Mike the Mad Biologist

Glenn Greenwald catches Washington Post political ‘reporter’ Anne Kornblut impugning the patriotism of millions of Democrats:

The Washington Post’s Anne Kornblut, analyzing the differences between Republicans and Democrats on Iraq, explained on Tuesday night’s Hardball:

ANNE KORNBLUT, “THE WASHINGTON POST”: It remains, especially in Democratic crowds, the number-one issue. There is no applause line that gets a bigger response when you’re out with Senator Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, John Edwards, than when they say the first thing I’m going to do is I’m going to start ending this war in Iraq.

Republican crowds are a little different. They still want to be supporting the troops.

Why don’t Democrats “still want to be supporting the troops”? The opposite of favoring withdrawal is “supporting the troops.” The main difference on Iraq between Democrats and Republicans is that Democrats want to end the war while Republicans “still want to be supporting the troops.”

This is the “analysis” from the Washington Post’s political reporter, until recently of the New York Times. Beltway reporters spend so much time speaking with government officials and political operatives that they actually see and understand the world through the spectrum of the simplistic, meaningless political slogans they are constantly fed.

There are two options here. One is that Kornblut actually thinks Democrats hate the “troops.” The second is that she is an incompetent moron. Call me an optimist, but I’m betting on number two. One would like to think that a reporter–someone who deals in words for a living–would believe that words have meaning, and thus be more precise in what she says.

There are plenty of phrases she could have put after “supporting” such as:

“the dumbest idea in foreign policy in over a decade”

“the foolish vanity of a man who is doubling down on death”

“bending over and shoving their heads up their asses”

Any one of these statements would have been more accurate than claiming that the Republican party which opposed actually supporting the troops is doing so.

Anyway, fuck you Kornblut.

Comments

#1 ctenotrish, FCD
August 27, 2007

Hear, hear. I love it when you get all firey!
#2 Joshua
August 27, 2007

Only a decade?

I mean, Somalia didn’t work out great, but it was far from an unmitigated clusterfuck like we have in Iraq.

Expand it to two decades, and at least you get Reagan’s support of Saddam, the Iran-Contra fiasco, not to mention funding of the mujaheddin that largely folded into the Taliban. Those I would accept as being worse mistakes than Iraq, if only because the current Iraq quagmire is directly resultant from them.
#3 PuckishOne
August 27, 2007

Completely on topic, this is from CBC’s “This Hour Has 22 Minutes” – great stuff.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o7MUQIb2OCo
#4 Jonathan Vos Post
August 27, 2007

Support our troops in Iraq the way we supported them in Vietnam?

From the Daily Show:

“At least we know one place the president is not going to go,” said Stewart, playing a clip of Bush saying in 2004, “I think the [Vietnam] analogy is false. I also happen to think that analogy sends the wrong message to our troops. It sends the wrong message to the enemy”

“You know what’s next,” said Stewart. “In what is perhaps the strangest turn in the president’s effort to rally support, he agreed that Iraq is just like Vietnam, but in a good way — and that our only mistake was not starting that war, but ending it.”

Stewart then turned to Aasif Mandvi, who suggested that “the message of today’s speech was, clearly, we should have stayed in Vietnam for that 13th or 14th year, if only to send a powerful message about our will to a teenaged Osama bin Laden — that’s when they’re most impressionable.”
#5 Dunc
August 28, 2007

One would like to think that a reporter–someone who deals in words for a living–would believe that words have meaning, and thus be more precise in what she says.

Sure – there are many things that one would like to think… But then experience rears its ugly head. These days, it seems that Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language” is the standard journalism primer.
#6 The Anti Atheist
August 29, 2007

No…fuck YOU.

You would love to see this government collapse, even if it fucked the country, because at least it would get the Republicans.
#7 Kristin
August 30, 2007

Hey Anti-Atheist – the country is already fucked, precisely BECAUSE of this government. Stop watching Faux News and get a grip.

Besides, Mike is not saying that he wants the government to collapse. He’s saying that a political reporter who should know better is essentially parrotting the Neocon line that anyone who doesn’t support the troops is an enemy of the state. That attitude, expressed by so many on the right and unfortunately in the media as well, is what is truly cheapening political debate and ruining this country. When did it become non-patriotic to express dissent? Right after Bush was “elected” president.