Category: Politics

As I was walking in downtown D.C., I saw a story in the Washington Post that actually made me purchase the paper:

U.S. Forces Move Into Stronghold Of Cleric
Insurgents Scatter as Hunt For Their Leader Intensifies
KARBALA, Iraq, May 23 — U.S. forces expanded an offensive against rebel cleric Moqtada Sadr on Sunday by pushing into his stronghold of Kufa for the first time, as his armed followers vanished from the streets of this Shiite holy city.
The battle for southern Iraq, which has occupied U.S. soldiers for weeks, appears to have shifted from a broad engagement across several fronts to a sustained battle aimed at a single elusive objective: Sadr, who leads thousands of militiamen, known as the Mahdi Army.
For seven weeks, U.S. forces have been killing scores of the fighters loyal to Sadr, who has fomented an anti-American insurrection in a region once receptive to the occupation….

Wait a sec…what’s that again? “U.S. forces have been killing scores of the fighters loyal to Sadr”? Not just a few here and there, but scores of them? Boy, I don’t remember seeing that on “Today,” my morning infotainment show! Must have missed it between the Iraqi prison photos and the 13,406th segment on low-carb dieting.
So it would appear that our war efforts are not failing. You will recall that less than a month ago, Iraq was on the verge of a full-scale civil war, and that arresting the respected Shiite thug leader Sadr was going to inspire the citizens to revolt, and the security situation was “deteriorating,” quagmire Vietnam failure unilateral blood-for-oil rama-lama-ding-dong.
Then the media abruptly switched to the prison abuse story. We are informed — by reporters who, judging by their stories, rarely venture out of their air-conditioned offices except under the protection of the U.S. military — that Arab opinion is “enraged” by these photos, trotting out numbers about how only .00034% of Moroccan Bedouins support Iraqi occupation, etc.
I remember reading similar poll numbers two years ago, before we even invaded Iraq. What’s the difference? And in a country where everyone — literally, everyone — had a family member imprisoned or murdered by the former regime, are Iraqis really that fainthearted?
Think back to 6-8 months ago, when the occupation was “failing” because “services” were not restored to the populace. Recall the endless stories from Baghdad about the electricity going out sometimes (which reporters noticed because that screwed up their laptop batteries.) Today, Iraq has more electricity than before the war, water is more abundant, schools are open, food is plentiful, etc. You never hear about the “services” because they all work, more or less, at least as well as the top-tier Third World countries.
I’ve written in Catholic Light about how the press has a meta-narrative for just about everything they write (if I didn’t, I meant to write about it.) Because of the exigencies of writing against a deadline, reporters can’t re-think The Big Picture every time they sit down to compose an article. So they have these meta-narratives they use. You know them:
Gays Are Conquering Prejudice to Claim Their Full Civil Rights
Greedy Corporations Cause Lack of Medical Insurance
Catholic Church Resists the Noble Forces of Modern Liberalism
Minorities Get Shafted — Again
Women Can Do Anything Despite Men’s Efforts to Keep Them Down
In this case, the meta-narrative is “U.S. Occupation Failing.” The narrative of an individual story is just a subset of the meta-narrative. Thus, lack of electricity is proof that the occupation is failing. So are random bombings of soldiers, and mass murders of innocent Iraqis. So are disgusting pictures of prison abuse. Or meaningless polls.
You see what I mean? Even though the original justifications for the conclusion have evaporated, the conclusion rolls along, because it’s the meta-narrative. Intellectual honesty would seem to demand a re-assessment of the conclusion, given that the facts have changed dramatically, but none is forthcoming.
You could list many huge stories the press has gotten wrong in the last 20 years, including the 1994 Republican takeover of Congress, the fall of the Soviet Union, and the rise of radical Islam and its threat to America. Yet by and large, after missing big stories, journalists don’t collectively scratch their heads and say, “How the heck did we miss that one?” They just adjust their meta-narratives, even though that approach got them into trouble in the first place.
In five weeks, there will likely be more violence after Iraq gets its sovereignty. Mark my words, that will spark another round of breast-beating. The occupation could fail, but the cause won’t be the policies or the people involved. It may happen because the news media will have sold their defeat meta-narrative to the American public.
Then thousands and thousands of Iraqis will die. Does that futher peace on earth? Is it good and right to allow innocent human beings to die in order to defeat President Bush? It would be nice if the media re-thought their commitment to this storyline, before it’s too late.

A little local news here: security nabobs for this summer’s Dem convention in Boston are planning to shut down the city’s inbound highways and commuter rail access for four days in July. Even Mayor Tom (“Mumbles”) Menino, who brought this money-losing disaster to town for the glory of Massachusetts Democrats, has given up the happy face and is telling businesses to take the week off.
What are the odds that the voters will make the Dems pay a price for this? Slim and none.

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The first question: why is Eric awake at 3 a.m.? Because I had to fix something at work, and I want to wait a few minutes before going to bed, in case the thing breaks again.
The next question: is Maureen Dowd the dumbest prominent columnist in America, or the most prominent dumb columnist in America? Many people read her because for some reason they read the New York Times, a habit I’ve never cultivated or even understood. Every time I read Dowd’s columns I feel like I’m reading a 19-year-old undergrad who thinks she’s clever because she writes alliterations and gives lame nicknames to public figures she doesn’t like (“Rummy,” et al.)
So it’s not just that I disagree with her — a forgivable offense — she’s a crappy writer, and furthermore, one of the many pseudo-Catholics who gets agitated when the Holy Father disagrees with the NYT magisterium. She is someone whose views I can safely ignore.
Then I read this piece, and my wonder at Dowd’s prominence is renewed. It’s a pastiche of anti-Bush statements that all begin “In Bushworld,” which is so fascinatingly clever that she’s now writing a book called “Bushworld.” How can someone who writes so ineptly, who regurgitates left-liberal pieties on command, get to be one of the top columnists in America? This piece (of…) is begging to be fisked thusly:
“In Bushworld, we can win over Fallujah by bulldozing it.”
We didn’t, MD. We ordered the Marines to stop fighting before they succeeded in killing the vicious thugs who are killing innocent Iraqis. That was in all the papers, including yours.
“In Bushworld, it was worth going to war so Iraqis could express their feelings (“Down With America!”) without having their tongues cut out, although we cannot yet allow them to express intemperate feelings in newspapers (“Down With America!”) without shutting them down.”
We shut down one newspaper because it was blaming murders by insurgents on the Coalition, and was fomenting violence against the Coalition. Even in America, you can’t agitate for killing government officials. Maybe you can in Dowdworld.
“In Bushworld, you don’t consult your father, the expert in being president during a war with Iraq, but you do talk to your Higher Father, who can’t talk back to warn you to get an exit strategy or chide you for using Him for political purposes.”
Nice — borders on blasphemy. God can’t talk back to you? News to me. Why do so many people bother talking to him, then? What did they teach you in your alleged Catholic upbringing, MD? While we’re at it, what’s your exit strategy? Care to express an actual idea instead of sniping?
“In Bushworld, you get to strut around like a tough military guy and paint your rival as a chicken hawk, even though he’s the one who won medals in combat and was praised by his superior officers for fulfilling all his obligations.”
Except most people who were with Kerry in Vietnam have said he’s a disgrace to those medals, because he repeated lies about alleged atrocities that didn’t happen and impugned the character of Vietnam servicemen. Plus, he didn’t fulfill all his obligations — he ran away from his men after four months in country. Anyway, you don’t care about medals or heroism anyway, so why bring it up?
“In Bushworld, you brag about how well Afghanistan is going, even though soldiers like Pat Tillman are still dying and the Taliban are running freely around the border areas, hiding Osama and delaying elections.”
If everything isn’t going perfectly, nothing is going right and you can’t talk about any successes. Is that the formula? Let’s see if MD sticks to it if Kerry is elected.
“In Bushworld, we went to war to give Iraq a democratic process, yet we disdain the democratic process that causes allies to pull out troops.”
Just because a decision was arrived at democratically doesn’t mean we have to like it. The “democratic process” gave us Jim Crow, forced sterilization of “mental defectives,” Chancellor Hitler, and the income tax. We can be against those things without impugning the “process” that produced them, can’t we?
When I used to read the best liberal columnists, I often thought, “Hmm, that’s a good point — I wonder what a good response would be.” Now I think, “Are we living in different universes?”

“The guards were escalating their abuse of prisoners in the middle of the night,” says the report, when they thought no one was watching. “Their boredom had driven them to ever more pornographic and degrading abuses of power.” Those sentences aren’t from a report on the abuse of prisoners in Iraq. They’re the words of Stanford University psychologist Philip G. Zimbardo, past-president of the American Psychological Association, describing what happened during his classic experiment that simulated prison life in the summer of 1971 at Stanford University.

Read the whole thing.