Posted on 03/06/2005 5:37:35 AM PST by Davis
Does anyone remember novelist Jane Smiley's outburst at the Bible-toting bloodlusting knuckle-draggers who re-elected George W. Bush? Why has no enterprising journalist sought her comments after the purple revolution in Iraq, the uprising of the Lebanese and the downfall of their puppet-regime? Why has no one asked her about the turnover by Syria of 29 Iraqi Ba'athist stalwarts, those Moore-ish Minutemen? Has Miss Smiley's tantrum simply vanished down the old memory hole?
The darling of the EU, J-F Kerry, promised faithfully on Meet the Press four weeks ago that he would sign and submit to the Navy a Form 180 making public all his service records. This was noted in an interview with reporters from the Boston Globe a week later. Since then, not a peep. No MSM reporter has broached the subject to the junior senator from Massachusetts much less braced him with a filled-in form awaiting his signature.
Nor has M. Kerry brought forward for forensic examination—thread, dye, and fabric identification—of the lucky hat given to him by a CIA operative Kerry had ferried to Cambodia along with a cargo of guns and ammo for the Khmer Rouge around Christmastime 1968. Why has no intrepid MSM investigative journalist pursued this matter to a conclusion?
You must have noticed that the characterization, "moron," formerly current throughout the MSM, is no longer being applied to George W. Bush. No wonder, of course, for Mr. Bush has evidenced a certain quantity of cleverness belying that moniker. Indeed, the New York Times, by reputation a leader of the MSM, whose pages had daily declared for some two years a verdict of Bush administration failure in the Mideast, has just this week acknowledged its astonishment at Mr. Bush's success.
Why was the NYTimes astonished? Because it didn't have a clue about what was happening in Iraq. The Times's crackerjack reporters, Dexter Filkins among them, were unable to pierce the gloom that burkha-like enveloped their dispatches and caused them to magnify every setback and minimize every victory. To the NYTimes and the MSM it was unbelievable that Iraq was not another Vietnam. More than unbelievable, morally wrong.
Accordingly, head-hackers and corpse-mutilaters were scrubbed clean and dubbed "insurgents" and the Times was able to report just a few days before the US election a totally fictitious military blunder—allowing the looting of several hundred tons of high explosives (presumably, shopping bag by shopping bag) at Al Qaaqaa near Baghdad under the very noses of our somnolent Army and Marines. A fiction, false, ca-ca, calculated to cost Bush votes, and now tossed down the old memory hole by Prince (pro tem) Sulzberger and his vizier (pro tem) Bill Keller.
It would seem to be a good course for the Times and its cohorts in the MSM to remember their ardent support for John Heinz Kerry-Forbes. What would the Middle East be now had they stroked him to election victory? Yes, run that scenario past your editorial staffers and reporters a couple of times. Use your imagination.
Two years ago, the NYTimes set seven of its crackerjack domestic reporters to track down about nine months of Jayson Blair's work. Blair's transgressions were trivial: phony datelines, spurious (but accurate) quotes, a few instances of outright plagiarism, but the Times devoted about 14,000 words to correcting them.
Why not apply similar ardor to uncovering the far more important lapses of judgment which infected the Times over the last two years and caused astonishment this week? Why not probe—sorry, that's not a broadsheet word—but, yes, probe why MSM coverage of the Rathergate memos was so late and invertebrate, why the coverage of Kerry's fables of Vietnam heroics was muffed, concealed. Why no facts were allowed to intrude on the devastating picture painted of the actions and achievements of our Army and Marines?
Why was Senator Edward (the Aquanaut) Kennedy not whipped soundly and sent to bed without a hot toddy for declaring the Iraqi elections a disastrous failure three days before their evident success exposed him once again to be a jerk and a thug?
Yes, time for the famed floozy of West 43rd Street, leader of the MSM, to find those old memory holes and board them over.
Trentino bump
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