The News Hens Get Teresa
Ivins, Molly
Small Favors Molly Ivins The News Hens Get Teresa For some reason, the guys in the media pack seem to be having a much harder time than us news hens getting Teresa Kerry. Many of them are stuck on...
...Nonetheless, I don't think it gets us far enough...
...The media get more and more divided into those who have some concept of journalism and those who simply consider themselves political and cultural warriors...
...Anyone who sees the whole incident on videotape is inclined to agree with Senator Clinton: "You go, girl...
...That's what he said, God speaks through him...
...Still, watch how the media pack boiled her long, patient exchange with a writer for conservative billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife's notoriously rightwing newspaper into "she told a reporter to shove it...
...The more or less official Democratic line is: "Whether you were for the war or against it, the Administration screwed up the implementation beyond recall," which I suppose works politically and has the added virtue of being true...
...Many of them are stuck on the "loose cannon" view-with-alarm interpretation, not having noticed that the woman has actual charm...
...Also, when Bush changes his mind, as he frequently does, do we conclude that God had to rethink things after the polls came out...
...We spent at least twenty years after Vietnam arguing about what we needed to learn from that experience, and I don't want to see the lessons of Iraq confused...
...Then there's Bush's slightly alarming claim to the Amish on July 9 that God speaks through him...
...This raises some troubling prospects...
...Molly Ivins, co-author of "Bushwhacked," writes in this space every month...
...The single most important weapon we have against terrorists is international cooperation, and that's what we so stupidly blew in this case...
...Painfully, clearly not...
...A beautiful example of distortion by lack of context...
...Just threw it away in a miserable display of arrogant "diplomacy"-a combination of threats, lies, and bribes that insulted our closest allies...
...First of all, I think God has a better grasp of subject-verb agreement than George W. Bush do...
...True, she has an exotic background-sounds and even looks a little like Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca...
...Not just a case of bad information on the WMDs, or on the supposed ties to Al Qaeda...
...Since their candi-date was in favor of going in, he's stuck with that position...
...That newspaper has printed ugly and untrue stories about both Kerrys...
...But those who merely hear the hacks repeat, "She told a reporter to shove it," are certainly going to get the wrong impression...
...There may be a time and place where we will have to act unilaterally, but this wasn't it...
...It really is much more important to understand why we should not have invaded in the first place...
...What's interesting is how many rightwing "journalists" seem to feel entitled to do this, as though they have no obligation to be fair...
...Hate to be the skunk at the garden party, but the one topic the D's-in their determined-not-to-be-negative mode-are avoiding like said skunk is Iraq...
...And such is the despicable state of our political debate that those making any of these obvious points are promptly accused of being "Saddam lovers" by people who consider concern for human rights a symptom of the dreaded Jimmy Carterlike softness...
...She's also worth $500 million, which I suppose frees one from at least a few of life's petty constraints...
...It is not just a matter of Use Overwhelming Force and Have an Exit Strategy (two lessons from Vietnam...
...Nice to see President W employing the tactic Texans got so familiar with under Governor W: the "Gee, I'm really for it, but I can't be bothered to expend one iota of political energy trying to help it pass...
...We need to get it through our heads that the real mistake was invading in the face of almost universal opposition from the rest of the world...
...She said "shove it" after she had tried seven times to get the reporter to stop misquoting her and after he either tapped her or grabbed her, depending on who's doing the describing...
Vol. 68 • September 2004 • No. 9
