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Getting "it"

by Mark Gisleson

We're at a point in Iraq and with the war on terror where it's fairly interesting to look around to see who gets "it," and who doesn't. As part of a discussion on Krugman's latest book that will be largely familiar to regular Bush Wars readers, I did some digging to see what the conservative columnists are writing about. Iraq's not high on their list, and many are clutching at some highly irrelevant topics (e.g., missing Sudanese penises, breast implants, "intelligent design," etc.) — anything to avoid talking about the elephant in their ideological living rooms.

Jimmy Breslin, not surprisingly, is one of the columnists who gets "it." His October 23rd column, "Bin Laden, Cop Killer," spells out for New York's finest the nitty gritty details of how George W. Bush and his administration have betrayed cops everywhere by failing to deal with the world's biggest cop killer, Osama bin Laden.

George Bush stood in the World Trade Center ruins and said he would get bin Laden. Get bin Laden as a sheriff would, smoke him out, shoot him cold dead. All the poor cops cheered. What a thrill to have a good tough guy as president! That was over two years ago. Now you never hear bin Laden mentioned.

And the cops who have lost their own do nothing. They are the most extraordinarily gullible of people. They support with all fervor the idea of our president sending troops to Iraq and not where they could capture bin Laden. The cops say nothing about their dead. They are afraid to demand that their government honor the tradition of the 1013 and catch this common cop killer, bin Laden. They are afraid of anybody in authority. They have their dead bodies and they don't have the guts to shout. If they yelled with the emotion used when pushing around a peace demonstration, or anything made up of blacks, their prep school hero, Bush, would quiver and I say he makes bin Laden the goal again.

What is this, bin Laden has killed cops and we don't even catch him, but now we have to listen to tapes of bin Laden threatening to attack us again? Why do we put up with this?

Ben Smith, in the New York Observer, writes about Jim Wilkinson, and offers him as exhibit A in the case against the Republican party having a clue as to how to handle things. As Gen. Tommy Franks director of strategic communications, Wilkinson managed to piss off the entire assembled press corps with his arrogant "no news" press briefings. His reward? Wilkinson will be handling the media for the 2004 Republican National Convention in New York City.

"What’s clear is, it won’t look like any other convention we’ve ever seen. We’re looking to provide as much access to reporters as possible," Mr. Wilkinson said, taking the war’s key lesson to the convention.

But that, as many reporters would remind him, is what he said in Qatar....

Plenty of reporters seethed at him during the war, and not covertly. Reporters there barked and protested—many are still brutally angry—at the "No comment" after "No comment" they received in Doha as their embedded colleagues broke news in the field and Mr. Rumsfeld gave press conferences at the Pentagon. Doha was, to them, a kind of biosphere of non-news.

"We were basically a studio audience to make it look like a real press conference," said Kevin Diaz of the Minneapolis Star Tribune. "They were talking—literally—directly over our heads to the television cameras."

The President, at least, is still on topic. In the aftermath of the horrendous Baghdad bombings, he made the following comments this morning, as reported by Fox News:

"The more progress we make on the ground, the more free the Iraqis become, the more electricity that's available, the more jobs are available, the more kids that are going to school, the more desperate these killers become," Bush told reporters at the White House.

He said those who are continuing to engage in violence "can't stand the thought of a free society. They hate freedom. They love terror. They love to try to create fear and chaos."

[more]

Oh yes, those freedom-hating Iraqis...

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A quick Diebold footnote. Swarthmore College, responding to Diebold's flurry of legal action in their efforts to suppress stories about electronic voting machine errors, has initiated a policy of "terminating the internet connection of any student who links to the Why War? website."

It's not quite as bad as that sounds. Swarthmore will let you spell out the URL, but warns students against actual links.

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Saw Beyond Borders Sunday afternoon with a friend. The horrific scenes from the refugee camps in Ethiopia, Cambodia and Chechnya will stay with me for a long time, even though the love story that runs through the movie was almost unbearably sketchy and clichéd.

Something else will stay with me as well: the nine consecutive commercials we sat through before the previews started. The first was perhaps the most grating, a teaser for Fox's season premier of "24" brought to us by Ford. Ford wanted to make sure that we knew that the season opener would be broadcast uninterrupted by commercials! Having just paid to see a first-run movie, we weren't terribly amused by Ford's logic of punishing a paying audience by bragging about not interrupting a free television show with commercials.

Posted by Steve Perry at October 27, 2003 10:23 AM

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