Short Stories, Long Odds

The concept of a liberal media, at large and destroying anything that gets in its way with welfare reform, is ridiculous. It doesn’t exist, except in one concentrated place – Air America.

Liberals, while being painted as the most terrible, dangerous element of American life by Right Wingers, have become the champions of American institutions and guaranteed rights, which is the place to be, as far as I’m concerned. Now that we have a corner on things like protecting the Bill of Rights, we can do business. Normally we by and large do the right thing.

Along those lines, I wasn’t surprised at all when the whole journalist / protected source debacle came out and Air America was all over the courts for daring to force a journalist to reveal an anonymous source. The very concept of the identity of an anonymous source being subpoenaed is terrible; the news business is a hard enough dollar as it is. The free press is an institution, etc and so on. I wrote a short post about how the whole thing made me feel here, in a piece entitled “What The Bitch?”

See, when it all started, the hard truth was that Valerie Plame’s name had been run in a column by Bob Novak, a usual recipient of my spite. The Chicago Sun Times was also on my list of “people I hope go to jail” even though the Chicago Sun Times is not a person. I understand there is a desk where the buck stops for fact checking and making sure your stories don’t reveal the identity of a secret CIA operative.

However, in the last week, things have changed. In the last week, it has turned out that the anonymous source that our two industrious reporters were protecting, along with their Constitutional Press Rights, was Karl Rove.

The second the story dropped that Karl was the leak and as such the protected source, our intrepid reporters became villified by liberals nationwide. Now, instead of defending them for standing up for their right to anonymous sources, we hated them for not giving up Karl’s name at the first opportunity.

Seriously, what is wrong with you people? Once the chance to bag the big game comes up, you all turn in to jungle beasts, blood-blind and ravaged by hunger, a starvation brought on by the inability to forage in an organized fashion. As a former newsman, I’m once againt disgusted by the public’s inability to understand how their own damned country works. And I’m certainly blown away by Air America’s boneheaded talking points.

Even Marc Maron got in on the act, and that makes me the most sad. Garofolo is usually unreasonable and Springer doesn’t usually touch this stuff. I have no idea what Al Franken has been saying, but I’m willing to bet it would make me mad. Maron is usually funny and not a bad radio newsman, as Thursday’s attacks were covered on his show.

We’re the party of RIGHTS, you retards. We are the party of things like “freedom of the press.” I know Karl is a big fish, I know that. But you all have to prepare yourselves for the very real and likely possibility that you’re not going to get him. He might as well be Christ, or an intangible spirit. Nothing will stick to him, and even if it does, Bush has a couple years yet to pardon him. So instead of continuing what I thought was a worthwhile defense of the rights of the press, we are actively throwing them all away in our eager, salivating wait time between now and that point somewhere about Never where we get to send Karl Rove to jail.

Karl Rove deserves a lot of things for what he’s done, and jail is most likely one of them. I want to get him too. I want to get them all. But you can’t put aside the Bill of Rights in order to get him. That kind of scorched earth hurts US, not them.

So I’ll say it: So what if the anonymous source is Karl Rove? His race is run. He’ll go off to the pasture like all the old heavyweights now that his title fight has come and gone. So what if it was him? Now we can’t have anonymous, background sources anymore, and you get to look at Karl’s lawyer every once in a while.

I wouldn’t be entirely surprised if he didn’t think of this whole chain of events himself, to stifle newsrooms.

You don’t have to hear it from me to know that things have gone south for the reasonable among us in the month or so since I left you. The last, despairing cries of my undergraduate career are echoing in the halls of the clean, ill-lighted place my days have become.

By that, I in no way mean that things are bad. Don’t think it. If I’m not at the Democrat HQ surrounded by good people, I’m in German class, where we’ve become good friends during our own private war mit Deutschem. If I’m not in those places, I’m home spending well-deserved time with my wife.

Now that we’re all caught up, let’s talk about the world. Not one of my favorite subjects these days.

My friend Jason was a combat medic in the US Special Forces. He still has Top Top Secret clearance, so it was no surprise to him that he received a phone call from someone still in the uniform Thursday morning. His aquaintance had been on one of the trains.

“He got hit with one of the chairs, and he said people were blown all over the place,” Jason said.

“Never mind that,” I said. “Give me the numbers. You’re familiar with this sort of thing, and 2 dead, 70 wounded sounds low.”

“You can expect a lot more. It won’t be pretty.”

It turned out to be a lot more. The Radio Funhogs suggested that now terrorists are bad at their jobs because this attack was “unsuccessful” and that also now is the time to buy stocks. The selling of the world picks up when things explode.

So China bails us out on a regular basis with RedBucks and the War On Terror’s failures are being trumpted as the obviation of our need for George Bush. The pundits say that 4 simultaneous bombings of our closest ally is a failure and that the War On Terror is working. Sandra Day O’Connor retires instead of (or perhaps along with, but at least before) Rehnquist, and my brother-in-law joins the Navy because not many other options in the world we’ve inherited look appealing.

I spent some more time with my Uncles, and they had more good natured ribbing. “What would Democrats do on Defense, Josh?” they ask.

I say “We would sure as shit have the good sense to take care of our soldiers when they come home. We wouldn’t cut veteran’s benefits. We’d make sure our soldiers have the tools they need to do the job.” The words fell out of my mouth and I realized I was reciting talking points. These are things I believe my party would do, but I sounded like a flak and it got my goat.

“But never mind that,” I said. “Woodrow Wilson, FDR, and Harry Truman were all filthy liberals, as your favorite guys like to call us. Harry Truman was a liberal, and he dropped the A-Bomb. Republicans can’t even make sure these guys have health insurance when they get sent home a leg lighter. How is that hard on defense?”

My words had become hard and my eyes flinty. My heart was full of ire and I hated more than ever that what is happening to my country is out of my control. I love these guys and I felt sorry for them, like they’d been ultimately mislead. None of us know anything but what the media tells us, so how am I any better than the guy with the W sticker on his car who thinks a little human rights abuse during freedom’s march is the cost of doing business?

A few days later I found myself in the company of another Deutschfreunden, a guy I call Metal Mike. We were having a cup of coffee outside the Jupiter House at 1 am and talking the hard talk of men who understand politics and can no longer dream big because the reasonable die lonely political deaths in the back alleys of idealism. Two guys sat next to us and played songs on their guitars.

Another patron of the Jupiter House turned to us after Metal Mike explained why he usually voted Republican but thought they were getting a little out of hand. The new guy said “You know, sometimes I wish Democrats would just come out and say that abortion is wrong but choice is important, or offer a plan about foreign policy. I couldn’t vote for Kerry because, while I knew Bush was bad, I didn’t have any idea how Kerry would be or what he would do. I did not vote”

I said “Never mind that. Gary Hart once told Hunter S. Thompson that part of the Democratic Party’s problem was that it ‘doesn’t have any policies. It doesn’t have any direction. People know that. They’d rather go with a Republican they know than a Democrat, a devil they don’t know.’”

This was in 1987. If it sounds familiar, well, there’s a reason for that. Later on in the conversation, Hunter told Hart that “we can’t afford another four years of these Half-Bright Rich Boys in the White House. Its time to win. We must maintain the bloodlines.”

This is a good point, and a true story. Its time to win, and to win will require the dirty work of a thousand guys like me in the back-water back-alleys of politics. It won’t happen in the smoke-filled room. There are no magic bullets and there are no quick fixes – every solution to one problem opens the door on another, bigger problem with a flat head and a mean mouth.

If we ever get to foreign policy, the clean, ill-lighted room will have gotten very large indeed.

Things are on the way. Seriously.

I’m not kidding.

UPDATE
See? The night got away from me again. There is lots of news, I swear I will put some up tomorrow. Argh argh argh.