A week has passed since the election, and I still have not fully formed any thought that the world really needs to hear on the subject. I have proven once again that my vote counts. No matter what the issue, no matter which party you’re in, my support has the power to make you lose. Sic me on your enemies, if you can live with yourself.
This serves as a caveat about anything you may read here: if my voting record is anything to go by, my beliefs are in direct oblivious opposition to whatever community I may inhabit. So many grains of salt, it’s no wonder I raise everyone’s blood pressure.
I was thinking about presidential second terms during my election hangover, and it occurred to me that we might really be in for something special in the next four years. As I began to think back, I realized that the presidents’ second terms in the 20th century were some s***ty things indeed. clinton, we all remember, was impeached for being exactly the bag of dirt we knowingly elected twice. Reagan briefly torpedoed his legacy by trading arms for hostages, illegally funding Cobra Commander with the profits, and letting his wife’s astrologer schedule summits with the Decepticons. As I recall. Nixon? Shot a man in Reno just to watch him die. Ike lived with the widespread rumor that our enemies had more missiles than we did; attempting to confirm this rumor, he inadvertently upgraded it to “our enemies have more missiles than we do, and also one of our U2 spyplanes, along with perhaps not the best pilot.” Even Wilson had to watch his League of Nations crumble on his head as he packed his bags. Given a twofer, presidents tend to get a little big for their britches and end up smacked down for it.
Gifted with this epiphany, I planned to sit down and unveil its hidden brilliance to the rest of the world as soon as I was sure all the things I was thinking of had actually happened. By the time I had gotten around to researching my hunch, however, I found the research was made easier by the fact that everyone on earth had written about it last week. While I was sitting around tonight, I saw a story about it on CNN.
That should be sufficient indication of how dim my bulb is at the moment: my mind is working like cable news. Then again, if the ethos of cable news is anything to live by, my only real crime was not unoriginal thought, but rather failing to break the story before everyone else. But anything that suggests my problem is a failure to blurt things out as soon as I think them should probably be ignored.
It is the news broadcast itself, not the contents of that broadcast, that depresses me most of the time these days. The haughtiness of a post-election gloater does nothing that irritates me as much as something like this:
I don’t begrudge these knights of the blog-table their grandiose dreams. But I worked on a school paper when I was a kid and I owned a CB radio when I lived in Texas. And what I saw in the blogosphere on Nov. 2 was more reminiscent of that school paper or a “Breaker, breaker 19″ gabfest on CB than anything approaching journalism.
-from the web site of CBS, bastion of journalistic integrity
I could just slap the shit out of this guy.
I’ll grant you, I have never seen new information on a bl*g. Every bl*g I have personally encountered has consisted of its owner pasting up links to other people’s reporting, regurgitating the swift boat vets, or posting pictures of his cat. But as for “anything approaching journalism”…? Today, we launched a major military strike on an insurgent stronghold city in Iraq that may end in the capture/termination of al-Zarqawi or may end in another royal clusterf*** atop a pile of Iraqi and American bodies. I really wanted to find out how this strike was going when I got home tonight, so I turned on a journalism-approaching cable news network. The top story, trumpeted and breathlessly bleated at the top of the hour, an hour in which the United States Armed Forces were engaged in pitched battle on foreign soil, was
THE JURORS MIGHT BE DEADLOCKED IN THE SCOTT PETERSON TRIAL! THE SCOTT PETERSON TRIAL JURORS MIGHT NOT BE ABLE TO DECIDE! HOLY S***, HONEY, WAKE THE KIDS AND GET THEM DOWN INTO THE STORM CELLAR BEFORE THE DELIBERATIONS END!
Disgusted, I changed the channel to another cable news network, this one inexplicably starring the skeletal remains of Larry King. As midwestern boys dodged bullets in the sand thousands of miles away, their best friends dying in explosions all around them, Larry King was prepared to deliver me the latest information on
LACI PETERSON’S HUSBAND! A DOUCHEBAG IN CALIFORNIA MAY GET A MISTRIAL! THE JURY WENT TO BED, BUT THEY COULD WAKE UP AGAIN ANY TIME! OH JESUS GOD ALMIGHTY! HONEY, GET THE KIDS IN THE CAR AND DRIVE! DRIVE, AND DON’T STOP FOR ANYTHING! JUST GO, AND DON’T LOOK BACK! I LOVE YOU!
Give me a f***ing break.
After about two minutes of Larry King’s skeletal remains hollering like he was trapped in a cave and trying to get the rescuers’ attention, I went online to a legitimate, journalism-approaching web site. They did, I was relieved to see, have a story that suggested the battle in Falluja might actually exist somewhere in this dimension. The story, unfortunately, reflected what bothers me the most about journalism right now. Allow me to paraphrase:
Thousands of U.S. and Iraqi troops streamed into Falluja on Monday, beginning an all-out assault aimed at driving insurgents out of the city, the Associated Press was told by someone who was there.
Pentagon officials said the operation involves more than 2,000 Iraqis and about 10,000 U.S. troops, and the AP has no reason to doubt that. Other sources have suggested that the Iraqi army is being deserted en masse, but no one in the hotel bar had heard anything to confirm those reports.
U.S. tanks fired 120-mm rounds into booby-trapped barricades for about an hour, igniting massive explosions. We’re told it was really something to see.
Military officials told our Jane Arraf, who is “embedded with troops” but apparently still needs to be told what they did, one of the initial goals has been achieved — clearing a path through the legion of orcs and trolls guarding Falluja’s massive stone gates.
The Army said U.S. airstrikes against one position killed an estimated 20 to 25 insurgents, none of whom were actually children waving cardboard tubes. That seemed like a strange thing for the Army to say, but we really weren’t sure what the follow-up question should be.
Arraf reported hearing an almost constant barrage of explosions and Dixie Chicks songs and said that tracer fire was lighting the night sky, which the AP would have loved to have seen. Insurgents could be heard chanting in Arabic: “God is great, and we hate your freedom.”
A target hit Monday was a position manned by about five insurgents armed with assault rifles who were acting as forward observers, trying to direct mortar fire against Marines outside the city. You would not catch our Jane Arraf anywhere near that s***. Our Jane Arraf is looking for some hazard pay before the upcoming Christmas sales at Neiman’s; that does not mean she is suicidal. Just because she is covering a war does not mean she has to go where fighting is. The official Marines spokesman made it sound pretty hardcore, though, and contradicting him might mean losing access to juicy government sources.
Before the ground offensive began at oh, let’s say 7 p.m., Falluja was pummeled for hours by airstrikes. Arraf said the forces cut the power before the start of the assault. Without power, many innocent people spent hours without the free HBO to which they were entitled as guests of the Green Zone Sheraton. The Army has no figures for how many innocent women and children saw their afternoons senselessly wasted, unable to find out how ‘Booty Call’ starring Jamie Foxx ends until DSL was back up in the Courtesy Room. This senseless tragedy will merit a special investigative report later in the week, possibly a -gate. ‘HBOgate’…? Doesn’t really flow. ‘Cablegate’! There we go.
In Washington, the AP has learned now that the hotel cable is back on, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld told reporters that the battle for Falluja was critical for the success of the U.S.-led war on Iraq.
Rumsfeld downplayed the threat to the city’s civilian population, saying U.S. forces are disciplined, well-trained and protected by the mighty fire of the Sun King.
“There aren’t going to be large numbers of civilians killed and certainly not by U.S. forces,” he said. That should be good enough for the AP; it’s not like he’s ever lied to us before.
Given this level of journalism, I’ll take my information where I can get it. I can understand staying out of the line of fire. I don’t want to get shot either. That’s why I’m not a journalist who volunteered to cover a war.