An American Quagmire-The Beginning of the End

One “side effect” of living in Washington DC (an exceptionally unpleasant city for reasons I will explore later) is news overload. Newspapers blow in the streets like tumbleweeds. People manhandle their morning papers then abandon them on coffee shop tables where they become public commodities. Newspaper dispensers are lined up reassuringly on every street corner so that more news is never too far away...

The radio is also prolific. News analysis shows in Washington have an endless supply of policy experts armed with wonk-speak and eager to fire away. Back in the Wild West, our first public radio station debuted less than a year ago and believe me it was an exciting time, at least in my life. But now I’m in public radio hell. At least three stations churn out more public radio than you could ever desire, and now it comes with commercials, too.

You might think this proliferation of media alternatives would translate into a wider variety and/or higher quality of news. You would be wrong.

The term “news” used to mean something like “what’s happening.” But when flagship publications like the Washington Post, The New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times fail to report news, such as the memos showing President Bush lied to Americans while secretly planning the war in Iraq with his roast-beef buddies, I get the impression the meaning of the term has evolved.

Personally, I don’t want to listen to semantic discussions about where the Ten Commandments can be legally displayed. I don’t care where they are displayed. I want someone to talk about something that MATTERS TO ME, like why haven’t we initiated proceedings to impeach George W. Bush for lying about the war in Iraq? As far as I am concerned, our “democracy” is one in quotation marks only.

Responding to yesterday’s feel-good war speech by GWB, the New York Times has this to say; “We did not expect Mr. Bush would apologize for the misinformation that helped lead us into this war, or for the catastrophic mistakes his team made in running the military operation. But we had hoped he would resist the temptation to raise the bloody flag of 9/11 over and over again to justify a war in a country that had nothing whatsoever to do with the terrorist attacks.”

Apologize for the misinformation? Apologize for catastrophic mistakes? The NYT was hoping the president would stop drawing false connections between 9/11 and Iraq?


How about a feature on who castrated the NYT?