox News and other right-wing outlets have so little imagination they cannot picture themselves in the same corner come a Democratic administration. What goes around comes around and all that good stuff, but to set it up so that payback is hell for yourself is tragically, deeply dumb. I have watched the D.C. press corps play courtier to Bush since he openly insulted Helen Thomas, who is not only a first-rate journalist, but a lady as well. Shame on you all. No principle, no guts, no grace.
On another topic, I was talking to a guy named Andy the other night when he observed that unlike President Bush, he had learned first-hand that diplomacy works with skunks. He was speaking of skunks, the striped, tail-up-bad-sign kind, but they seem a perfect metaphor for the rest of what he laughingly calls Bush's diplomatic strategery -- at which point the proper response is to ask, "What diplomatic strategery?" Has anyone seen a foreign policy lately? Does anyone still know what containment means? These are, after all, the people who were against arms control because Bill Clinton was for it.
One feels like Casey Stengel looking at the early Mets: "Doesn't anybody here know how to play this game?" In the most contemptible act of irresponsibility imaginable, the neo-cons who pulled together to start this war now reject any responsibility for it. Mr. Wolfowitz is busy running the World Bank; it's no longer his business.
The rest of this crew of moral pygmies are too frightened of Dick Cheney to point out that this entire war is a disaster, or a FIASCO as Thomas E. Ricks, author of the new book "Fiasco" puts it. I think the Bush foreign policy -- when in doubt, send Condi Rice home -- is a public relations ploy to keep the Israeli-Lebanese war going long enough so that Americans won't notice Iraq has completely collapsed in the meantime. And it has collapsed. I suggest our military figure out how to get out of there before they lose an entire effing army on the way.
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more:
http://www.workingforchange.com/article.cfm?itemid=21184Molly takes no prisoners in this one.
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