The superstar columnist George Will has an impressive vocabulary.
Too bad it doesn’t include the words “I’m sorry.”
Ten months ago, Will led the media charge when a member of
Congress dared to say that President Bush would try to deceive the
public about Iraq. By now, of course, strong evidence has piled up that
Bush tried and succeeded.
But back in late September, when a media frenzy erupted about Rep.
Jim McDermott’s live appearance from Baghdad on ABC’s “This Week”
program, what riled the punditocracy as much as anything else was
McDermott’s last statement during the interview: “I think the president
would mislead the American people.”
First to wave a media dagger at the miscreant was Will, a regular
on the ABC television show. Within minutes, on the air, he denounced
“the most disgraceful performance abroad by an American official in my
lifetime.” But the syndicated columnist was just getting started.
Back at his computer, George Will churned out a piece that
appeared in The Washington Post two days later, ripping into McDermott
and a colleague on the trip, Rep. David Bonior. “Saddam Hussein finds
American collaborators among senior congressional Democrats,” Will
wrote.
There was special venom for McDermott in the column. Will could
not abide the spectacle of a Congressperson casting doubt on George W.
Bush’s utter veracity. “McDermott’s accusation that the president --
presumably with Cheney, Powell, Rumsfeld, Rice and others as
accomplices -- would use deceit to satisfy his craving to send young
Americans into an unnecessary war is a slander.”
During early October, the national media echo chamber kept rocking
with countless reprises of Will’s bugle call. One of the main reasons
for the furor was widespread media denial that “the president would
mislead the American people.”
An editorial in the Rocky Mountain News fumed that “some of
McDermott’s words, delivered via TV, were nothing short of outrageous.”
In Georgia, the Augusta Chronicle declared: “For a U.S. congressman to
virtually accuse the president of lying while standing on foreign
soil -- especially the soil of a nation that seeks to destroy his
nation and even tried to assassinate a former U.S. president -- is an
appallingly unpatriotic act.”
Nationally, on the Fox News Channel, the one-man bombast factory
Bill O’Reilly accused McDermott of “giving aid and comfort to Saddam
while he was in Baghdad.” O’Reilly said that thousands of his viewers
“want to know why McDermott would give propaganda material to a killer
and accuse President Bush of being a liar in the capital city of the
enemy.”
A syndicated column by hyper-moralist Cal Thomas followed with
similar indignation: “We have seen Reps. Jim McDermott of Washington
and David Bonior of Michigan -- the Bozos of Baghdad -- accuse
President Bush of lying for political gain about Iraq’s threat to
civilization.”
But such attacks did not come only from right-wing media
stalwarts. Plenty of middle-road journalists were happy to go the way
of the blowing wind.
During one of her routine appearances on Fox television, National
Public Radio political correspondent Mara Liasson commented on
McDermott and Bonior: “These guys are a disgrace. Look, everybody knows
it’s 101, politics 101, that you don’t go to an adversary country, an
enemy country, and badmouth the United States, its policies and the
president of the United States. I mean, these guys ought to, I don’t
know, resign.”
Now that it’s evident the president of the United States not only
“would” mislead the American people but actually did -- with the result
of a horrendous war -- it’s time to ask when such pundits, who went
after McDermott with a vengeance last fall, might publicly concede that
he made a valid and crucial point.
To use George Will’s inadvertently apt words, it was prescient to
foresee that “the president -- presumably with Cheney, Powell,
Rumsfeld, Rice and others as accomplices -- would use deceit to satisfy
his craving to send young Americans into an unnecessary war.”
Much more importantly, if a mainstream political journalist like
Mara Liasson was so quick to suggest 10 months ago that McDermott
resign for inopportunely seeking to prevent a war, when will she
advocate that the president resign for dishonestly promoting a war --
or, failing resignation, face impeachment?
___________________________________
Norman Solomon is co-author of “Target Iraq: What the News Media Didn’t
Tell You.” For an excerpt and other information, go to:
www.contextbooks.com/new.html#target
