Cry havoc and let slip the jackals of war.
I haven’t been watching the mid-40s on our television, where the Vast Left-wing Media Conspiracy hangs out. Atrios has:
Literally every broadcast “journalist” should be ashamed of him/herself. I never talked much about shock and awe here because I assumed it was probably a scare tactic—something we could do, but not something we would necessarily do. But the whores on TV are pissed. They were promised their shock and awe and they aren’t getting it. Literally every report wonders when it is going to happen.
Pathetic.
Which reminds me of something posted to National Philistine back in January:
I find myself here, today, in an impossible situation.
I must speak to you—the press—with you and through you, using your kind of sentences and leaps of reason, letting you sell me like a precious but marginal commodity, so I can say what everyone already knows but a few vaguely important people in this city are unwilling to admit: that no one wants a war; that an attack against Iraq is no attack against terrorism; that an attack will in fact make the United States less safe; that the Iraqi people do not want a war to liberate them because they will not live through the liberation; that as Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. said, “if we do not act we shall surely be dragged down the long dark and shameful corridors of time reserved for those who possess power without compassion, might without morality, and strength without sight.” I must convey all of this to you, sell it to you, all the while knowing that I find you despicable.
The wild dogs of Baghdad have more dignity and sense than you. You travel in packs and think the same way. You mistake quotes with facts and facts with meaning. You lack historical imagination and intellectual empathy. Your sentences are short and puritanical. In Baghdad you step over children and knock over speakers, reduce subtleties and ignore contexts. An American newspaper journalist in Baghdad told me with a gleeful sense of pride that journalists are lazy and under pressure to write, so issues and ideas have to be reduced into sound bites in order to function as media. Pathetic.
History rarely reads like a press release. And history is being made right now by those who have no time to issue statements. Get complex and get curious or get out of the way.
I think we are going to stop this one without you.
On the other hand, Raed abides; Christopher Allbritton isn’t on the ground yet; Kevin Sites still hasn’t updated. (One hopes it’s just more technical hell.) —Meanwhile, here in Portland, cops pulled guns on the drum circles of the Burnside Free State. Protestors turned highways into parking lots last night. And me, this morning, I just finished my coffee. It’s raining. Now I’m going to get on a bus and go downtown and spend the first day of spring helping one company sue another one.
Commenting is closed for this article.
Get complex and get curious or get out of the way.
I have found my t-shirt.
Oh, and: If it's any consolation, CNN has been kicked out of Bagdhad. Just in time for their shock & awe show, coincidentally.