The Candor and Accuracy of Frank Rich
When it comes to Iraq, there are few MSM journalists that boldly speak the truth and portray reality. Why? The wrath of Dick Cheney and George Bush is needless to say intimidating. There are two journalists, Frank Rich and Keith Oberman, that volitionally engage powerful discourse on the totalitarian rule of George Bush and his formidable lieutenant, Dick Cheney.
As much as I would like to read or view all the pundits opine, it is not possible; therefore Rich and Oberman are not an exclusive club limited to two. However, if an exclusive club of truly “evil-doers and defeatist” journalists did exist, they could all meet in a small conference room when compared to Rich and Oberman.
To my point. I just read Rich’s column [sub. req.] in today’s New York Times; I don’t believe the drama of Iraq could be articulated more succinctly than Rich did today. A few passages:
The White House’s latest jabberwocky about “benchmarks” and “milestones” and “timetables” (never to be confused with those Defeatocrats’ “timelines”) is nothing more than an election-year P.R. strategy, as is the laughable banishment of “stay the course.” There is no new American plan to counter the apocalypse now playing out in Iraq, only new packaging to pacify American voters between now and Nov. 7. And recycled packaging at that: President Bush had last announced that he and Mr. Maliki were developing “benchmarks” to “measure progress” in Iraq back in June.
After Election Day, adults in Washington will step in, bow to the obvious and pull the plug. The current administration strategy — praying for a miracle — is not an option. The current panacea favored by anxious Republican Congressional candidates — firing Donald Rumsfeld — is too little, too late.
As we’ve learned from Operation Together Forward, when Iraqis do stand up, violence goes up. And when American and British troops stand down, murderous sectarian militias, some of them allied with that “unity” government, fill the vacuum, taking over entire cities like Amara and Balad in broad daylight.
The ultimate chutzpah is that Mr. Bush, the man who sold us Saddam’s imminent mushroom clouds and “Mission Accomplished,” is trivializing the chaos in Iraq as propaganda. The enemy’s “sophisticated” strategy, he said in last weekend’s radio address, is to distribute “images of violence” to television networks, Web sites and journalists to “demoralize our country.”
This is a morally repugnant argument. The “images of violence” from Iraq are not fake — like, say, the fiction our government manufactured about the friendly-fire death of Pat Tillman or the upbeat news stories the Pentagon spends millions of dollars planting in Iraqi newspapers today.
To imply that this carnage is magnified by the news media, whether the American press or Al Jazeera, is to belittle the gravity of the escalated bloodshed and to duck accountability for the mismanagement of the war. Mr. Bush’s logic is reminiscent of Jeffrey Skilling’s obtuse view of his innocence in the Enron scandal, though at least Mr. Skilling has been held accountable for the wreckage of lives on his watch.
Spot on.
