There’s an email circulating that starts off with another of those typical “the media won’t tell you this” lines. In this particular case, the accusation is that the story “doesn’t have the shock effect.”

But as usual, there’s a little more to it than that…something that the “they” who composed this email really don’t want you to know.

The story centers on a statue of an American soldier, apparently grieving at the loss of a fellow soldier and being comforted by a young child. According to the email, the statue, which will eventually be shipped from Iraq to a military museum in Texas, was created by an Iraqi artist named Kalat.

This Kalat, the story goes, had suffered the torturous existence of being forced by Saddam Hussein to make “many hundreds of bronze busts of Saddam that dotted Baghdad.” The email then reports that Kalat was so grateful for “the Americans [sic] liberation of his country” that he melted three of the busts to create this memorial to fallen American soldiers and worked on the statue for many months.

Out of the goodness of his heart.

The email then asks and answers its own question:

“Do you know why we don’t hear about this in the news? Because it is heart warming and praise worthy. The media avoids it because it does not have the shock effect.”

Or so “they” want you to believe…while they deliver this little call to action: “But we can do something about it. We can pass this along to as many people as we can in honor of all our brave military who are making a difference.”

A quick visit to myth-busting website snopes.com, which, curiously enough, is the kind of place these self-appointed media-condemning “truth” spreaders never seem to bother to go, tells a somewhat different story about this Kalat and his artistic creation.

The website declares it a case of “real photograph, inaccurate description:”

“…the accompanying text is very misleading. The Iraqi sculptor was not ‘forced by Saddam Hussein to make the many hundreds of bronze busts of Saddam,’ he did not produce the memorial shown because he was ‘so grateful that the Americans liberated his country,’ and the monument was not his idea. Members of the U.S. Army paid the sculptor, who had previously worked on a few other Saddam statues, to create the work pictured according to a design of their choosing.”

And believe me, the tall tale only gets better — or worse, depending on your point of view — from there. Why did this Kalat really agree to build the statue, and how does he really feel about American soldiers? Read it for yourself…but be warned: the “they” who created this email certainly don’t want you to know!

I certainly have no problem with “supporting the troops” and honoring the men and women of our military. But there’s a big difference between paying tribute and spreading propaganda.

What’s on their agenda? What are they trying to get you to believe, despite what the apparent facts are? And why would they make false accusations while demanding the “whole” truth?

Why won’t the media really report this story? Maybe because it’s inaccurate, exaggerated and just plain false. Sometimes the media does gets it right.

Just a few minutes ago, a bulletin from the New York Times reported that a roadside bomb in Baghdad killed four U.S. soldiers, bringing the official American death toll, as tabulated by the Associated Press, to 4,000.

The grim milestone came on the same day that rockets and mortars pounded the U.S.-protected Green Zone, underscoring the fragile security situation and the resilience of both Sunni and Shiite extremist groups despite an overall lull in violence.

Excuse me, but isn’t this famous “Green Zone” the same one that John McCain toured in an attempt to prove how safe the streets of Iraq have become?

It was not a dark and stormy night, although perhaps that would have been a more appropriate setting, obvious cliché aside. In fact, it was an otherwise quiet morning in Washington, around 9:00am, when President George W. Bush gave the executive order from the Situation Room that launched Operation Iraqi Freedom.

As you must surely know, that event happened five years ago today.

It was followed, less than two months later, with Bush standing on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln, a banner that read, “Mission Accomplished” in the background.

One may continue to wonder why, if the mission had truly been accomplished on May 1, 2003, we are marking our fifth anniversary in Iraq amid warnings from the Bush administration that pulling troops out too soon could spell certain disaster there and here at home.

I was told by someone I work with that they had heard someone on another station — possibly one of the cable networks — say that today we “celebrate” the anniversary of the war in Iraq.

I’m glad it wasn’t someone on our station, because I’d have had to get up, walk out of my office to the newsroom, walk up to that person and smack them right upside the head.

We commemorate such an event, but with casualties around the 4,000 mark and the price tag that grows by about $200 Million every day, there seems to be little to “celebrate.”  To add fuel to that fire, I note that one of the candidates for president says it’d be fine with him to keep our troops there for 100 years.  Wonder what kind of celebration would be appropriate for that?

In an upcoming article, Mike Huckabee, who has surged ahead in the GOP polls, is questioning the Mormon faith:

“Huckabee, an ordained Southern Baptist minister, asks in an upcoming article, ‘Don’t Mormons believe that Jesus and the devil are brothers?’

“The article, to be published in Sunday’s New York Times Magazine, says Huckabee asked the question after saying he believes Mormonism is a religion but doesn’t know much about it.”

Has Huckabee ever heard of the internet? Or the Information Age? It’s amazing what one can find in just .0013 seconds in a good Google search. Like this article from the homepage of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints about their beliefs on the subject of Jesus Christ. Or their official definition of Satan, which makes no mention whatsoever of him being the brother of Christ.

Of course, there’s the other side of the coin, that we are all children of God, and thereby brothers and sisters of each other in a spiritual sense. So Christ and Satan are spiritual brothers, just as I am your spiritual brother as children of God. Unfortunately for Huckabee, even Southern Baptists believe that.

This little blunder comes on the heels of his unsatisfactory explanation of his own words from 1992, when he urged the “isolation” of “carriers” of HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. He also opposed increased funding for finding a cure and said homosexuality could pose a public health risk.

He now says that today, he might phrase his answers “a little differently,” but doesn’t define exactly what those differences would be. Of course, Huckabee has “flip-flopped” on the funding issue, and now claims that his remarks were made at a time when little was known about how the AIDS virus was transmitted.

And here’s where that dreaded “Information Age” comes in, again. Sorry, Mike, but that just doesn’t ring true, unless you were as uninformed about AIDS in 1992 as you seem to be about other religions in 2007.

Let’s review a little history, shall we?

• It is interesting to note, however, that as far back as 1959, scientists isolated what they believe was the earliest known case of AIDS, and that in 1978, gay men in the United States and Sweden, and heterosexuals in Tanzania and Haiti began showing signs of the illness.
• In 1980, the year Ronald Reagan was elected and 12 years before Huckabee’s remarks, 31 people died of the illness. The following year, there were 234 known deaths.
• In 1982, a full decade before Huckabee didn’t seem to know much about it, the illness became known as Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome and the Centers for Disease Control linked it to blood. There were 853 known deaths attributed to AIDS that year.
• In 1983, during which 2,304 people died from it, the AIDS virus was identified. The CDC warned of a potential problem with the blood supply.
• By 1985, the first antibodies test for AIDS was developed, and the blood supply was checked for signs of the virus. That was the first year that Reagan mentioned AIDS in public.
• AZT, the first anti-HIV drug, hit the market in 1987, five years before Huckabee’s call for isolation. In April of that year, Reagan, speaking to a group of physicians in Philadelphia, refers to AIDS as “public enemy number one.”
• In 1988, the United States mailed out more than 100 million copies of a booklet written by then-U.S. Surgeon General C. Everett Koop called Understanding AIDS. Huckabee’s copy, undoubtedly, was lost in the mail.
• In 1990, Reagan apologized for neglecting the crisis during his eight-year presidency. That same year, teenage Ryan White, a hemophiliac who contracted AIDS from a blood transfusion, died. Notables like Rock Hudson, Liberace, and Amanda Blake are already gone.
• An alarming statistic came in 1991, when the World Health Organization estimated that 10 million people worldwide were HIV-positive. That was the year before Huckabee opposed funding for a cure and wanted to ship HIV+ patients somewhere else.

Here is a different look at what knew about AIDS and when we knew it:

• By 1982, the CDC had identified four primary risk factors: male homosexuality, intravenous drug abuse, Haitian origin and Hepatitis A.
• In 1983, the U.S. Public Health Service had released recommendations to prevent transmission of HIV through sexual contact and blood transfusions. The CDC added female sex partners of HIV+ men as a fifth high-risk group. (They probably didn’t have to think too long about that one.)
• In 1985, the U.S. Public Health Service issued its first recommendations for preventing the transmission of HIV from mother to child.

By 1992, it was clear to most people — other than Huckabee or those who continued to rule out AIDS as anything but a “gay disease” — how HIV was transmitted. It was not some mystery illness that had people wearing masks to prevent airborne infection.

Yet somehow, despite the fact that women and children were getting the disease in manners that had nothing to do with gay sex, Mike Huckabee opposed funding to find a cure, and apparently didn’t understand the basics about how it was spread.

If he could miss a decade of scientific data, a kind of “intelligence information,” can you imagine what he might do with Iraq?

Who’ll be the Democratic presidential candidate in 2008? It would seem that Karl Rove has already decided that it’ll be Hillary Clinton. In his Newsweek column, he discusses how the Republican candidate — he apparently hasn’t decided who that will be, yet — can beat her:

“Say in authentic terms what you believe. The GOP nominee must highlight his core convictions to help people understand who he is and to set up a natural contrast with Clinton, both on style and substance. Don’t be afraid to say something controversial. The American people want their president to be authentic. And against a Democrat who calculates almost everything, including her accent and laugh, being seen as someone who says what he believes in a direct way will help.”

I wonder if Mitt Romney read the article. Romney already makes John Kerry, the man accused of being the new millenium’s first real flip-flopper of a presidential candidate, look like he never changed his mind a day in his life.

Clinton has gotten lots of attention the past few days, and she seems to have gotten points for her handling of a hostage crisis at her campaign headquarters in New Hampshire. She seemed calm under fire, authoritative, decisive. (Even though she likely made no decisions at all about how that particular crisis was being handled.)

Meanwhile, just as people have been forgetting that pointless squabble about why she won’t admit that her vote to authorize Bush to invade Iraq if necessary was a “mistake” (and use that specific word), Bill Clinton made a remark that will probably put him (back) in the dog house: speaking to an Iowa audience, he said that he “flatly opposed” the war in Iraq from the beginning.

Of course, back in 2003, he told a graduating class at Tougaloo College, “I supported the President when he asked the Congress for authority to stand up against weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.”

And in 2004, he said this in a CNN interview:

“I have repeatedly defended President Bush against the left on Iraq, even though I think he should have waited until the U.N. inspections were over.

“[After 9/11, Bush's first priority was to keep al Qaeda and other terrorist networks from obtaining] chemical and biological weapons or small amounts of fissile material.

“That’s why I supported the Iraq thing. There was a lot of stuff unaccounted for.”

Is this a rewriting of history or a clarification of what Bill Clinton really felt but didn’t come right out and say because of his wife’s pending run for the White House? It makes little difference, because either way, it gives Hillary’s critics more ammunition.

And while Clinton’s critics are typing up a storm on the blogosphere, there is now word that Barack Obama has now taken the lead (albeit a slight one) in Iowa over Clinton and John Edwards. Obama is still riding the high of campaign assistance from Oprah Winfrey and the endorsement of Des Moines’ mayor, as well as a fiery speech three weeks ago in which he vowed to turn away from the partisan battles of the Clinton-Bush years.

That’s something all candidates should be promising. And exactly what the winning candidate needs to deliver.

• Take the poll: Who do you think will win the Democratic primary in Iowa?

Did Saddam Hussein participate in the 9/11 terror attacks?

It’s a simple question, and the answer has been confirmed by official sources, including some at the White House.

But the answer still doesn’t come easily for some Americans. Continue reading “Six Years Later, The Myth Lingers”

“A threat to your children.”

Where did that quote come from? To what does it refer?

Was it spoken by George W. Bush on the subject of terrorists? Or was it how Al Gore described global warming?

“It is not a question of left vs. right; it is a question of right vs. wrong.”

How about that one? Was it said in reference to doing anything necessary to win the war on terror or to save the planet?

“I worry about it, because I don’t want to die.”

Those words were attributed to a nine-year-old who had heard one of the two messages: was she terrified of al Qaeda or sweeping climate changes? Continue reading “The Outrage”

The War in Iraq’s most vocal and well-known critic, activist Cindy Sheehan, says she’s giving up her fight. She blames her decision, since someone else is always to blame, on Democrats who caved on their showdown with the president as well as some attacks from the left that have targeted her.

In her “resignation letter,” she states that the toll has been too much:

“I have spent every available cent I got from the money a “grateful” country gave me when they killed my son and every penny that I have received in speaking or book fees since then. I have sacrificed a 29 year marriage and have traveled for extended periods of time away from Casey’s brother and sisters and my health has suffered and my hospital bills from last summer (when I almost died) are in collection because I have used all my energy trying to stop this country from slaughtering innocent human beings. I have been called every despicable name that small minds can think of and have had my life threatened many times.”

She also takes a shot at Americans in general with this:

“I have invested everything I have into trying to bring peace with justice to a country that wants neither. If an individual wants both, then normally he/she is not willing to do more than walk in a protest march or sit behind his/her computer criticizing others.”

A while back, when Sheehan first started getting attention with her protest outside Bush’s ranch in Texas, I criticized the way in which she chose to protest. Specifically, it was her line of reasoning I called into question: she suggested repeatedly that Bush lied about the reasons for the war, and that he shouldn’t be trusted. Yet she then claimed that she wanted to meet with him privately to get the “real” reason her son died in Iraq. The problem with this, I said, was that if you don’t trust Bush, then you don’t trust him: why would you believe what he said to your face if you think he’s incapable of being honest? I suggested that she was only there to make her political point and that she didn’t really want to meet with Bush for that very reason. She later made a statement indicating that she was glad Bush refused to meet with her.

Sheehan’s current potshot at the American society, it would seem, indicates that flawed reasoning is still alive and well.

The price tag for protesting, she says, is too high. Yet she seems to be angry that everyone else isn’t willing to pay the very price she says she is no longer willing to pay. Memorial Day is an annual reminder of the high price our soldiers have paid over this nation’s history so that we can have our freedom. But it is their work, their literal blood, sweat and tears, that have won the right for the rest of us to be as involved or as uninvolved as we wish to be.

Not everyone is going to be Cindy Sheehan. There are people who despise the war far more than she does, whether she would agree with that or not. And these people aren’t willing — and never have been willing — to go to the extremes she has to make their case. But in America, there’s nothing wrong with that if we value personal freedom: how willing you choose to be in letting your president, your lawmakers and your neighbors know how you feel is your business, not Sheehan’s and not anyone else’s.

If you have deep personal reservations about this war, then perhaps it could be reasonably argued that you should make them known; but the decision is still up to you. No one else gets to dictate that for you. You have to decide when your point needs to be made. No matter what price Sheehan has paid, that was her choice. No one forced her to do so. That’s why her campaign struck such a chord with so many people!

Ironically, her decision to throw in the towel comes at a time when I was most in agreement with what she was saying. As she put it in the aforementioned letter:

“I believe that partisan politics should be left to the wayside when hundreds of thousands of people are dying for a war based on lies that is supported by Democrats and Republican alike. It amazes me that people who are sharp on the issues and can zero in like a laser beam on lies, misrepresentations, and political expediency when it comes to one party refuse to recognize it in their own party. Blind party loyalty is dangerous whatever side it occurs on.”

It cannot be said any better or more clearly than that. Perhaps her son didn’t die in vain, as she has repeatedly suggested, if this clear point about the danger of falling for your own party’s lines, whichever party that happens to be, can be made and can actually sink in.

What do you say on Memorial Day? Especially while an unpopular war continues to divide the country so bitterly that little if anything seems to get done because of all of the arguing.

You send your condolences to the families who’ve lost loved ones. Not that there is anything anyone can say that can make it any easier.

You thank soldiers any time you encounter one, because you know that they could face the same fate serving this country.

You talk to kids to make sure the next generation understands what those who have come and gone before them have sacrificed so that they can live in a nation that values freedom so highly. (Depending on which freedoms we’re talking about in a given moment, that is.)

But what do you say to the soldiers who have died? If you could talk to a soldier who had lost his or her life while serving the country, what would you say? Would you thank them? Would you apologize? Would you look down at your shoes and shift your weight, hoping that words might eventually come?

I think I’d ask the soldier about their life. Their family. Their hopes. Their dreams.

These are the things that always seem to be lost in the haze of controversy. We get so worked up over numbers — how many troops have died since the war began, how many more have died this year than last, how many less have died in this war than in others — that we seem to forget so easily that each one of them was a person who had the same fears, ambitions, and desire to live that all of us have.

Some of them made a decision to volunteer for service. That doesn’t mean their death was “deserved.” It doesn’t mean, no matter how right you think a war happens to be, that their deaths were any less tragic.

The War in Iraq makes a lot more people pause to think about Memorial Day. If there wasn’t a war, would you be as likely to take the time? If we weren’t still losing troops, would you notice when one of these “military holidays” roll around? Or would you just enjoy your day off and pay no attention to the occasion?

I heard someone today wish someone else a “Happy Memorial Day.” Memorial Day isn’t a day that should be happy. It should be solemn. It should be a day of respect that we spend counting the sacrifices our soldiers have made carrying out missions our country deemed — for whatever reasons — necessary.

The ironic thing is that these same soldiers, in performing those functions and giving their lives to see them carried out, provided the rest of us with the ability to do whatever we want to do on a day like this, without ever noticing that the price tag for freedom in America is high.

Rosie O’Donnell won’t be returning to The View following an on-air skirmish between the former comedienne and colleague Elizabeth Hasselbeck, it was announced on Friday.

O’Donnell was riding out the last few weeks of her contract with ABC and was planning to leave at the end of the season. What set her off — this time around — was that Hasselbeck apparently didn’t rush to Rosie’s defense when conservative pundits accused Rosie of calling American troops “terrorists.”

To review, here is a sample of the exchange between the two on the show from May 16th:

Rosie: Six-hundred fifty-five thousand Iraqi civilians are dead. Who are the terrorists?Elizabeth: Who are the terrorists?

Rosie: Six-hundred fifty-five thousand Iraqis. … I’m saying that if you were in Iraq and another country, the United States, the richest in the world, invaded your country and killed 655,000 of your citizens, what would you call us?

Though her question was rhetorical, there is no doubt in my mind that Rosie is making the implication that our soldiers are the terrorists in this situation. You may agree with her; it doesn’t really matter to me whether you do or not. But I don’t see how anyone can hear (or read) that exchange and doubt that Rosie was making that suggestion, whether she meant to or not.

Last Wednesday, the two had a well-publicized blow-up on the air, when Rosie called Elizabeth “cowardly” for not stepping up to defend her. Elizabeth fired back:

“You know what’s cowardly? Asking a rhetorical question that you never answer yourself. That’s cowardly.”

And I would have to agree. There’s nothing wrong with speaking your mind; there’s a lot wrong with leaving so much room to interpretation, then claiming offense when someone else doesn’t rush in and explain your words for you. If we’re to believe that Rosie is so tough, so eager to “put it out there” and so thick-skinned, we should have a great deal of trouble believing that Rosie seriously thinks she needs anyone to defend what she has to say.

This is the problem I see with talking about the war: it has everything to do with snarky personal attacks and very little to do with the facts. (Are we to believe that even Rosie thinks that American troops killed each one of those 655,000? Are we really to believe that Rosie has somehow discounted the deadly results amassed by Iraqis who are bombing and murdering their own citizens?)

It is this kind of foolishness that has kept us in Iraq so long. It is this kind of attack-style argument that not only doesn’t help real discussion, understanding and solution occur, but also only encourages both sides to stubbornly dig their heels even deeper into the soil of whichever side of the spectrum they’re standing on.

You don’t solve conflicts or ease tensions that way.

If I were to use Rosie’s reasoning, I guess I’d be calling the extremists on either side, those who seem to delight in attacking for the sake of attacking, terrorists as well. I bet she’d have a problem with that.

Incidentally, in case you are wondering about the timeslot, it should come as no surprise to my regular readers that while the while the women of The View are trading their barbs, I’m watching The Price is Right, which I find infinitely more entertaining and equally effective in bringing the troops home.

Some people are taking the story of the massacre at Virginia Tech and using it to make a political point.

Those who speak out against the current administration, and there are many, are comparing the bloodshed in Blacksburg to the bloodshed on any average day in Iraq. Some of them argue that while John McCain showed how “safe” the streets of Iraq are (while being heavily guarded with big guns), we don’t seem capable of providing even a safe environment for our own kids here at home. Some have suggested that a day when only 32 innocent people are killed at the hands of a gunman would sound like peace time to the average Iraqi citizen.

Naturally, those who support the War in Iraq, and there are fewer of them, are outraged by what they describe as so callous an argument.

Some of these same people, I suspect, nod their heads in agreement when one of the religious zealots out there says that the reason such a thing could happen is because of the removal of prayer from our schools. (That link is to a more-detailed religion-oriented post over at my other blog, The Cross Examination.) As if their “loving” God would allow 32 innocent students to be slaughtered, probably while some of them were praying for their lives, just to make such a point.

That’s a pretty callous argument, if you ask me.

Occasionally, a comment appears that I consider important enough to address in its own post.

In response to my post about McCain’s trip to Iraq to prove how much safer the streets of Baghdad are, and particularly after I stated that McCain has essentially zapped his chances of winning my vote, the great Screamin’ Remo had this to say:

“Let me get this straight: You won’t be voting for McCain because of a staged photo op? You must know of a super-secret candidate waiting in the wings who is immune to doing exactly what the media demands they do.

“I guess this means your station won’t be showing anymore b-roll of HRC clapping like an cracker in a Baptist church.”

I’ll take the second part first.

What my station does has absolutely nothing to do with what my political beliefs happen to be. I make it a point never to discuss specific details about my station, because I don’t want their to be even the possibility of any impropriety in the event that one of my bosses might stumble upon this blog.

I work in television. But since I don’t talk about my station specifically, or even the Charleston market, which station I do work for is a moot point. When I talk about television or news coverage or the media, I speak in more general terms, anyway. In case it hasn’t been clear in the past, I do not speak for any station here. Nor do I speak for anyone else here. I speak for me.

I have no control of what my station’s news department actually covers. My job is to create promotional announcements, “promos,” to lure you to the next newscast. Had I done promos the night news of McCain’s visit to Iraq broke, I would have promoted the story, assuming there wasn’t more pressing local news. Had I decided to promote that story, I wouldn’t have editorialized on the effectiveness of McCain’s trip or the irony of the heavily-armored security detail.

When I promote a story, I have anywhere from four seconds to fifteen or so. Occasionally, I’ll get a full thirty seconds. But those thirties are almost never devoted to a single story. My point here is that I don’t have time to cover the story in the promo; I have to give you just enough to (hopefully) persuade you to watch later.

So my promo for McCain’s trip, assuming that it was one of a couple of stories in the same promo, would likely have said something like this:

“John McCain says you’re not getting the ‘full picture’ of security in Iraq. What he found when he walked the streets of Baghdad, tonight at (whenever) on (newscast title).”

It wouldn’t win an award, but you get the idea. It’s my job not to allow my personal feelings to cloud my news judgment when I select stories for promotion. That’s what I do. I don’t have to like a story I’m promoting to include it in a spot. I don’t have to agree with a new law or a candidate’s claim to include it if it is relevant news that has content I think will attract viewers.

Now the first part of Remo’s remarks: I’m not saying I won’t vote for McCain just because of a staged photo op. I don’t have a problem per se with staged photo ops because they are an unfortunate fact of life for all candidates.

I have a problem with staged photo ops that don’t make sense, are used to make a point that I disagree with, or that twist or distort facts to falsely convey the reality of a given situation.

Remember this nice little photo op with John Kerry? When he dramatically “reported for duty,” once again touting his military experience, it might not have been your typical photo opportunity that has the press “meeting up” with a candidate somewhere to shed light on an issue important to the candidate’s platform, but you can be sure that it was every bit as staged.

My problem with this moment was that in 1992, Kerry had won points with me when he criticized Republicans for attempting to use the military service issue against Bill Clinton. Sorry, John: if it was wrong in 1992, then it was wrong in 2004. That photo op was a turn-off for me, but I had already come to the conclusion that I wasn’t voting for Kerry based both on what he was and wasn’t saying about Iraq.

Then we had this striking image. President Bush stands on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln on May 1, 2003, with a giant “Mission Accomplished” banner strategically placed behind him.

If the mission was accomplished back in 2003, why, in 2007, would McCain even need to make a point about conditions in Iraq since the troop surge? And why would there even be a surge for McCain to take such steps to defend?

And with all respect to Remo, I must take issue with his point that photo ops are those things that the media demands that a candidate do. Very often, the candidates are the ones who schedule them in an attempt to demand that the media cover their campaign. In the case of McCain’s trip, he had criticized the media for skewing coverage in a manner to hide the “good news ” in Iraq, then went their to prove how incomplete their coverage was. His visit was practically in the form of a dare for the media to show what he felt they were refusing to show in the past. So who really made “demands” of whom?

Of course, then there’s the saddest part of the story: while McCain was there, touting the increased security, another two dozen people — including four US soldiers — were killed in attacks just southwest of Baghdad. How much more effective might McCain’s stunt have been had it occurred at the end of a full week without any casualties?

Are we “making progress” as he insists? Sure. But before staging a visit to prove how much progress has been made, why not wait until they’ve gone a full week without any American soldiers being lost. Or a full week without any bombs going off? As long as the violence continues, and particularly, as long as our soldiers are losing their lives, that’s going to be news.

There was a time when I had every intention of voting for John McCain in 2008. It might have begun as early as 2000, in fact. The recent news item about the presidential candidate’s recent trip to Iraq, to make a point about the effectiveness of the War in Iraq, has shot that to hell.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m not sad about ruling him out. I’m actually pleased that my decision has been made slightly easier so early in the race. But I am getting ahead of myself.

In case you aren’t familiar with the story, McCain, accompanied by Sen. Lindsay Graham of South Carolina, visited one of Baghdad’s oldest marketplaces last weekend, and told reporters that he felt much better about the effectiveness of the Bush administration’s troop surge because he felt so safe on the street.

He went on to describe the scene as being “like a normal outdoor market in Indiana in the summer time.”

McCain then criticized the media for not giving Americans the “full picture” of the Iraqi situation:

“Things are better and there are encouraging signs. I’ve been here … many times over the years. Never have I been able to drive from the airport, never have I been able go out into the city as I was today.”

Ironically, McCain probably would rather the media not have provided a “full picture” of the visit itself! Then again, what’s good for the goose….

While it’s true that McCain was able to walk the streets of Iraq as he never has before, the marketplace he visited was located within the city’s “green zone,” a heavily-secured area. When outside of that zone, he was accompanied by about 100 armed soldiers, about 20 of whom went with him inside the safe portion of the city. McCain was outfitted in what appeared to be a bulletproof vest, and was being protected from the sky by three Blackhawk helicopters and two Apache gunships.

I think even I would feel safe walking the streets with that much protection around me. Maybe not.

It is unimaginable to me that people could look at the level of protection McCain’s visit required and believe that the media is intentionally downplaying the success in Iraq. When a presidential candidate tours the streets in an entourage of that much military might, then claims that the visit is proof of the safety and success of the security implementation, it should be an insult to our intelligence.

That certainly seems how it was perceived by some of the Iraqis who were in attendance. A 37-year-old textile merchant in that market had this to say of McCain’s appearance:

“They were laughing and talking to people as if there was nothing going on in this country or at least they were pretending that they were tourists and were visiting the city’s old market and buying [souvenirs]. To achieve this, they sealed off the area, put themselves in flak jackets and walked in the middle of tens of armed American soldiers.”

Another merchant was much more angry about what he saw:

“They were just making fun of us and paid this visit just for their own interests. Do they think that when they come and speak few Arabic words in a very bad manner it will make us love them? This country and its society have been destroyed because of them and I hope that they realized that during this visit.”

Somehow, I wouldn’t bet money on that from what McCain and Graham have said since they’ve returned.

The story isn’t that the American people aren’t getting the truth about how secure the streets of Baghdad are; the story is that the streets still aren’t secure enough that people can’t walk the streets without obvious fear of deadly violence.

I don’t for a moment downplay what our soldiers are risking their lives to accomplish there, nor do I think they aren’t committed to making Iraq safe. To be fair, there was a time, quite recently, when many markets like Shorja couldn’t even open for business because of the level of violence.

The fact that this one is open at all, even for what some are calling a clear publicity stunt, is certainly proof that the security situation has improved. But if we’re going to look at the “whole picture,” it seems reasonable to me that we should look at both sides: and when one side talks about being able to “walk freely” through the streets of Baghdad but seems only able to do so while under heavy military protection, you have to put those claims into perspective.

“I’m not paranoid! Why are youse all out to get me?”

–Archie Bunker,
All in the Family

Recently, in response to the piece I wrote about criticizing the news, I got a comment from Dave that I thought was worth mentioning. He began with this:

I think you have a hard time evaluating what the news does without making it personal. You’re involved with it and you’re a good guy. I’m sure most the people you work with a great people. Unfortunately, as Marx pointed out, you are what you do.If you work for any major media news outlet than your primary job is to confuse and scare the American people. The same news media that “doesn’t have the time” to cover the growing impeachment movement has all the time in the world to cover the Anna Nicole Smith nonsense.

I guess that’s another reason to find disagreement with Marx!

So I’m simultaneously a “good guy” and someone who sets out to confuse and scare people on a regular basis? I guess I’m tall and short and skinny and fat at the same time as well.

There are people who only see the world — or only want to see the world — in absolutes. You’re either all good or all bad. And if you don’t happen to side with someone else’s viewpoint, you’re either the “enemy” or “uneducated” when it comes to the truth.

I’ve never said that the media doesn’t have its failures. It does. But I also maintain that a lot of the people who go around looking for such failures sometimes invent them where they don’t exist out of their own zeal to make a point.

Think that doesn’t happen? Here’s an example:

I recently had a conversation with a friend of mine the other day who turned out to be a lot more conservative than I had realized. I said something about a health story I had seen on the Today show.

“I don’t watch NBC News,” he replied. “They’re biased.”

“Biased how?” I thought perhaps he felt that they had some kind of bias against certain medical procedures. I quickly found out that he was referring to Iraq and not to anything related to the story I was talking about.

“NBC was the first one to say ‘civil war.’”

I sat there for a moment, waiting for an explanation. When he didn’t give one, I asked what he meant.

It turns out that because NBC News had called the situation in Iraq a “civil war,” this person took that to be a specific attack on the Bush administration and conservatives everywhere.

But let’s think about this for a second. When I look up civil war in a dictionary, I find this as its primary definition:

n. A war between factions or regions of the same country.

It is a fact, not opinion, not commentary, not propoganda, that the Shi’ites and Sunnis, two factions within Iraq, are at each other’s throats. By definition, their conflict is a civil war. In labeling their ongoing battles with that term, there’s nothing inherently biased there. Saying that Iraq is suffering the effects of a civil war doesn’t, in and of itself, point blame at anyone — unless it’s the Shi’ites and Sunnis themselves.

The Bush administration didn’t cause their conflict; the Prophet Muhammad did. To put it more correctly, his death, back in the year 632, is where their hostilities began. They couldn’t agree on a successor, and they haven’t been able to settle their growing disputes that sparked from that one after all these years.

I need hardly mention that even the first Bush administration wasn’t even a wild fantasy 1400 years ago.

But this person’s perception was that using the words civil war and Iraq in the same sentence had to have been intended as an attack on his political beliefs. In his mind, therefore, NBC News is biased. Therefore, as far as he is concerned, he isn’t interested in anything they have to say about any story.

There’s something wrong, very wrong, with that kind of thinking.

The thing is, we all bring our own preconceived notions to the table. I work in the media, so I carry my own experiences when it comes to what that means. Dave suggests that I should visit other sites (that happen to side, coincedentally, with his opinion) to “learn what I really do for a living.”

That strikes me as a quite presumptuous statement for someone who doesn’t work in the media to make to someone who does.

Am I in denial? I don’t deny that there are problems in the media. I agree that there are warped priorities in terms of stories that get too much attention. But I also believe — and have stated before — that there is a cause-effect relationship that’s behind this. If the news media even thought that it could get ratings as high as they get covering celebrity “non-news” by covering things like Dave’s “growing impeachment movement,” don’t you think that’s what they’d be covering?

I can visit websites criticizing the media every day for a year. I’ll agree with the criticisms that seem reasonable, and I’ll disagree with those which depend on sweeping generalizations and paranoia, the same kinds of unreasonable debate that Dave despises when it is used against his beliefs.

I know what I do for a living, thank you very much. I don’t need you to tell me what that is, just as you don’t need me to tell you what it is that you “really” do for a living. I don’t have your knowledge or life experience. I don’t know your bosses and their goals. I don’t know what’s on your agenda.

I know the people that I work with. And even if it’s true that in only my newsroom, there isn’t a “conspiracy” to confuse and mislead, then, logically, is is therefore untrue to claim that all media people have this as their goal. That statement is invalid.

But I’ll play devil’s advocate for a second as well: if I can’t be trusted to be reasonable when it comes to the media because I’m part of it, I wonder why it doesn’t occur to Dave that he should butt out of all discussions about the labor movement since he is a union supporter. I wonder why Dave doesn’t realize that his opinions and “research” with respect to Iraq and the Bush administration could be suspect simply because he’s part of that “growing impeachment movement.”

Good luck selling him on that! And good luck with suggesting sites where he can “educate” himself about what is “really” going on, particularly when, for all of us, what is “really” going on completely depends on how paranoid you are.

Sometimes, people who fail in their job not because of conspiracy, but because of other, equally realistic reasons. Sometimes, they have personal problems that distract them from doing their best work. Sometimes, they’re just lazy and let other people do their thinking for them. And sometimes, it’s as simple as a genuine lack of talent. You can’t build conspiracy theories on that.

Hillary Clinton, now stumping as a candidate for president in 2008, has now joined Democratic lawmakers like John Kerry and John Edwards in acknowledging that the vote to authorize George W. Bush to invade Iraq was a mistake:

“If we had known then what we know now, there never would have been a vote and I would have never voted to give this president that authority.”

The audience cheered. I don’t know why they cheered. That’s like a car crash victim saying that if he’d known the morning of the accident that someone was going to barrel into him, he’d have taken a different route. Or a robbery suspect admitting that if he’d known the surveillance camera would have taken such a clear picture, he wouldn’t have robbed that store.

It’s so obvious that it doesn’t need to be said, and certainly is not be deserving of cheers when it is: Of course they wouldn’t have voted the way they did if they knew then what they know now!

That’s why hindsight is always 20/20.

The real question here in my mind is, as former First Lady, who would have been in a position to get some information from her husband through his position as president, why didn’t Hillary know then?

If you believe all of the political bloggers — and I don’t — they knew long before the vote. If our lawmakers were as smart as the bloggers claim to have been, they’d have all been watching the events of 9/11 unfolding on live television, immediately certain that Bush would use the terror attacks as an excuse to go to war with Saddam Hussein. So why didn’t they know then?

I wonder why those bloggers aren’t our elected officials; we seem to be sending the uninformed to Washington these days and leaving those in the know stuck on Blogger and Wordpress. How did that happen?

John Edwards said this in a November, 2005 op-ed article for The Washington Post:

“But in fact we now know that Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction when our forces invaded Iraq in 2003. The intelligence was deeply flawed.”

“It was a mistake to vote for this war in 2002.”

Bill Clinton, in a July, 2003, Larry King interview, said:

“People can quarrel with whether we should have more troops in Afghanistan or internationalize Iraq or whatever, but it is incontestable that on the day I left office, there were unaccounted for stocks of biological and chemical weapons.”

If he believed that to be true in 2003, there should be no question about whether to second-guess the votes in 2002. The intelligence information that would have been available as he was leaving office — the materials that would have led him to that unquestionable conclusion — wouldn’t have been the “flawed, misleading” intelligence information that Bush produced; it would have been based on the information obtained during the Clinton administration.

So the debate still rages on over those elusive weapons of mass destruction. If they were there, they’re either not there now, or they’re hidden in the same tear in the space-time continuum where Osama bin Laden is kicking back.

President Bush has flat-out accepted responsibility for the errors made during the war. As well he should have. There have been many. But Bush didn’t get to the point of liability without asssitance.

The people who voted to give the president the authority to go to war made it too easy.

Even if Bush and Cheny personally fabricated every word of intelligence they presented, they still were given the authority to go to war. Conditions? Obviously they weren’t strict enough, were they? If the lawmakers had known then what they knew now, and the rest of the country was in the dark, they wouldn’t have voted no because it would have made them look too passive to an angry public still reeling from 9/11. But we all know that at the very least, they’d have made it a hell of a lot harder for Bush to make the case that would allow him to go to war. Those conditions they put on that authorization would have been a lot more specific, and would have required a lot more proof. He’d have had to be a lot more convincing to talk them out of what they already knew.

In this country, when a bartender continues serves someone who’s obviously too drunk to drive who then gets into a deadly accident, some jurisdictions allow the bartender to be punished. When a parent owns a gun and doesn’t take sufficient precautions to keep their child from getting that gun and fatally shooting someone, it’s the parent who faces jail time, not the child.

There are Democrats who think that Bush has to be blitzed out of his mind or possess the mentality of a small child, if not both. So why did they, and their Republican counterparts, serve him up more drinks and leave the gun cabinet unlocked so he could take us into Iraq on flawed intelligence without a clear plan for getting out?

My question takes no blame away from Bush about what has happened since we went in; it simply seeks to question why those who helped Bush get there are able to get off the hook by playing word games with history to draw attention from their own complicity.

Is that too unreasonable a question to ask? I don’t think so. Do you?