Guest Author
A Russian pundit in the early 1990s was asked, “What is the difference between the old Soviet Union and the new democracy?” His response was a bit puzzling at first: “We have more plane crashes now.”
It was a remark aimed at Pravda, the Soviet state-run news source. He identified “freedom” as the power of the press to freely report on the news. They were now free to report what had been ignored under the Soviet leadership.
I am reminded of this as I watch today’s Pravda, aka most of our major media, suddenly find out we are at war in Iraq again. Does anyone find it odd that for the last seven years we had almost no reporting on the deaths and cost of war, yet suddenly every Republican candidate is asked about the decision they might have made in 2003-04? A question, by the way, which has zero bearing on the facts on the ground today.
Questions about what you would have done or not done are appropriately directed at the Democratic nominee (she’s your only choice, Dems) Hillary Clinton, who has brilliantly avoided any questions on her vote to go into Iraq, or her tenure as Secretary of State during part of the missing seven years of war in the Middle East. You really want to ask a meaningful “gotcha” question – try, “If you knew then what you now know about ISIS, would you have abandoned Iraq?”
This will never happen because a perverse variation of “Inter arma enim silent leges” has taken place – “When a Democrat occupies the White House, we must be silent and protect him, or her.”
Voltaire once wrote, “To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize.” I never expected our media to roll over and be silent, but here is where we find our nation.
Recently, at a Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton event, Hillary made sure no reporters covered the “public” events. A British paper reported:
“‘It’s maddening,’ a print journalist who was in Mason City for Monday’s earlier event said in the evening, asking to remain anonymous for the sake of her career.”
Read more here.
“Remain anonymous for the sake of her career.” Ramadi falls to ISIS after hundreds of U.S. soldiers died there, but journalists protecting their careers is really what’s important. I’ll mention your courage to the next family I see at a military funeral, an event we are all too familiar with here in the Florida panhandle.
We are not a nation at war. We are a nation with a military at war. The general public is so far removed from the loss of life and money that we can and do pretty much ignore foreign policy, unless it can be used to ding Republican candidates for president.
The 2009 Nobel Peace Prize recipient, President Barack Obama, announced in true Orwellian fashion that the Afghanistan war would end Dec. 31, 2014, with one exception: NATO will retain a large military presence there. Since the U.S. is really NATO, nothing really changed. Yet our media compliantly reported the White House line.
Salon.com (an approved leftist news source) reports that under President George W. Bush, we had combat operations in 60 nations. Now that number is at least 75. Truth hurts. Except it doesn’t because that doesn’t score political points.
Since the media have failed miserably in their once valuable watchdog role of spotlighting new military interventions under President Obama, it’s laughable to now watch them fret with deep concern over the Republican responses to crappy hypothetical questions.
If our failed media had the slightest concern over the soldiers involved in combat, I’d be interested in the responses. But the cold fact is instead of 17 minutes of missing tapes, we have seven years of missing combat. And when history weighs in, the blood is also on the hands of those who remained silent, when they could have done real reporting under President Obama. And it’s not looking much better during the Hillary Clinton campaign.
Henry Kelley is owner of NWF Farms Winery, Inc. Column courtesy of Context Florida.
