Virginia Tech. shooting, the coverage continues…
The news channels remained focused on the terrible events at Virginia Tech, the victims and what signs there were that may have indicated this was going to happen. While I stand by my comments that we need to change how we view mental illness, the President of GWU wrote and excellent op-ed in today’s Washington Post. Last year, that university suspended a student for having mental issues and they were sued. Stephen Joel Trachtenberg noted that he knew they would be sued if they did nothing students were injured or killed and/or if they did something and that he thinks the decision was correct. No one would disagree with him this week but that was not the case last week, or when it happened and the school was vilified so I concede the point that if someone is really intent on doing something like this, they will. The other comment Mr. Trachtenberg made, also covered in the same paper on an earlier page, was “Presumably Stephen King was once and undergrad.” One irony of that, is that when I read that other students were concerned about this student’s writing, I thought of people like Stephen King. Being an avid fan of his I have read most of his books and some are pretty gory – in one a person actually eats their own body to stay alive, yuck. In any case, King has never, as far as I know, killed anyone. Clive Barker has written hideously gory books but he is not a violent person either. But the coverage goes on…
PS. Note to NBC: Your statement that ‘every news organization on the planet used the coverage’ and that justifies you using it is just bogus. NBC set the precedent by showing the video and once they showed it the door was open for the others to follow suit. D’uh. Thanks.
Preventable deaths
Ali Allawi was on the Daily Show last night, he wrote The Occupation of : Winning the War, Losing the Peace. Jon Stewart asked him about his reaction to the violence in . He asked in reference to the shooting and talked about how it has shocked and upset most of this country – how do the people of deal with this kind of violence on a daily basis? Perhaps it is natural to take deaths in your own country more seriously than those that happen far away from home, even when Americans are killed. My initial thought on the Iraq/Virginia comparison was that is in the middle of a civil war. The rub is that we started the civil war there and are responsible. According to one web site, and I will not vouch for its accuracy, (Iraq Body Count), between about 62,000-68,000 Iraqi civilians have been killed since we invaded. More than 3,200 Americans have died – the average is about 80 a month right now and the last few weeks have produced some of the worse violence since the war began. One headline today read, Another suicide attack hits Baghdad after bloodiest day since US surge began, more than 230 people were killed yesterday:
The most devastating of Wednesday’s blasts struck the Sadriyah market as workers were leaving for the day, destroying a lineup of minibuses that had come to pick them up. At least 127 people were killed and 148 wounded, including men who were rebuilding the market after a Feb. 3 bombing left 137 dead.
How do you live in that kind of environment? How do you raise children? How do you do this and NOT this to create resentment against the ? Not too long ago I saw a poll that showed more Iraqis think their lives were better before Saddam was toppled. That’s a scary thought, to me. One will argue that hindsight is 20/20 but it seemed to me – before we went into – that we had no plan past ‘regime change.’ In fact, all we had was how to get rid of the last regime, not start a new one. At the time I worked in WDC and spent a lot of time at Congressional hearings and think tank/NGO meetings about – how and who would manage the reconstruction. The ONE THING everyone seemed to believe was that the DOD had no experience in this area, though it would be their responsibility, and it was basically a train wreck waiting to happen. What struck me as odd was that even with this knowledge, people still wanted to go in. Now we are in a mess of our own making. And more Americans have died there than in NY & Virginia on 9/11.
One interesting thing is that the Democrats remain steadfast and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said the war is ‘lost.’ And:
Reid, speaking to reporters, drew parallels between Bush's still-can-win attitude and President Lyndon Baines Johnson's decision to deploy more troops to to avoid a defeat while he was president.
was lost militarily he said, leaving only diplomacy, politics and economics as tools for achieving any sort of victory for the . "I believe … that this war is lost, and this surge is not accomplishing anything, as is shown by the extreme violence in this week," he said.
Dubya responded, indirectly (same article):
In his opening remarks at a Town Hall meeting in , Bush placed the war in the context of the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and stressed the necessity of not retreating. "It's an interesting war … where asymmetric warfare" employs suicide bombers to wreak havoc and, with the resultant media coverage, use the bombings to help "define whether or not we're successful," Bush said.
So, we know Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11 and that there is MORE al Qaeda there now than before the war, Dubya insists on linking the two AND has the nerve to call the war ‘interesting.’ Yes, Mr. Bush the media is to blame for our problems in – at least they stay on message. Laura Bush told some media outlet that everything is going just great in except for that ‘one bombing a day that spoils everything’ (that may not be an exact quote). One definition is repeating the same action while expecting it to produce a different result. Our policy fits that bill.
Alberto Gonzales on the mat and asked to resign – by a Republican
The AG finally got taken to task for his deception and went before the Senate Judiciary Committee. No one expected the Democrats to support him but everyone thought some of his Republican friends would support him and they failed to do so. In fact, one Republican called watching the hearing like watching ‘the clubbing of a baby seal.’ It was not pretty. It went further, Sen. Thomas Coburn (R-OK) argued "The best way to put this behind us is your resignation." For the AG’s sake, I hope that happens sooner than later.
The clips on CNN showed someone who was not prepared for the hearings or the job. His answers were either, I don’t know, or they made him look like he had no idea what he was doing at Justice or at the hearing. The New Republic summed up the testimony this way:
Gonzales displayed an odd dissociation from his job as head of the Justice Department, often behaving more as though he was a diligent inspector general called in to analyze what had happened rather than someone who had made things happen himself. "The fact that Mr. [David] Iglesias appeared on the [firings] list doesn't surprise me," he told Chairman Patrick Leahy, as though he'd just completed a departmental audit. When Kansan Sam Brownback asked him to explain the rationale behind Nevada U.S. Attorney Daniel Bogden's dismissal, he said that "it appears there were concerns about the level of energy," like he'd come from some fact-finding staff interviews. As the clock ticked on, Gonzales's self-transformation from Cabinet member to impartial observer threatened to become a full-blown identity crisis: "I now understand I was involved in a conversation with the president," he said at the end of a spat with Arlen Specter. Reporters glanced around in confusion, perhaps imagining what it was like when the two different I's Gonzales had just referred to talked to each other in the privacy of his own home, one in a low voice, one in a high, squeaky one. Specter, who–like an exasperated parent–had just finished berating Gonzales for not taking his advice about how to prepare for the hearing, simply leaned back in his seat and shook his head. Boy, the look on his face said. Have I raised a screw-up.
What’s almost worse than how he answered questions about the firings and his role in them was how he addressed his ability to do his job, which no one could possibly think is possible. He said that he asks himself every day if he can do the job and always feels he can. He is the only one but if Dubya can remember conversations with you that you have forgotten, well the time has come for some serious medical testing. Dubya, it turns out, was the only Republican to support the AG and released a statement that the hearings went well.
AlysonChadwick.com 