This column first appeared at HuffingtonPost.com. Reader comments not included here.
By Beth Arnold
Watching the lead-up to General Petraeus giving his Iraq report on CNN,
I expected the Democrats to do their usual wimp out. I expected them to
shuck and jive and eventually go along with whatever George Bush
wanted, as they inevitably do.
Rep. Skelton, D-Mo, made critical remarks about the Iraq catastrophe that were worth hearing, though he delivered them snoozily. After that, Democrat Tom Lantos aggressively continued to find fault with the current administration and its war. I found myself becoming engaged. This was going better than I thought. Then Republicans Duncan Hunter and Ileana Ros-Lehtinen began the typical GOP march toward wrong-headed righteousness with comments about how upset they were about MoveOn.org's Petraeus/Betray Us ad -- how this ad was going too far and besmirching the honor of the excellent general. Cha-Ching! Now things were really picking up.
I hadn't seen the ad in The New York Times, but I'd caught it on the Internet. I'd thought that at least somebody in this country -- thank you MoveOn.org! -- wasn't going to lean over and take it anymore in the wham-bam-without-any-thank- you-ma'am way the American people have been treated since the Bush/Cheney duo has been in power. Most particularly since the president and vice president maneuvered the United States into this war for which they lusted -- and even after the ineffective Democrats took control of Congress after the last election.
With MoveOn.org's Petraeus ad, I thought that at least someone somewhere was doing his and her job of telling the facts to the public's face without a load of doublespeak as camouflage. It's a job others could and should be doing.
Speaking of which, during the problem with the general's microphone, I was listening to, though sporadically watching, the network commentary. The way the dialogue was going I was curious about who was mouthing the Bush administration's talking points to the CNN anchor, although I'd missed her credentials. My husband informed me she was with CNN. Ah, yes. This was more reporting of spin being presented as news, which I call news-speak in honor of George Orwell. If only we could track the percentage of actual news compared to news-speak that's produced by the traditional media. I'm afraid we'd find it frightening.
In last week's New York Times, Frank Rich had yet another incisive column in which he wrote about this, what I consider, national humiliation, "...What's surprising is not that this White House makes stuff up, but that even after all the journalistic embarrassments in the run-up to the war its fictions can still infiltrate the real news...Anchoring the CBS Evening News from Iraq last week, Katie Couric seemed to be drinking the same Kool-Aid (or eating the same lobster tortellini) as Mr. O'Hanlon. As "a snapshot of what's going right," she cited Falluja, a bombed-out city with 80 percent unemployment, and she repeatedly spoke of American victories against "Al Qaeda." Channeling the president's bait-and-switch, she never differentiated between that local group he calls "Al Qaeda in Iraq" and the Qaeda that attacked America on 9/11. Al Qaeda in Iraq, which didn't even exist on 9/11, may represent as little as two to give percent of the Sunni insurgency, according to a new investigation in The Washington Monthly by Andrew Tilghman, a former Iraq correspondent for Stars and Stripes. Next to such "real" news from CBS, the "fake" news at the network's corporate sibling Comedy Central was, not for the first time, more trustworthy."
Besides that, what a lucky "coincidence" that Katie and the president happened to be in Iraq at the same time. That war reporter Ka-Ka-Ka-Katie.
In Huff Post, former Sen. Gary Hart wrote, "This administration stands indicted for incompetence and mendacity. That it still commands the loyalty of even a quarter of our fellow citizens is testament to the persistence of willful ignorance...That the media still treat these operatives and spokespersons, and indeed the president himself, seriously is witness to their desire for "access" and "sources" rather than their commitment to the truth.
The traditional American media has failed and keeps on failing. It's quite stunning to think of this, especially as our society and press were formerly known and highly regarded throughout the world as free. No longer -- even among our citizens. The compromise of the mainstream media in no small way contributes to the fact that our nation's checks and balances aren't working -- and this is really saying something -- though I find some justice in the books being written by Republican insiders like Jack Goldsmith. I feel some consolation that even American conservatives are disturbed about this administration's desire for absolute power over rule of law. Mr. Goldsmith evidently felt it was important to write his book The Terror Presidency. This is an example of an absence of doublespeak or gobbledygook.
As for General Petraeus, this New York Times article points out part of the problem with his version of the surge in Iraq. "And General Petraeus formalized the widely anticipated reduction by announcing that American forces would be at the "pre-surge" level of 15 combat brigades by mid-July 2008...General Petraeus declined to say what additional cuts would be carried out after that point, saying he would revisit the issue in March."
In my experience of people using the phrase "revisiting the issue," it's actually doublespeak meaning that nothing will change. The point for the person who says this is to get his way and stall for time -- to diffuse the immediate confrontation whatever it is and to lead the audience of the speaker to false hope.
So again, I want to say thanks to MoveOn.org for saying something that needed to be said -- without camouflage.