Where to start? Perhaps first by informing National Public Radio, the BBC, CNN and they are disappointed, as are many others who made fools of themselves during Operation Iraqi Freedom. A few of these comrades in the coalition of the unpatriotic we’ll always remember, but in case we don’t, here are my nominees for the Battle for Baghdad Hall of Shame.
Peter Arnett, the ex-pat Kiwi but now an American citizen—and therefore subject to our laws of treason and sedition—gets the blue ribbon in a closely contested competition for the biggest idiot among the useful idiots who labored on behalf of Saddam and against the US and UK.
Jacques Chirac, prancing around the world stage like Pepe Le Pew, gets the red and would have gone first but his treachery was of the French manner, blustering, cowardly and grandiose but ultimately barren of content or character. His belief that the European Union, the mini Soviet Union his nation created in its own image (tedious bureaucracy, hopeless ideals and anti-Americanism) would support his diplomatic guerrilla attack at the United Nations and derail the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld troika has left him and his countrymen humiliated and stained as self-aggrandizing losers with a dim future in global affairs. (Gerhard Schroeder of Germany, Chirac’s co-conspirator, goes here for consistency, but only receives honorable mention as Germany, prospering directly due to US largesse for the past 50-plus years, just doesn’t count anymore. We forget that they hardly have an army at all anyway as punishment for their instigation of World War II and certain well-known war crimes. As for the Belgians, let them eat chocolate.
Our Canadian neighbors are suffering under the premiership of a Frenchman named Jean Chrtien (Frog for cretin, I suppose) who has allowed his government to call Americans bastards and morons for freeing Iraq. Worse, the frozen North’s hockey fans booed the American national anthem at several games. I don’t advise visiting Canadian teams trying that again at the RBC Arena in Raleigh. This is odd behavior indeed as the Canucks usually wisely support US and allied causes. Let’s hope this is an impermanent aberration in business as usual and withhold final judgment down the road a bit. Meanwhile, Monsieur Chrtien can remind his citizens that the fatuous and sneering French Canadians are ruining an otherwise quite nice English country.
(Vincente Fox, our close friend south of the border down Mexico way, receives dishonorable mention for not backing the war. George Bush went to great pains to single out Mexico as a top priority of his administration with his first presidential visit, demonstrating the importance of regional partnerships over the usual European bowing and scraping undertaken by previous newly elected American presidents.
This is going to get personal with Bush and Fox, with Mexico returning to the graveyard of unimportant nations on the geo-political radar screen.)
Tom Daschle is another useful idiot, representing a flaw in the electoral process that allows a state with fewer people than Peoria to send US Senators to make vital national decisions. Idiocy is one thing, treason another and Daschle should be censured by the Senate and tried for aiding and abetting the enemy for his comments criticizing the war after American troops were on the ground. Expect the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN and ABC to try to resurrect his career in the coming months. (Nancy Pelosi, a featherweight on the House side of the Congress, who was trotted in front of the camera by the incompetent national Democratic party advisors to answer George Bush’s call to war, hardly deserves a mention for her treachery as she is unremarkable in so many ways). And, oh yes, the blustering septuagenarian Robert Byrd ought to be in the Hall but he deserves a place all his own where I pray he will indeed just fade away. A few other antiwar elected officials took a stab at criticizing the war and then backed off, such as black Congresswoman Stephanie Tubbs Jones of Ohio and John Kerry, whose presidential bid is beginning to look like Baghdad after dark. Al Sharpton and Charles Rangel are beneath contempt for using the war to continue racial warfare by other means and should be ignored. And poor Jimmy Carter, who stained his Nobel acceptance with an attack on the Bush team, will walk his own lonesome valley to political oblivion. In contrast, Hillary Clinton read the tea leaves correctly and kept her mouth shut while those around her lost their heads.
The Pope in Rome is old and bent and sickly but this time he could have kept his mouth shut. Not to make a pun, but the Peter Principle has to set in when you serve beyond your sell-by date. In the 1980s he was a singular soldier of Christ, bravely working to undermine the Soviet grip on his native eastern Europe and even defying the odds by surviving an assassination attempt bungled by Bulgarian hit men dispatched by their KGB masters. He ranked right up there with Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher as heroes of the free world until his conservative grip on the global communion of Roman Catholics slipped free from his ecclesiastical grip. He has not been up to handling the notorious sex scandal that has rocked the Church to its core and his platitudes criticizing US action in Iraq prove that it’s time to hope for white smoke in St. Peter’s Square.
Vladimir Putin, the man with the unfortunate name who rules post-Soviet Russia has been sidling up to the US in urgent matters recently but he fell on his butt choosing France and the EU and their selfinterested blather against the war early on, and then he kept on doing it, causing
George Bush the 43rd to call him on the carpet midway through the hostilities. He then compounded his errors by calling for a conference with his new friends France and Germany to demand a role in post-Saddam Iraq. The Russians are passionate and possess literary and dramatic qualities but basically they are not the sharpest knives in the kitchen drawer of governance.
The mass media finally climbed up a news pole high enough to expose their behinds before, during and now, after the war. Remember the questions hurled at George Bush at his early news conferences?
Is this another Vietnam, or the battle for Stalingrad (for God’s sake) or a “quagmire” America can’t get out of, etc.? Or, how can we pay for it? (This ain’t Sierra Leone and we have the money as the richest nation, tribe or kingship in the history of man.) My favorite refrain, sung over and over, is “Mr. Bush aren’t you concerned that world opinion thinks the US is the terrorist state and not Iraq?” Or “military experts say the Coalition is using a bad plan with too few troops on the ground.” And “is this a ‘just war’ since we broke with the UN?” As the war turned our way, the questions turned to civilian casualties, then the old chestnut, body-bags a la Vietnam, then quoting Red Cross spokespeople whining about water and electricity shortages in Basrah, concluding with looting by the Iraqi people and just what are US troops going to do about it? The next wave of rhetoric is calling our soldiers “an occupying force” and on and on.
The press agenda, borrowed from the Old Left (who got it from Soviet propaganda from the 1960s and ’70) goes like this: Bush is not legitimate because he “stole” Florida and every action he takes is evil. Once demonized, he is a villain as is America that, as one typically left-wing academic put it, “is a nation of murderers… that is losing the hearts and minds of the populace just as in Vietnam. …The enemy is the American mechanical monster which burns and tortures and never fights fair.” Get it?
There are bright spots. Fox News murdered the other news channels with its coverage since they did not assume that our own country was the enemy in the conflict, as did the others, who acted as shills for the anti-American line taken by the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post. CNN took such a hit in viewership they resorted to running ads on Fox. So hats off to Brit Hume, Bill O'Reilly, Cannity and Holmes and the gang and nominations to the Hall of Shame for Carol Costello of CNN, the ridiculous Wolf Blitzer of MSNBC and their henchmen and henchgirls for wishing the US had lost. And our local television affiliates reported commendably, especially about troops dispatched from North Carolina, without the tiresome anti-American slant of their network masters.
The greatest fool in the media hall of shame is Graydon Carter, the urbane boulevardier editor of the gussied up trailer trash fodder called Vanity Fair. Not two months ago he featured George Bush’s White House advisors on the cover, calling them The Home Team. By the April issue, as befitting a publication dedicated to the superficial, he is angry that the President doesn’t have “worry lines” about attacking “a country that has not attacked us, and saber-rattling with North Korea, a nation that wore us down to the quick a half-century ago,” and then the piece de resistance: “You really have to work at it to create a situation in which Saddam Hussein is looked upon as less of a threat to world peace than the US President.” Hey Graydon, the National Enquirer is looking for an editor.
The losers in the media are not shutting up, however, despite being totally wrong, a quality borrowed from the Left who never use facts to argue. Instead they keep up the personal attacks. Sure enough, a Pat Morrison of the LA Times showed up on NPR listing, supposedly tongue-in-cheek, reasons why George Bush would be the best candidate for the new president of Iraq.
According to Morrison: Bush loves guns; he is for capital punishment; he doesn’t drink (a reference to his former drinking problem and Islamic laws against alcohol); he has a funny accent; and, in an example typifying the depths to which the Left will descend, a reference that in Iraq, Bush’s daughters (who have had some issues growing up) could not go out in public. In response on her level, I say Pat Morrison’s prostitution of the truth and her attacks on the president’s children qualify her to be a street-walking madam in downtown Baghdad.
However, the “embedded” media, a term I hope will fade away soon, were, for the most part excellent. I predict a sea change in national newsrooms when they return from their experience with real American young men and women who put their lives in harm’s way for their country and the people of Iraq (and for that matter the world). These veteran combat journalists are not going to put up with the dimwits sitting at the anchor desk spewing their anti-American rhetoric. Allowing reporters to go along with actual troop units was a masterful stroke that will pay dividends for those of us fed up with the party line coming out of the mass media.
The Dixie Chicks and other show folk who showed their asses over the war will suffer with falling record and ticket sales. Michael Moore is not worth nominating as he has created a cottage industry in hating his country. Poor pitiful Susan Sarandon and hubby Tim Robbins the same. Someone from the JDL obviously got to the puerile Barbara Streisand telling her Israel has much to gain from the war, and she shut right up. But Jesse Jackson (I put him in the entertainment group as he is hardly credible as a political player) had to get face time to proclaim that we are an immoral nation because we locked up terrorists at Guantanamo in Cuba—a reach even for scam artist Jackson. The infamous Bill Maher has sneaked back on HBO but seems to be more moderate in his slanders and Dennis Miller, the scabby comedian who usually takes the Party line, has performed a gratifying volte-face and supported the war and his new hero George Bush.
Michael Bloomberg has to be mentioned in dispatches from the home front for banning smoking during a war. I mean, don’t dying soldiers want a cigarette for their last earthly pleasure? Isn’t the nation nervous and in need of a smoke?
What is it about a man so dedicated to ruining someone else’s good time that he buys political office to spoil the party? Hasn’t anyone sent him the memo that proves conclusively that passive smoke has no measurable effect?
PAX AMERICANA
As happens in the course of the American experience in times of danger and turmoil, our system produces the right people at the right time. George Bush, Dick Cheney and the incomparable Donald Rumsfeld have done what no leaders have accomplished in 50 years: instead of sitting around and posturing, they did what they said they would do, and in the process have created something else just as important: a coherent, uni- fied foreign policy that recognizes, whether we like it or not, that we are de facto an imperial power with global responsibilities devolved to us by the accident of our success as a free democracy and the blessing of the resources available to help make a better world.
They had help. The otherwise bland Tony Blair, who articulated the war’s aims better than anyone, at great political risk, will be deified to the heights of Winston Churchill for his brave stand against the European Union and his own cannibalistic Labor Party and attendant press. Of course our military officers and troops performed professionally and effectively and make us proud. But you have to admit, the porpoises we sent from San Diego to sniff out mines should be singled out for special mention. Hats off and a sincere thank you to you all.
Notes from La-La Land
The “peace demonstrations” during the war that have now fizzled out as the facts of the US matter in Iraq emerge are not spontaneous but are organized by groups created by the KGB in the 1950s and ’60s. A former Soviet general writing in the “National Review Online” names names at www.nationalreview.com/comment/comment- pacepa041403.asp.
•••
I heard a useful suggestion: let’s go ahead and build the mass transit system in the Triangle and not use it until we need it (if we ever do).
•••
We’ve won the Iraq War but what about the battle against affirmative action playing out in front of the US Supreme Court in the Michigan case? This twoedged sword cuts right through the basic principles of the United States. If you are white, you are discriminated against. If you are black, you are under suspicion that you made it without proper credentials. And all of us lose when standards are lowered for all.
•••
I predict that John Edwards wins the Democrat nomination for president and is pounded by George Bush.
•••
Hats off to Mary Anne Fox for standing up to the tenured faculty after their cowardly attack after she did her job and fired the dead wood on her staff and was stranded without the support of her boss, the insipid UNC system president Molly Broad.
Published May 2003