Posted on 12/17/2003 8:21:41 AM PST by dead
Even the good news for so many can be carved into a plateful of spin, says Miranda Devine.
I am all for compassion and pity but what kind of message is the Vatican sending about mass-murdering dictators? Reuters reported yesterday the words of Cardinal Renato Martino, head of the Vatican's Justice and Peace department, on seeing footage of Iraq's former tyrant Saddam Hussein being examined by a US doctor. "I felt pity to see this man destroyed, [the military] looking at his teeth as if he were a cow. They could have spared us these pictures."
Did I miss the electrodes attached to Saddam's testicles, bamboo sticks under his fingernails?
In fact, the pictures Martino would have spared us showed the unkempt ex-dictator welcoming the expert attentions of his latex-gloved US doctor. On the two-minute video aired after his arrest on Sunday by US troops, Saddam is seen obligingly opening his mouth, parting his own hair to let the medico have a closer look at whatever might be nesting in the matted mess.
He even offered up his jaw for examination, feeling around with his fingers for what may have been swollen lymph glands. After months on the run, the once-dapper despot with a hygiene fetish was probably keen for a body overhaul.
Less saintly people than Martino might look at Saddam and feel pity, not for him, but for the voiceless thousands he and his regime pals tortured, shot, gassed and buried in mass graves.
After all, being videotaped with a tongue depressor in your mouth seems less grim than being hung upside down and beaten on the soles of your feet, or having bits of your body cut off, or just living each day in fear of capricious arrest.
There were so many ways for a person to be "destroyed" in Saddam's Iraq.
Of course, Martino wasn't the only one with a surreal take on Saddam's arrest. From Bayview, the former NSW Liberal Party president John Valder wrote a letter to this newspaper on Monday: "Saddam Hussein captured. Bush next?"
It is awe-inspiring how many ways the anti-Bush, anti-Howard, anti-war crowd can spin bad news. No matter what good happens in Iraq, they moan about petrol queues. Saddam is caught and they focus on car bombings. Where is Osama bin Laden, they cry? Mass graves? Humph, they say: Saddam was just taking orders from the CIA.
A talkback radio caller on Monday didn't believe the dirty old guy who had been captured was Saddam, because she had personally inspected the photos in the newspaper and found the eyebrows were too bushy. You can't believe DNA tests, she said, because the Yanks are liars.
Hyper-cynicism is the gloom merchants' last line of defence, if changing the subject, shifting the blame and moral equivalence don't work against inconvenient evidence that damns their attempts to keep Saddam in power.
Sometimes enthusiasm for cynicism is farcical, such as in the story of the plastic turkey. The evil moron Bush had shown courage and commitment to the troops in Iraq by flying in to share Thanksgiving dinner with them. The troops cheered and hollered. There was a photo of a beaming Bush holding a platter of golden turkey, surrounded by a sea of appreciative khaki. Here was a story crying out for negative spin.
So the story spread around the globe that Bush was holding a plastic turkey, a fake bird that symbolised his presidency, even though, as the Washington Post reported two weeks ago, the turkey was a real, dressed turkey on display at the front of the mess hall, in accordance with US Army custom.
The Australian's Phillip Adams and the Herald's Alan Ramsey were the most gung-ho local propagators of the myth. Adams devoted an entire column to it: "It was a prop turkey, a pretend turkey ... the President had taken a plastic turkey - one used for gourmet magazine shoots - to the mess hall."
Who cares about facts, as long as you turn a positive for Bush into a negative?
But it's harder to apply negative spin to those jubilant Iraqis, rifles in the air, ululating, dancing for joy, from Auburn to Baghdad, at the news of Saddam's capture.
Iraqi refugee Guzin Najim, whose husband was murdered by Saddam's intelligence agents, wept for joy on Sunday night in her south-west Sydney apartment. Saturday marked the first anniversary of her husband's death and she had been inconsolable most of the weekend.
Sunday night she was in bed, having cried herself to sleep, when her son Mohammed, 23, burst in to tell her the news.
"It was the first time in eight years I saw a big smile on his face," she said yesterday. "I ran and I sat on the floor in front of CNN. We cried. We cried with joy."
In the book about her escape from Iraq, The Promise, by Sandra Lee, Najim tells of the day her husband was taken for questioning to the office of the Saddam minister Tariq Aziz before being dispatched to intelligence headquarters. He was deposited home, unable to walk, feverish. He had been poisoned, and took agonising days to die.
"There was always a fear that maybe Saddam will come back," said Najim. "Today the Iraqi people feel free."
If you are open-minded, there are good signs democracy is taking root in Iraq, despite the problems. Just look at the proliferation of newspapers, free to publish what they like.
"The capture of Saddam is another window of hope for a clean Iraq," editorialised the independent daily Al-Zaman. "[An Iraq] swimming in sunshine and far away from a dark past crowded by the dungeons of the secret services in which hundred of thousands of Iraqis have disappeared because of a word or a whisper or an opposing view."
The news on Sunday from Afghanistan was good, too. On the same day Saddam was captured, the loya jirga, or grand assembly, opened in Kabul "amid high hopes it will produce a constitution and permanent government and pave the way for political stability and security", reported Knight-Ridder.
Whatever your position on the war, surely it is better to will Iraq and Afghanistan to succeed than hope for the worst just to prove a point.
WHAT hard right agenda?? I wish he had a conservative domestic agenda period!
Bad Howard
Nooo. I was referring more to the message that the Vatican (not some Cardinal) has been putting out along the lines of what KoffeeCup Anan was spewing about executing the scumbag.
Probably correct. That Howard Dean hatefest out west the other week was a good example. The language and tone of that was just beyond the pale. It's going to turn off a lot of fair-minded people who otherwise might (mistakenly) be inclined to give Dean and The Rats the benefit of doubt. I don't know about you, but when I hear these Deaniacs and people like John Kerry mindlessly spewing profanity in an attempt to appear hip and edgy, it's an immediate tune-out. It's like they have nothing of real substance to say, so the turn up the volume of the noise with profanity.
The Rats are really in danger of overplaying their hand with this negative spin on the capture of Saddam thing. Especially in view of the fact that it was they who made such a big deal out of it when he was still at large. It was like, "Where's Saddam? If we don't get him we haven't won anything.", and then when we get him, they seem to be saying, "Oh. Big deal. Nevermind...". Well, geez, does it matter, or not? They are so transparent...
My response is this: It is better to give a public oral and head lice examination to someone, than to feed them feet first into a shredder. I believe Jesus would agree.
Interesting. This newspaper is nicknamed the Saddam Times by Australian conservatives!
Miranda Richardson is their Safiresque token conservative.
It showed him receiving medical care that he was willingly and eagerly accepting after living in a hole in the ground for weeks. That's what made the comments so absurd. It is also why I suspect the emotion behind the comments was not the pure love and forgiveness you cited, but more of an expression of the cardinal's anti-Americanism, though that is obvious speculation on my part.
Really?
The Vatican could have spared hundreds of innocent American children the horror of sexual predation at the hands of their pedophilic priests by removing those perverts from their cassocks, but instead, they just shuffled them around to other churches to keep the matter swept under the rug.
This lame-assed Cardinal's proclamations of "pity" and "compassion" are not only hideously misguided, they are also a day late and a few million dollars in damages short.
Pontificate thyself, you Vatican pervert puppets. World history will record you as the evil, ineffective, marginalized cult which you have become.
;-/ ;-/
You would surmise wrongly. The Cardinal's screed was a grasping attempt to slam the United States on the thinnest of excuses.
Perhaps the cardinal himself does not fully comprehend the significance of what he said about feeling pity. This is how prophecy frequently works, and it's certainly how the Church works, providing spiritual tools by which the faithful utter profound truths accidentally. Athletes sometimes play better than their class, don't they? God uses foolish sinful people to do his work in this world becasue that's by and large the only kind available. Clean water can flow through rusty pipes.
This is true. People also have to understand that Pope John Paul II is in very bad health. He may not even know that this idiot is spouting nonsense.
I have heard this is the next guy in line to be Pope.
I am worried about what he said, it should have been more compassionate to the thousands that Saddam had killed.
And...... We captured him, and had him checked out physically (concern for his health) regardless to the crimes we know he committed. We didn't shoot him in the back of the head. Capturing a killer, and allowing him to be tried by his own people, I believe , shows our troops and CiC put moral and religous values first.
Wouldn't be the first time.
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