by Stanley Rogouski, 1/20/06
I want to believe that the grownups are in charge. But
watching MSNBC in the wake of Bin Laden’s latest tape made me realize that they
are not.
First of all, one would think that with the horrifying video
of Jill Carroll surrounded by masked gunmen there would have been a tone of
seriousness, of solemnity in most of the newsrooms across the country. After
all, here was their colleague, one of them, probably at that moment sitting
alone in utter terror for her life. It would be natural to think that the
people who run the media could stop the Wurlitzer for a brief moment of
silence.
But the Republican Party is far too disciplined and
relentless and the media far too compliant for anything like this to happen.
After a few hours of MSNBC, I found myself ready to throw my TV out the window.
It was clear what the talking points were going to be. Bin Laden’s tape, where
he tones down the religious and plays up the economic and geopolitical angles
of his conflict with the United States,
proves that liberals and anti-war activists are traitors and would be
terrorists.
The usual suspects sounded off. Joe Scarborough compared Bin
Laden’s message to John Kerry’s and Tucker Carlson, predictably, wondered aloud
about how similar Bin Laden’s rhetoric about big oil was to Howard Dean’s. A
parade of ‘terror experts’ was trotted out to give the usual racist angle about
how Muslims are naturally violent and the old stab in the back myth from the
Vietnam War was resurrected and put on display for all of us to see. Opponents
of the war in Iraq
are ‘giving aid and comfort to the enemy’. Bin Laden is counting on politically
dividing America.
We have to stay the course in Iraq.
How divided we already are was in full display on Hardball
where, during an interview with Delaware Senator and possible Presidential
candidate Joe Biden. Chris Mathews, the Bush shill disguised as a centrist
blowhard started comparing Bin Laden to Michael Moore. ‘He sounds like an over
the top Michael Moore here, if not a Michael Moore,’ the odious Mathews said.
‘You think that sells.’
Moore of course
is a controversial figure, a gifted political agitator who rubs a lot of people
the wrong way, but, as far as I know, he’s never killed anybody or masterminded
the destruction of a major American landmark and the deaths of 3000 people. I
looked at Joe Biden, hoping against hope he would step up and play the part of
the grownup, defend the right of every American to dissent from his or her
government’s policy but, alas, he had the reaction I knew he would have. He
laughed. He made no attempt to correct Mathews or defend Moore’s
first amendment rights. I did a double take. Surely Biden as a United States
Senator would prove himself better than a cheap media whore like Chris Mathews,
a man so intoxicated by his ‘access’ to the president that he’s willing to
slander his fellow American citizens but no.
Biden laughed.
Then I thought back to the videos of Jill Carroll being held
hostage in Iraq and realized to my horror that Iraq’s been at war almost
constantly for 20 years, tormented first by Saddam and his lunatic war with
Iran and then for over a decade by the Bush crime family.
Edmund Osmanczyk, a Polish journalist who described the
seemingly irrational massacre of Jews in Poland
after the Nazis had been defeated describes the state a people can descend to
when they’ve been at war for a long enough period of time. ‘This first post-war
generation knew death intimately’, he wrote, ‘death was something tangible and
real. It was easy to kill or to allow someone to be killed.’
We are still a long way from the kind of situation Osmanczyk
is describing here and I hope I never find myself in as dire a situation as
Jill Carroll finds herself in now. But the coordinated Republican media blitz
last night and the willingness of the pundocracy to go along with their characterization
of political opponents as traitors and allies of Osama Bin Laden is troubling. Americans
are no different from Iraqis or Poles or the Irish or Spanish or any other
people who have ever found themselves in the middle of a violent civil war or
occupation by a foreign power. The language of civil war the fat smirking
Mathews so odiously used against Michael Moore and the acquiescence of Senator
Biden shows us how far the Bush Regime has taken us down the road to that
culture of death Osmanczyk describes so eloquently, a culture where dissent is
labeled treason and objective journalists like Jill Carroll or partisan ones
like Michael Moore are targeted by political operatives acting on behalf of the
government or a rival faction.
That Senator Biden sat there and laughed shows us how
dangerous it is to rely on Democrats to save us. There will be no savior from
the Democratic Party.