Tearing down the firewall

Is anything on the internet more ridiculous than the NY Times Op-Ed firewall? Thanks to Jurassic Pork and Tennessee Guerilla Woman for reprinting this morning’s Maureen Dowd column, Say Uncle, Rummy. Snip:

The former “Matinee Idol,” as W. liked to call him, is now a figure of absurdity, clinging to his job only because some retired generals turned him into a new front on the war on terror. On his rare, brief visit to Baghdad, he was afraid to go outside Fortress Green Zone, even though he yammers on conservative talk shows about how progress is being made, and how the press never reports good news out of Iraq.

If the news is so good, why wasn’t Rummy gallivanting at the local mall, walking around rather than hiding out in the U.S. base known as Camp Victory? (What are they going to call it, one reporter joked, Camp Defeat?)

Yesterday, I had to suffer through another 45 minutes of Fox News. I work out three times a week, and while I’m shvitzing on the elliptical trainer I’m a slave to whatever is on the box. To be exact, I was reading the third novel of Jonathan Stroud’s Bartimaeus Trilogy (Ptolemy’s Gate), but Fox was on and despite my consistent gym habits most of the other guys there are still BIGGER THAN ME.

Just like high school, dammit.

Anyway.

So this flatulent windbag John Gibson was op-ed’ing on Neil Young’s and Pink’s antiwar songs. Here’s the full text. (See how much I love you? I braved the Fox News website to find this bit of rubbish.) This is how our government, through it’s official mouthpiece, wants us to view the war in Iraq:

I’m all for artists speaking out. I lived through the ’60s, too. In fact, I worked in the music business back then, and everybody was against war. That was because we started a war we didn’t have to. Everybody knew that.

Things are different nowadays for me.

When I think of the war, I think of Flight 93. I wonder if Neil Young and Pink are going to go see that. I wonder if they would accept free tickets from me.

I also commend to them the recent tapes of bin Laden and Zarqawi and Zawahiri. They continue to promise to kill us, as many of us as possible.

In fact, Zarqawi promised just a day or two ago that the worst is yet to come.

Wonder if they listen to Neil Young and Pink? Doubt it.

Think they would spare Neil Young and Pink while they killed the rest of us because, after all, Neil Young and Pink are against war and want peace?

If Zarqawi and bin Laden are against Bush, they must be against war, right?

I’m sure we could have a contest: who can point out the most logical errors and sleazy debater’s tactics? But I’ll be content to point out what I think is the most important fallacy here: the implied notion that what we’re doing in Iraq hurts Zarqawi and bin Laden.

In the June 2005 issue of Fantasy and Science Fiction you’ll find Harry Turtledove’s “Bedfellows,” which recounts an imagined marriage between bin Laden and Dubya. (Who better than Turtledove, a master of alternate historical fiction, to write such a tale?) It was superb satire because it skewered a fundamental truth of this administration’s “war on terror”: Bush is the best thing that ever happened to bin Laden. Of course, the reverse used to be true, but is no longer. It’s a one-sided relationship, has been for a while now. Bush keeps promoting the cause of bin Laden and Zarqawi et al., but nowadays, he has less than nothing to show for it.

Back to Maureen Dowd:

The assertions that Iraq is largely peaceful were belied yesterday by our own government. A State Department report on global terrorism counted 8,300 deaths of civilians in Iraq from insurgent attacks — more than half of all those killed by terrorists worldwide — and noted that violence is escalating. The elections have clearly not quelled the violence, and terrorists are said to be trying to turn Iraq’s Anbar province into a base for Al Qaeda and other militants. (And since it’s our State Department, you’ve got to figure they’re soft-peddling it.)

April was the most lethal month for U.S. soldiers this year; at least 67 died.

That’s enough ranting for now. Today and tomorrow, I’ll be going over the first 100 pages of Nest with a fine tooth comb, and I’ll be sending it out to an agent on Monday. Wish me luck. This afternoon, I’ll be canvassing with our local Democratic party. Wish me clear skies.

D.

Walnut, April 29, 2006. Category: Political rants.

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