BULLETIN from the fever swamps of the Left: The administration might just plant weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Oh, and President Bush may cancel the 2004 election.
These were some of the observations offered yesterday at a breakfast sponsored by the Columbia School of Journalism about the first week of war.
Panelist Katrina vanden Heuvel, the editor of The Nation magazine, said the media need to ask some hard questions, like, “Will some in the U.S. government attempt to plant evidence of weapons of mass destruction?”
The panelist who reported the cancellation-of-the-2004-election rumor was Kevin Buckley, a decorated Vietnam War correspondent and now a contributing editor of Playboy. Evidently, Bush simply won’t allow himself to be voted out of office due to a bad economy and bad war news. Ms. vanden Heuvel not only offered her own delightful notion, but seconded Buckley’s theory: “I heard that in Moscow last week!”
Thus does the unabashedly leftist viewpoint greet the coming of war with Iraq. Not content merely to oppose the war, unwilling to believe that their antiwar views failed to prevail because they were out-argued, they imagine vile and all-powerful conspiracies afoot.
Ms. vanden Heuvel also complained that Helen Thomas, the ancient White House pseudo-reporter, had been relegated to a “kind of Siberia” because she dared to point out the “irony” of Donald Rumsfeld complaining about Iraqi violations of the Geneva Convention.
Given Helen Thomas’ high jinks of late, which have included asking Ari Fleischer why the president “wants to bomb innocent Iraqi children” and comparing Bush to Hitler and Israel to Nazi Germany, I said Helen Thomas shouldn’t be sent to Siberia but rather to an old-age home.
Kevin Buckley upbraided me for this admittedly harsh remark: I was “rude” and a “lout” for attacking an “old lady” who wasn’t there to defend herself, he said. “You ruined the whole panel!”
It’s true. I did ruin the whole panel. If I had only just thrown out a wacko conspiracy theory about the unparalleled evil of George W. Bush, I’d have fit right in.
Instead, I expressed feelings of rage toward a reporter who uses her White House press pass as a disgraceful opportunity to slander American officials and the nation of Israel on a daily basis.
The most interesting and impressive remarks were offered by Floyd Abrams, the veteran First Amendment lawyer. He pointed out how unprecedented and “transformative” the decision to embed reporters within the U.S. military truly is. “The administration deserves praise,” he said, for “going beyond what the Constitution requires.”
The military’s willingness to open itself up to reporters is evidence of how deeply the attitudes of both the armed forces and the media have changed since Vietnam. Over the years, the hatred of the military expressed by mainstream journalists has been replaced by an unspoken but profound respect for the sacrifices made by men and women in uniform and the life-and-death challenges they are called upon to face.
Katrina vanden Heuvel, meanwhile, expressed her fear that embedded journalists would serve as cheerleaders for the U.S. military. (And she knows something about cheerleading: In its ignoble past, her magazine has served as a cheerleader for Stalin, Castro and the Sandinistas.)
As for the evil commander-in-chief, he had something more elevated to offer yesterday morning. “We will stay on the path to Baghdad, mile by mile, and all the way to victory,” said George W. Bush.
Forgive me for cheerleading, but: Yay!