Hinderaker Loses His Marbles, Part II
Over at Powerline, Hinderaker is busting his buttons with pride because (gasp! swoon!) Rush Limbaugh read one of his posts on the air (Rush, apparently exhausted from hauling so much water for the administration, needed someone else to carry the bucket for a while). It's typical Hinderaker idiocy, that basically boils down to this:
1. The war is going great.
2. If you think the war is not going great, that's the fault of a) The liberal news media and / or b) spineless liberal fifth-columnists
The sins of the news media in reporting on Iraq are mainly sins of omission....Partly this omission is due to laziness or incomprehension, but I think it is mostly attributable to the fact that if the media acknowledged that reforming the Arab world, in order to drain the terrorist swamp, has always been the principal purpose of the Iraq war, it would take the sting out of their "No large stockpiles of WMDs!" theme.
Hinderaker, Hinderaker, Hinderaker.
Don't tell me you believe that line of B.S. Why don't you pull down any Star Tribune from March of 2003 and read it? (I know you read every issue of the Strib from cover to cover, so this is just for review).
The administration's arguments for war were all about weapons of mass destruction. Remember the terrifying aluminum tubes? The fearsome "mobile bioweapons vans"? The sinister "drone aircraft" that looked like they were made of plywood? The "smoking gun" that "may turn out to be a mushroom cloud?" The President's own (demonstrably false) claim that Iraq attempted to buy uranium from Niger? That Iraq was, at any moment, only 48 hours away from a nuclear weapon?
Must we continue this idiotic charade, where you wingnuts pretend you can't remember any of the stuff you were shouting from the rooftops a couple of years ago?
Oh I'm sorry, Hinderaker, I interrupted you. Go ahead.
One wonders how past wars could have been fought if news reporting had consisted almost entirely of a recitation of casualties. The D-Day invasion was one of the greatest organizational feats ever achieved by human beings, and one of the most successful. But what if the only news Americans had gotten about the invasion was that 2,500 allied soldiers died that day, with no discussion of whether the invasion was a success or a failure, and no acknowledgement of the huge strategic stakes that were involved? Or what if such news coverage had continued, day by day, through the entire Battle of Normandy, with Americans having no idea whether the battle was being won or lost, but knowing only that 54,000 Allied troops had been killed by the Germans?
How about the Battle of Midway, one of the most one-sided and strategically significant battles of world history? What if there had been no "triumphalism"--that dreaded word--in the American media's reporting on the battle, and Americans had learned only that 307 Americans died--never mind that the Japanese lost more than ten times that many--without being told the decisive significance of the engagement?
Or take Iwo Jima, the iconic Marine Corps battle. If Americans knew only that nearly 7,000 Marines lost their lives there, with no context, no strategy, and only sporadic acknowledgement of the heroism that accompanied those thousands of deaths, would the American people have continued the virtually unanimous support for our country, our soldiers and our government that characterized World War II?
Wait a minute, hold on. D-Day? Midway? Iwo Jima? Those were three of the biggest battles of one of the biggest wars in human history. But this war in Iraq wasn't supposed to be big. It was supposed to be over years ago -- Dear Leader said so (Mission Accomplished, remember?) Donald Rumsfeld said we were just mopping up a few "Saddam loyalists" and "dead-enders". Dick Cheney insists to this day that the insurgency is in its "last throes".
Maybe the difference is that during World War II, the American people knew exactly who they were fighting and why. They had a clear idea of the risks and the costs. They were willing not only to put up with a draft that would send them or their loved ones overseas to fight, but also to endure rationing of everything from meat to gasoline to rubber to textiles. Imagine if that were asked of the American people today -- imagine if, for the next four years, cars, kitchen appliances and a host of other consumer goods weren't even sold in the U.S. because the the factories that produce them were needed for war production. The American people were willing to do it then and nobody complained about it; why not now?
Could it be the American people don't see this war as important as that war? That's where the wheels come off your Iwo Jima parallel, Hinderaker. The news media isn't unpatriotic and neither are the American people. That's not the problem.
The problem is you sold this war to them like you'd sell them a box of corn flakes.
And now that they're tired of cornflakes, you don't know what to do.
