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The 1,518th CyberAlert. Tracking Liberal Media Bias Since 1996
Wednesday June 11, 2003 (Vol. Eight; No. 111)

 
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1. Moyers: Right Wing Implementing "Intentional Destruction" of US
Another mean-spirited, vitriolic attack on conservatives by Bill Moyers, but at least this time one that was not broadcast on his taxpayer-subsidized PBS show. At the "Take Back America" conference in Washington last week, Moyers, John Nichols relayed in an online posting for the far-left Nation magazine, delivered a speech "condemning 'the unholy alliance between government and wealth' and the compassionate conservative spin that tries to make 'the rape of America sound like a consensual date.'" Plus, Moyers asserted: "I think this is a deliberate, intentional destruction of the United States of America."

2. Couric Treats HRC as Victim, But Also Raises Unfavorable Topics
While Katie Couric often treated Hillary as a victim, just as did ABC's Barbara Walters, Couric also raised subjects not brought up by Walters, such as how many were disturbed about an un-elected First Lady taking a policy role and those who felt "dissed" by Hillary's dismissal of stay-at-home moms. Couric empathized with Hillary's plight because since her days at Wellesley College she's been "a so-called lightning rod, a term that would haunt you, really for the rest of your life," prodded Hillary to run for President and delivered this doozy of a loaded question about negative reaction to her political activities: "Were you surprised at the backlash? The really vitriolic, violent backlash against you in many ways? Do you think it was good old-fashioned sexism?"

3. Carlson Advices Martha Stewart to Look to Hillary for Guidance
In this week's Time, columnist Margaret Carlson suggested the indicted Martha Stewart look to Hillary Clinton for direction: "There's another vilified damsel to provide guidance: Hillary." In her piece, "Martha, Meet Hillary: The First Lady-turned-Senator has plenty to teach Martha Stewart about surviving a storm," Carlson advised Stewart to downplay the protests of innocence, play up the poor-girl routine, just like Hillary. Carlson oozed: "It took her husband's humiliating, reckless affair to turn the tide. Even then, Hillary at first instinctively resisted any sympathy for standing by her man. Once she finally accepted it, she won the widespread popularity that had always eluded her."

4. ABC's Martin Believes HRC, Time's Klein Faults Clinton Critics
ABC's Michel Martin expressed sympathy for Hillary Clinton's plight and claim she didn't learn of the truth of her husband's Monica Lewinsky relationship until he admitted it to her. On Sunday's This Week, Martin contended: "She's a lawyer, but she's also a woman and she's also a human being, and who among us does not have someone in our circle with a drinking problem, with a drug problem, with some sort of mental illness that we find it just somehow intolerable to deal with, for whatever reason, because we have a stake in the status quo? So I don't find it very difficult to believe at all." Time's Joe Klein painted the Clintons as victims of unfair attacks: "They were faced with a real assault. Bob Dole once told me that there was a part of the Republican Party that never accepted Bill Clinton's legitimacy."

5. "Penn's Pugnacity of the Day," Profiting via "Collateral Damage"
The fifth installment of "Penn's Pugnacity of the Day," quotes drawn from actor Sean Penn's 4,000-plus word screed which filled a full page of the May 30 New York Times. In today's excerpt he complains about "the callous and too easily accepted term, 'collateral damage.' This is a term where proportionality of loss is taken from the people who have lost, and given to marketing executives." Huh?


 

Moyers: Right Wing Implementing "Intentional
Destruction" of US

Bill Moyers     Another mean-spirited, vitriolic attack on conservatives by Bill Moyers, but at least this time one that was not broadcast on his taxpayer-subsidized PBS show. At the "Take Back America" conference in Washington last week put on by the left-wing Campaign for America's Future, Moyers, John Nichols relayed in an online posting for the far-left Nation magazine, rallied the liberal faithful "who seek to spark a new progressive era."

     Nichols relayed how Moyers delivered a speech "condemning 'the unholy alliance between government and wealth' and the compassionate conservative spin that tries to make 'the rape of America sound like a consensual date,' Moyers charged that 'rightwing wrecking crews' assembled by the Bush Administration and its Congressional allies were out to bankrupt government."

     Plus, Moyers asserted: "I think this is a deliberate, intentional destruction of the United States of America."

     James Taranto's "Best of the Web" column for OpinionJournal.com (www.opinionjournal.com/best) highlighted the Nation's recounting of the Moyers screed and FNC's Brit Hume picked up on it Tuesday night.

     An excerpt from "The Online Beat" column by John Nichols posted on June 9 about the Moyers rant:

....Recalling the populism and old-school progressivism of the era in which William Jennings Bryan stirred the Democratic National Convention of 1896 to enter into the great struggle between privilege and democracy -- and to spontaneously nominate the young Nebraskan for president -- journalist and former presidential aide Bill Moyers delivered a call to arms against "government of, by and for the ruling corporate class."

Condemning "the unholy alliance between government and wealth" and the compassionate conservative spin that tries to make "the rape of America sound like a consensual date," Moyers charged that "rightwing wrecking crews" assembled by the Bush Administration and its Congressional allies were out to bankrupt government. Then, he said, they would privatize public services in order to enrich the corporate interests that fund campaigns and provide golden parachutes to pliable politicians. If unchecked, Moyers warned, the result of these machinations will be the dismantling of "every last brick of the social contract."

"I think this is a deliberate, intentional destruction of the United States of America," said Moyers, as he called for the progressives gathered in Washington -- and for their allies across the United States -- to organize not merely in defense of social and economic justice but in order to preserve democracy itself. Paraphrasing the words of Abraham Lincoln as the 16th president rallied the nation to battle against slavery, Moyers declared, "Our nation can no more survive as half democracy and half oligarchy than it could survive half slave and half free."...

In the face of what he described as "a radical assault" on American values by those who seek to redistribute wealth upward from the many to a wealthy few, Moyers said he could not understand "why the Democrats are afraid to be labeled class warriors in a war the other side started and is winning."...

[Dennis] Kucinich, who earned nine standing ovations for his antiwar and anti-corporate free trade rhetoric, probably did more to advance his candidacy than any of the other contenders. But he never got to the place Moyers reached with a speech that legal scholar Jamie Raskin described as one of the most "amazing and spellbinding" addresses he had ever heard. Author and activist Frances Moore Lappe said she was close to tears as she thanked Moyers for providing precisely the mixture of perspective and hope that progressives need as they prepare to challenge the right in 2004.

That, Moyers explained, was the point of his address, which reflected on White House political czar Karl Rove's oft-stated admiration for Mark Hanna, the Ohio political boss who managed the campaigns and the presidency of conservative Republican William McKinley. It was McKinley who beat Bryan in 1896 and -- with Hanna's help -- fashioned a White House that served the interests of the corporate trusts.

Comparing the excesses of Hanna and Rove, and McKinley and Bush, Moyers said "the social dislocations and the meanness of the 19th century " were being renewed by a new generation of politicians who, like their predecessors, seek to strangle the spirit of the American revolution "in the hard grip of the ruling class."

To break that grip, Moyers said, progressives of today must learn from the revolutionaries and reformers of old. Recalling the progressive movement that rose up in the first years of the 20th century to "restore the balance between wealth and commonwealth," and the successes of the New Dealers who turned progressive ideals into national policy, Moyers told the crowd to "get back in the fight." "Hear me!" he cried. "Allow yourself the conceit to believe that the flame of democracy will never go out as long as there is one candle in your hand."

While others were campaigning last week, Moyers was tending the flame of democracy. In doing so, he unwittingly made himself the candle holder-in-chief for those who seek to spark a new progressive era.

     END of Excerpt

     For the online article in full: www.thenation.com

     Moyers' passionate disgust for conservatives is nothing new to anyone who watches his Friday night PBS show, Now with Bill Moyers, as recounted in some previous CyberAlerts:

     -- Moyers on the April 18 Now. Vice President Cheney, Bill Moyers argued on his PBS show on Friday night, is the "poster boy" for the "military-industrial complex" made up of those who "call for war with all the ferocity of non-combatants and then turn around and feed on the corpse of war." Moyers lectured: "America's corporate and political elites now form a regime of their own and they're privatizing democracy. All the benefits -- the tax cuts, policies and rewards flow in one direction: up." See: www.mediaresearch.org

     -- Moyers on the November 8, 2002 Now. Republicans are about to use "the power of the state" to enforce "their radical ideology" Bill Moyers charged Friday night. After Moyers dedicated much of his PBS show, Now with Bill Moyers, to the evils of U.S. "imperialism" and the Bush-led "oligarchy," he warned that the government "is united behind a right-wing agenda." That agenda, Moyers claimed, "includes the power of the state to force pregnant women to surrender control over their own lives," transferring "wealth from working people to the rich" and "giving corporations a free hand to eviscerate the environment." See: www.mediaresearch.org

     [Web Update: The Common Dreams Web site, "views for the progressive community," has posted the full text of Moyers' address to the June 4 Take Back America conference sponsored by the Campaign for America's Future:
www.commondreams.org]

 

Couric Treats HRC as Victim, But Also
Raises Unfavorable Topics

     NBC's Today this week featured a five-part taped interview with Senator Hillary Clinton to promote her new book, with segments conducted by Katie Couric airing during the 7:30am half hour on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, plus time during the 9am half hour on Monday and Tuesday.

     While Couric often treated Hillary as a victim, just as did ABC's Barbara Walters, Couric also raised subjects not brought up by Walters, such as how many were disturbed about an un-elected First Lady taking a policy role, the early "bimbo-eruptions," and whether she could understand how, after her quote ("I suppose I could've stayed home and baked cookies and had teas but what I decided to do was fulfill my profession which I entered before my husband was in public life") that "women staying at home, raising a family, leading very full lives would feel dissed by that comment?"

     Given the 45 minutes or so of air time devoted to the sessions, there's way too much to fully convey, but thanks to MRC analyst Geoffrey Dickens who got much of it transcribed, below are highlights of the interview segments from Monday when Couric empathized with Hillary's plight because since her days at Wellesley College she's been "a so-called lightning rod, a term that would haunt you, really for the rest of your life," to incessantly prodding Hillary in Wednesday's concluding segment to run for President.

     In between, on Tuesday, Couric delivered this doozy about negative reaction to Hillary's political activities as First Lady: "But were you surprised at the backlash? The really vitriolic, violent backlash against you in many ways? Do you think it was good old-fashioned sexism?"

     For a rundown of Walters' Sunday infomercial for Hillary's book, see the June 9 CyberAlert: www.mediaresearch.org

     Now, highlights from this week's Today show series with Clinton:

     ## Monday, June 9, 7:30am, a session with a lot of giggling:

     -- Couric on Hillary's Wellesley College commencement address: "And that was quite controversial as was some of the content of your speech. Was that your first experience being at the center of a storm. Being a so-called lightning rod, a term that would haunt you, really for the rest of your life."

     -- Couric: "When you went to Yale Law School you met Bill Clinton. It's hard to believe, given the person he is today, that you find him quite shy."
     Clinton: "I did, that's really true. I write about it in the book. You know he had a very long beard and very long hair. I say he looked like a Viking from Arkansas. I knew that underneath that was a very handsome young man. And we started talking and found we had so much in common even though our experiences growing up were quite different. But we shared this abiding commitment to, you know, trying to make the world a better place. It sounds so, oh I guess hopeful and optimistic."
     Couric: "Corny?"
     Clinton: "And yes absolutely corny. But that is what we believed in. It's what I still believe now."

     -- Couric: "You write about his hands. You say, 'One of the first things I noticed about Bill Clinton was the shape of his hands. His wrists are narrow and elegant and his long fingers, deft, like those of a pianist or a surgeon. When we first met in law school I loved just watching him turn the pages of a book.' Whoa! So what else attracted you to him other than watching him turn the pages of a book?"

     When Hillary recounted how much she liked Bill's hands, Couric gushed: "That's quite very dreamy."

     ## Tuesday, June 10, 7:30am:

     -- Couric: "Hillary, the White House years, just days after your husband was sworn in as President he announced he was appointing you to head the task force on national health care reform. Looking back on that do you wonder what planet were we on?"
     Clinton: "There was so much going on and so he asked me if I would do this and, and you know I said yes because I've always believed that we should figure out a way to provide quality affordable health care to every American. And of course it became a target and it became a big controversy. And I also, again, think we tried to do too much too fast."
     Couric: "You write in the book that you quote, 'knew I had contributed to our failure both because of my own missteps and because I underestimated the resistance I would meet as a First Lady with a policy mission.' In retrospect was it truly appropriate to put someone who had never been elected, who had never been confirmed by the Senate as, as cabinet officers are in charge of something as big as reforming health care in this country? Can you see why that would make people feel uncomfortable?"

     -- Couric: "You and your husband had many controversies to deal with during your time at the White House. Travelgate, Whitewater, the brouhaha over money you made on cattle futures trading. Do you believe the world was out to get you or would you acknowledge now that you all made your fair share of mistakes?"
     Clinton: "You know what after $70 million spent on investigations and countless people looking at every piece of paper in our lives the fact is that neither of us on these issues like Whitewater or, or the travel office or anything else did anything wrong. Now however I think our, oh, perhaps misunderstanding of how best to present the facts and to make clear that there was no there, there wasn't as good as it could've been. And so I thought about that and I've written about it but I also believe there was an agenda at work. The people who opposed Bill's policies didn't agree with the direction he was trying to take the country, couldn't beat him politically so they did engage in what I call the politics of personal destruction. And that meant that, you know, limitless investigations, tens of millions of dollars. Looking for something, anything that we might have done wrong that they could hold up to the public and they weren't able to do that with all of the various controversies that they tried to pull me into."

     Couric didn't follow up on the ridiculous claim that investigation found the Clintons didn't do anything wrong.

     -- Couric: "You stand by your contention that there was a vast right-wing conspiracy?"
     Clinton clip from 1998: "The great story here for anybody willing to find it and write about it and explain it is this vast right-wing conspiracy that has been conspiring against my husband since the day he announced for President."
     Couric: "Knowing what you know now and didn't know then when you made that statement on this show in January of 1998 wasn't it really your husband's poor judgment, which you acknowledge as immoral behavior, and subsequent actions that really got him into trouble in this situation?"
     Clinton: "Well there's no doubt that his transgression and wrong-doing which he's admitted and apologized for was absolutely his responsibility. No one else's. But it was a private matter that unfortunately made public and used then for partisan political advantage in what really amounted to as a power grab. You know to abuse the Constitution and our political and our legal system to make something that should've been a very painful, as it was, private matter between us and with our family into a grounds for impeachment for which there was no historical or constitutional or legal basis I think fits into this whole pattern. And I might have used a different, more artful term because it's really not a conspiracy. It's, it's out there in the open. There are people who have a very different view of where we should be going in our country."

     -- Couric: "There are so many people out there who say, 'Uh! They're just political animals. They do what's expedient. They don't love each other, they're just together because it's politically advantageous. It's a sham.'"
     Clinton: "I know."
     Couric: "You've heard all that and when you hear people passing those kinds of judgments on your marriage does it gall you? Does it amuse you? What do you think?"
     Clinton: "You know I really don't pay attention to it because I don't think anyone knows what happens in a marriage between two people. Nobody could have predicted that he would've ended up being President of the United States. You know I loved him for who he was, the kind of person that he is. And we've had a great, great time together. You know it is something that I just value in my own life that I have to do what I think is right."

     ## Tuesday, June 10, 9am half hour:

     -- Couric, on reaction to Hillary's political activity as First Lady: "But were you surprised at the backlash? The really vitriolic, violent backlash against you in many ways? Do you think it was good old-fashioned sexism?"

     -- "You often talked about a zone of privacy when you were at the White House and I'm wondering how you square that with the fact that you are a feminist. That, that means you are against things like sexual harassment and given some of the things your husband allegedly engaged in as President do you think that fell under the purview of the public's right to know?"
     Clinton: "I do think everyone is entitled to privacy and I deeply regret that in this effort to undermine his presidency and to impeach and get him out of office what should've remained private was made public because I don't think that's good for our country..."

     ## Wednesday, June 11, 7:30am half hour:

     -- "As you know Senator Clinton there's been lots of criticism that the Democrats are feckless, clumsy, too slow to articulate an alternative vision to President Bush's. And if they are articulating it, it's not being heard. Why can't the Democrats, seemingly, get their act together?"

     -- Couric: "Recently a number of your more liberal supporters, I'm sure you read about this in the New York Times, a group representing children, the poor, gays, have complained that you aren't speaking out enough on their behalf. That you're not basically challenging President Bush and Republican leaders on the issues they care about the most. What was your reaction to that?"

     -- Couric: "You have said, Senator Clinton, you will not run for president in 2004. What if your party drafted you?"
     Clinton: "That's not gonna happen. We have very-"
     Couric: "What if it did? What if they came to you and said, 'Senator Hillary Clinton you are the only person, in our view, who can beat President Bush.' What would you do?"
     Clinton: "Well it's not gonna happen. It's a total hypothetical and we have and I've said I am not running so that is the answer. But you know we have very good candidates. We have people who have been in the Senate and the House. We have people who've served as governor, we have people with great ideas who've got energy. I am confident that we're gonna have a candidate emerge from this process who will be extremely strong against President Bush."
     Couric: "Who?"
     Clinton: "Well I'm not going to guess who it's going to be. That, that will be up to the voters in the Democratic primaries."
     Couric: "Who would you like it to be?"
     Clinton: "I don't engage in speculation in Democratic primaries. I will not support anyone in the primaries but I will wholeheartedly support whoever our nominee is."
     Couric: "Would you run for Vice President in 2004?"
     Clinton: "No, no, no. I am, I am so happy being a Senator from New York and I learn something everyday. You know I get to travel through the most extraordinary diverse state and the most amazing city."
     Couric: "You know I'm gonna bug you and this is my job but what about 2008? Are you prepared to say in front of God, your country and me, that you will never run for President of the United States?"
     Clinton: "I have said the same thing over and over again. I have-"]
     Couric: "Can you say something new here this, this morning, please?"
     Clinton: "I, I can't, I can't, because I have nothing new to say. I have no intention to run for President."
     Couric: "Ever?!"
     Clinton: "But it's flattering! It's very flattering that people like you ask me this question."
     Couric: "But no, having no intention, intentions can change."
     Clinton: "They can, they can."
     Couric: "Would you be open to the possibility in the future?"
     Clinton: "Well right, I can only answer day-by-day. I don't know where I'll be tomorrow. I hope, God-willing, I'll be right here but I have no intentions, no plans. I'm just gonna take everyday as it comes. That's how I've gotten through my life, thus far, you know."
     Couric: "But you're not completely ruling it out?"
     Clinton: "Well, you know, I, I've tried to rule it out in every way I know how but nobody will, will take my answer so I'll just keep saying it over and over again."

     Couric wrapped up by enthusing: "By the way Senator Clinton sold 200,000 copies of her book on Monday alone, the first day it was out. And the publisher has already ordered a second printing."

 

Carlson Advices Martha Stewart to Look
to Hillary for Guidance

     In this week's Time, columnist Margaret Carlson suggested the indicted Martha Stewart look to Hillary Clinton for direction: "There's another vilified damsel to provide guidance: Hillary." In her piece in the June 16 edition of the magazine, "Martha, Meet Hillary: The First Lady-turned-Senator has plenty to teach Martha Stewart about surviving a storm," Carlson advised Stewart to downplay the protests of innocence, play up the poor-girl routine, just like Hillary.

     The MRC's Tim Graham submitted this item for CyberAlert.

     Carlson maintained that Clinton not only "set the record straight," by claiming to be in the dark about the Lewinsky affair until mid-August 1998, she buried it "in a show of grief, describing how she gulped for air and cried and felt the universal female emotion of wanting to wring her husband's neck. There's a couple million votes right there."

     Carlson explored the similarities between the two divas: "Lucky for Martha, there's another vilified damsel to provide guidance: Hillary. The two have a lot more in common than first-name recognition. Both rose to the top by dint of brains, resolve, and marriages that jump-started their careers -- Martha's to the publisher of her first books, Hillary's to a governor-to-be. Both have had their financial transactions investigated by ambitious prosecutors. Both were humiliated by husbands who fell for younger women. Both are loved and hated for driving while blond."

     Her argument was play down the protests of innocence, play up the poor-girl routine, like Hillary: "It took her husband's humiliating, reckless affair to turn the tide. Even then, Hillary at first instinctively resisted any sympathy for standing by her man. Once she finally accepted it, she won the widespread popularity that had always eluded her. Wooing county chairmen from Utica and Poughkeepsie, and mastering the arcana of dairy price supports was not what won Hillary her Senate seat. It was Monica."

     Carlson rejoiced in what the memoir, an excerpt of which accompanied Carlson's column, could accomplish: "And now, with this book, she revisits the scene of her humiliation -- reluctantly, no doubt, but with a purpose. She knew she'd have to show a little ankle to justify such a huge advance. She also knew the book would allow her to set in stone (or print) the parts of the fiasco that had proved so useful. Indeed, Hillary plays the victim card to perfection, shrouding her lawyer-like efforts to set the record straight. If Hillary had initially been an involuntary victim, she now reprises the role voluntarily. It worked once; it is working again."

     Then Carlson argued that Stewart was being punished more harshly than any man would be: "Like that other distressed damsel Hillary, who had Ken Starr, Martha has a villain: James Comey, the U.S. Attorney for New York....Martha deserves much of what's she's gotten. But has she behaved more arrogantly than Citigroup's Sandy Weill and Jack Grubman, or bankrupted her company buying $15,000 umbrella stands? Does she deserve to be hung in the town square for lying about trading on information men have been exchanging on the back nine for years?"

     Carlson cynically found the Hillary memoir isn't about accuracy. It's about striking an effective pose: Stewart "can find pointers in Hillary's chapter on Monica, which doesn't so much show that Hillary's smart -- which we knew -- but that she's human, which we sometimes wondered about. That doesn't mean Hillary the legal gladiator doesn't take the opportunity to set the record straight on what she knew (nothing) and when she knew it (not until Bill's public admission). But she shrouds that crucial point in a show of grief, describing how she gulped for air and cried and felt the universal female emotion of wanting to wring her husband's neck. There's a couple million votes right there."

     If Stewart wins using the Hillary pointers, Carlson concluded, "Who knows? One day the First Lady of Domestic Arts could run for the Senate from New York. Stranger things have happened."

     For Carlson's column in full: www.time.com

 

ABC's Martin Believes HRC, Time's Klein
Faults Clinton Critics

     ABC's Michel Martin expressed sympathy for Hillary Clinton's plight and claim she didn't learn of the truth of her husband's Monica Lewinsky relationship until he admitted it to her eight months after news stories broke about it. During the roundtable on Sunday's This Week, Martin contended: "She's a lawyer, but she's also a woman and she's also a human being, and who among us does not have someone in our circle with a drinking problem, with a drug problem, with some sort of mental illness that we find it just somehow intolerable to deal with, for whatever reason, because we have a stake in the status quo? So I don't find it very difficult to believe at all."

     Martin needs to find better friends, colleagues and neighbors.
     Time's Joe Klein saw Hillary as a victim of unfair attacks: "I think that this has been her coping mechanism throughout.... they were faced with a real assault. Bob Dole once told me that there was a part of the Republican Party that never accepted Bill Clinton's legitimacy."

     Martin soon recalled how President Bush didn't bring up something unpleasant in his book, his drunk driving arrest, as taken down by MRC analyst Jessica Anderson:
     "There's also the concept of 'being on the wagon,' isn't there? I mean, you know, there is a history and then, for whatever reason, maybe he took steps to deal with his conduct in a way that, you know, I don't know anything about, but you know, it is a political memoir. I mean, George [Will], forgive me for bringing this up, but did, you know, our current President discuss his drunk driving arrest in his book that he published before he ran for office? Do a number of people who have published political memoirs in advance of running for major office, particularly at midpoint in their career, do they parse and dissect these painful episodes in their careers? They shape it in such a way it will allow them to go on. I mean, perhaps this would be a different book 10 or 20 years from now when she's at the end of her political career, but this is what she's chosen to do now for obvious reasons."
     Will countered: "Well, strategic reticence in writing a book is one thing; to assert something that's facially implausible is another -- that's the difference here."
     Joe Klein of Time magazine then chimed in with more about Hillary as the victim of unfair attacks as he scolded Clinton critics: "I think that this has been her coping mechanism throughout. There are two things that are very clear: one is she loves the guy, and number two is that they were faced with a real assault. Bob Dole once told me that there was a part of the Republican Party that never accepted Bill Clinton's legitimacy. Well, how dare they? The guy was elected President twice and there was a constant assault, and it drove them nuts."
     George Stephanopoulos added: "And actually, one of the things she reveals in the book is on her health care tour, she actually at one point had to put on a bulletproof vest."

 

"Penn's Pugnacity of the Day," Profiting
via "Collateral Damage"

     Today, the fifth installment of "Penn's Pugnacity of the Day," quotes drawn from actor Sean Penn's 4,000-plus word ad which filled a full page of the May 30 New York Times.

     As noted in the June 4 CyberAlert, it's impossible to sum up Penn's diatribe, so I'll defer to Tony Snow, who in his end of the show "Final Thoughts" on the June 1 Fox News Sunday, offered this apt description of the screed: "It throbs with loopy desperation, as if he were trying to persuade authorities that aliens from Alpha Centauri had instructed him to scale a TV tower, put on a hat made of foil and await lightning. You know the old theory that a chimp, given enough time in front of a typewriter, would pound out the Gettysburg Address? Well, this is a simian rough draft."

     For more of Snow's take and for the first installment of "Penn's Pugnacity of the Day," culled from the first three paragraphs of his diatribe headlined "KILROY'S STILL HERE," see the June 4 CyberAlert: www.mediaresearch.org

     For the second installment, taken from the fourth, fifth, sixth and seventh paragraphs of the 30-paragraph opus: www.mediaresearch.org

     For the third installment, made up of the seventh, eighth and ninth paragraphs, see: www.mediaresearch.org

     For the fourth installment, lifted from the tenth, eleventh and twelve paragraphs: www.mediaresearch.org

     Now, the fifth installment of "Penn's Pugnacity of the Day," culled from the thirteenth and fourteenth paragraphs:

If military intervention in Iraq has been a grave misjudgment, it has been one resulting in thousands upon thousands of deaths, and done so without any credible evidence of imminent threat to the United States. Our flag has been waving, it seems, in servicing regime change significantly benefiting U.S. corporations. What remains to be seen is an effective plan for the rebuilding of the civilian infrastructure, or any other benefit to the people of Iraq or the United States. It is an achievement that includes the callous and too easily accepted term, "collateral damage." This is a term where proportionality of loss is taken from the people who have lost, and given to marketing executives.

On Larry King's show, I appealed to American mothers and fathers to sit with a scrap of paper and a pencil and scribble the following words, "Dear Mr. and Mrs. (your name here), We regret to inform you that your son/daughter (child's name here) was killed in action in Iraq..." I asked that those mothers and fathers finish that letter in a way that would comfort them if they were to receive it. This war, for all its military triumph, would provide no satisfactory completion of that letter for this father. The human death toll of this corporate march includes those courageous and heroic Americans who lost their lives. As Americans considering loss of life, we are at liberty to claim unbiased humanitarianism, but few among us are ever so poignantly saddened as with the loss of a young American soldier fighting for his country in a lonely, foreign land. And I am no exception. And what of the wounds of body and spirit in many of those who survived? I ask to join in celebrating those soldiers, all of them. They are every bit the heroes of World War II, of Korea, and every bit the heroes of Vietnam (where postwar suicides of veterans totaled higher numbers than those killed in battle, and the term collateral damage" broadened its scope). Unimaginable is the loss felt by the families of the dead. Are we willing to consider that the righteous execution of a soldier's duty, training, unity, and mission, has always stood or fallen, to the degree the citizens they serve struggle at home for the rights our soldiers pledge to fight for abroad? It should be noted that President Bush's 2004 budget proposed a 6.2 billion dollar cut in Veterans' health and welfare benefits.

     END of Excerpt

     For a PDF of the ad, go to Penn's Web site: www.seanpenn.com

     For picture of Penn and a rundown of his movie roles, check the Internet Movie Database's page on him: us.imdb.com

     CyberAlerts have been getting later each day as I work at home during an illness which I hope I am now getting over.

-- Brent Baker

 


 


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