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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Lane3 who wrote (116882)	5/28/2005 11:42:43 PM
From: Nadine Carroll	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793609

The point of the essay was that the media shouldn't trumpet things that make the other guys think of this as a war against Islam because that can cost us the war. The first half of the essay was about that. The latter half, the part about the Smarties, was just venting, best I could tell, and not germaine to the argument. If you can see how the rant about those horrible Smarties adds substance to the argument that the media should restrain release of such info, perhaps, you'd clue me in. The point of the second half of the essay was why the patriots of Smartland act the way they do - not after anguished decision-making, but in blithe confidence of their own superiority. It's not after all, as if Newsweek or the NYT ever stopped to ask themselves if the news value of Abu-Ghraib or alleged Koran-flushing or whatever outweighs the potential harm that will come to Americans if they were to report it. I can see no sign that they ever put the question to themselves that way. On the contrary, they are sure that they have a duty to report the abuses, indeed to pound on any they find, in order to cut down the arrogance of Bush/the government/the military. They are not only not anguished about their behavior, they are immensely proud of themselves. Like I said, in a full hour on Charlie Rose, the question of whether Isikoff's report had harmed American interests never came up. The question that stares OS Card and VD Hanson in the face is, How the Hell can smart and educated men act like they are bystanders in the war? How can they deny there even is a war? and it's clear that they do deny it. They are outraged when anybody even talks about necessary tradeoffs of legal norms for security. Look at how Gonzales was pounded for even raising the issues. Scarcely anything about the MSM coverage of Gitmo hints that there is a valid reason for not reading these prisoners their Miranda rights and putting them into civilian jails with burglars. It is of a piece with the Amnesty report that spends only 2 pages on North Korea but calls Gitmo a "gulag". The conclusion that Card and Hanson come to is that these reporters have emotionally seceded from America; they are patriots of some other entity. Call it transnational progressivism as Fonte does; call it Smartland as Card does; or talk about our petulant elites as Hanson does, it's all one. In a sense, both sides are outraged at the other for taking an opposite stance. Smartland is outraged that Bush thinks there is a war just because Al Qaeda destroyed the World Trade Center; leading to all kinds of hysterical crying about wars for oil and imminent fascism and destruction of democracy. Heartland is outraged that Smartland refuses to recognize or support or participate in the war that was brought home to us on 9/11. Smartland refuses to support the troops with more than lip-service (how many of their sons are serving?), and is oblivious to the ways their coverage is hurting the troops every day. The whole military, a very Heartland organization, is clearly seething about it. To condemn the situation just for being polarized is trite; there can be polarization caused by deep differences over important issues. Slavery caused a great deal of polarization in the USA in the 1850s; looking back, do you think that the polarization per se was the evil to be avoided, and everybody would have been so much better off with the discussion tabled? Here is an open letter to the editor from a very unhappy media consumer who is currently serving in Iraq: dadmanly.blogspot.com