October 29, 2007--Rona's Last Straw

We each have different tipping points. I went over the edge over abu ghraib. To me, though I was terribly upset about the war in Iraq and the lies that went into justifying it, it wasn’t until I saw young American soldiers taking sadistic pleasure in humiliating and torturing Iraqi detainees that I blew. For me this summed up all that was wrong with our so-called mission to overthrow Saddam and bring democracy to that region. By revealing what we had been doing in that prison, one of Saddam’s worst venues for torture, it was obvious and maddening to me that we had replaced him as the tyrannical oppressor. Though Rona was progressively upset about this and the manipulations that led up to our invasion and angry and frustrated about all the congressional scandals and hypocrisy they revealed and Scooter Libby’s felonies and the Katrina failures and the demagoguery that is likely establishing the “justification” to bomb Iran and the Democrats’ cowardly and enabling behavior, Rona somehow managed to maintain her perspective and sanity. But she really lost it last night while talking on the phone with her sister Sharon. After the usual checking in with each other about their mother’s situation and how expensive everything has become, the conversation quickly turned to things in the news. At first most of this was fairly benign, considering the state of the world, about how some of our governmental agencies give sweetheart contracts to well-connected providers; but then Rona uncharacteristically began to bounce on the bed screaming and yelling. I was only half listening to her side of the conversation, trying to watch the beginning of what turned out to be the last game of the World Series, but I grew alarmed that something terrible had happened. She was ranting about the fake news conference FEMA staged in California while there purportedly to help in the relief effort. After Katrina they were obviously eager, along with President Bush, to make it appear that they were both on the case and effective. What better way to do that than have a high-level FEMA official confronted by what would predictably be a skeptical press corps? If he could fend them off successfully, it might help wipe out memories of FEMA and administration failures in New Orleans. And what better way to assure a good outcome from such a press conference than giving real reporters just 15 minutes notice that the press conference was about to begin so they would be unable to get to it; or, even better, have other FEMA employees pose as reporters and lobe softball questions to their boss? Questions such as, “Are you happy with FEMA’s response so far?” and, “What lessons learned from Katrina have been applied?” For Rona, after recalling that early on in the Bush administration Karl Rove was famously quoted as saying that the truth is what we say it is, this was her last straw. She screamed into the phone, “Are we living in the Soviet Union? When in so many countries in the world brave men and women are placing themselves in danger, are suffering in prison, or have been killed while fighting for freedom of the press, here in this country our government is holding phony press conferences.” She raged on, “It’s bad enough that our so-called ‘legitimate’ reporters so casually sell out to the administration so they can gain access to ‘sources’ and get invited to the best parties. But it’s a hundred times worse to have their own people posing as journalists. “And,” she continued, “Why didn’t the New York Times put this on their front page? They buried their account of it on the bottom of page 15. [Article linked below] Was it because the Washington Post scooped them by reporting it first and they were embarrassed? And why aren’t all the network and cable TV channels making a bigger deal of this? If I were in charge of one of these networks I’m mention it first thing every day.” Then, she said, “What’s happened to us to make us so passive? So afraid to protect our own values and democracy, while sending troops all over the world supposedly to bring the same things to others?” Finally, she added, "Bush should be impeached for this. But of course he won't be. What does he have to do? Get a blow job?" It was hard after that to continue to watch the Red Sox proceed to wipe out the Rockies.