Monday, July 31, 2006
A Thought on Cokie's Weekly Hokum
Just now on NPR's Morning Edition, Cokie Roberts framed Joe Lieberman's electoral problems as just being what happens today when a politician tries to hew to the "center" on an issue like Iraq. This attempt to minimize the reason of why Lieberman is in trouble opens a window on why our news media is so bad.
The crime, the mass murder, that is the war in Iraq doesn't fall on a line from liberal to conservative passing through an index point in the middle. War isn't one dimensional, it's not even two dimensional. When people get killed in large numbers in an entirely unprovoked war, an abstraction for the convenience of the chattering classes distorts the entirely real horror that the people on the ground experience in every dimension of their being. Abstracting war into a graph of clean lines allows a corrupt regime to wage wars of conquest without paying a political price. Our media being what it is, the only line they focus on is the segment from right to far right. They don't make it as far as zero, the center.
The dishonest reporting and discussion of the comfortable media and it's parasites, the pundits, prevents the American People from knowing what is really happening. When the retaliation comes here, and it will, Americans will be left wondering why we are being attacked again. It could lead to a spiral of wars such as we see in the Israeli-Lebanon crisis.
If you want to reduce war to lines Goya's etchings are about your best hope of seeing a clear picture.
Just now on NPR's Morning Edition, Cokie Roberts framed Joe Lieberman's electoral problems as just being what happens today when a politician tries to hew to the "center" on an issue like Iraq. This attempt to minimize the reason of why Lieberman is in trouble opens a window on why our news media is so bad.
The crime, the mass murder, that is the war in Iraq doesn't fall on a line from liberal to conservative passing through an index point in the middle. War isn't one dimensional, it's not even two dimensional. When people get killed in large numbers in an entirely unprovoked war, an abstraction for the convenience of the chattering classes distorts the entirely real horror that the people on the ground experience in every dimension of their being. Abstracting war into a graph of clean lines allows a corrupt regime to wage wars of conquest without paying a political price. Our media being what it is, the only line they focus on is the segment from right to far right. They don't make it as far as zero, the center.
The dishonest reporting and discussion of the comfortable media and it's parasites, the pundits, prevents the American People from knowing what is really happening. When the retaliation comes here, and it will, Americans will be left wondering why we are being attacked again. It could lead to a spiral of wars such as we see in the Israeli-Lebanon crisis.
If you want to reduce war to lines Goya's etchings are about your best hope of seeing a clear picture.
