Neo-Con Pundits Fire Barrage at Liberals
Defend 'Humane' Bombardments

By: Antonia Zerbisias

There is more than one front in the attack on Iraq.

Far from the sandstorms, the shooting, and the shock and awe, pundits are locked in battle, sniping at each other in a war of words. But it's the same-old, same-old guerrilla match that has raged for years, with neo-con pundits attacking their foes in the "liberal" corporate media.

Can you say oxymoron, kids?

(Just for the record: The Star is liberal. And proud of it. But it sure is lonely on this bank of the mainstream.)

For a few interesting - at least for news junkies - days over the weekend, when the war seemed bogged down by unexpected resistance, bad weather, and vulnerable supply lines, the right was on the run, defending the Pentagon's "humane" bombardments, even as civilians going to market were being blown to smithereens.

Dovish opinionators for some of the major agenda-setting newspapers, including the New York Times, were serving up crow to the hawks.

But they weren't biting: Instead of taking some well-deserved shots at the administration or Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, the right aimed at the messengers who, by questioning the Pentagon's plan, were committing the sin of journalism.

"Are we there yet? Are we there yet?" syndicated columnist Kathleen Parker peevishly asked. "The media are beginning to sound an awful lot like brats in the backseat, nagging Daddy Rumsfeld because the war is taking sooooo long. I mean, it's been a little more than a week already!"

The barrage soon escalated.

On Saturday, Rupert Murdoch's pro-war New York Post actually deconstructed its rival New York Times, calling it "News By Saddam."

Then, Tuesday night, word came that pretty young PoW Jessica Lynch was rescued in a daring raid, followed by news of battles fought and won, breakthroughs made and coalition troops surrounding Baghdad.

Plus the big gift, Peter Arnett, the New Zealand-born reporter who burst the Bush bubble as a CNN correspondent during Persian Gulf War I, shot off his mouth to Iraqi state TV - and got fired by NBC, which is owned by GE which has ties to the Pentagon.

So the neo-cons started having their wargasms again.

"The fact that NBC, and before it, National Geographic Explorer, hired Arnett at all after his debacle at CNN reveals the tolerance among many in the press for anti-American bias of a particularly nasty kind", wrote syndicated columnist Mona Charen, omitting how Arnett is an American.

"Throughout the Cold War, liberals surrounded themselves with people like Arnett - people whose scepticism about the United States made them seem 'independent' and 'objective'. But some, like Arnett, were tawdry, America-hating weasels."

According to pundits such as these, freedom of the press only extends to those who press for Operation Iraqi Freedom.

Complains Rush Limbaugh's brother David, author of Absolute Power: The Legacy of Corruption in the Clinton-Reno Justice Department: "As soon as the war started, many of the usual suspects pretended to adopt a ceasefire in their attacks on the Bush administration and the coalition invasion of Iraq on the premise that, once at war, they would support the troops. But no sooner than they implemented their pseudo-moratorium did they start right back up again - at the administration's first sign of vulnerability in the prosecution of the war... These people really are something to behold. I'm sleeping well knowing that mature adults are running this war and that the American people aren't swallowing this mainstream media propaganda."

"In the `new' view of America by American media, (fog of war) refers to blatant, unabashed lies, half-truths and intentional misinformation to promote an agenda", scolds California attorney Paul Walfield in his column for Accuracy In Media, a right-wing watchdog (http://www.aim.org), adding, without irony: "The facts on the battlefield are simple, and readily available from the Pentagon."

Next, Walfield's chilling conclusion, odd from a champion of freedom: "We need to remember who said what and when."

It's interesting tracking the tide of U.S. right-wing opinion. She-who-remains-nameless at voxpopgirl.blogspot.com says that you can almost always see where it starts: with daily delivery of two e-newsletters, one from the Wall Street Journal, the other from townhall.com, both forums for conservative, even reactionary, perspectives.

Every morning, they show up in the in-boxes of the punditcocracy and, eventually, their themes, right down to their phrasing, find their way on to the Crossfires, the Hardballs, the Kudlows & Cramers, and other cable screamfests, where the fighting really gets dirty.

As bigtime blogger Mickey Kaus (kausfiles.com) pointed out Tuesday, the raging neo-cons "have a habit of trying to thuggishly suppress annoying journalism with withering bursts of ad hominem fire".

Me, I like the way Marshall McLuhan put it: "The coverage is the war. If there were no coverage... there'd be no war. Yes, the newsmen and the media men around the world are actually the fighters, not the soldiers any more."