Oh, by the way...
There isn't much doubt that the GOP House leadership spent more time worrying about the political consequences of Foley's behavior than about the pages that he was harassing. There isn't much doubt that North Korea is a dangerously unpredictable country that possesses nuclear material, even if they can't quite get it to properly explode. These things have occupied quite a bit of front page real estate and evening news time slots for the last few days.
The good news is that the American public appears to be wising up as to who is responsible for these messes (hint: not Clinton). The bad news is the disappearance of the massive, crushing, central failure of this Administration and its congressional enablers from the front pages. One of the curious phenomena of our media-driven America is that if it isn't in the paper or on the news, then it didn't happen.
Iraq is a long-term event; it doesn't fit into the 24 hour news cycle that we have adapted our attention spans to. The ongoing and slowly increasing carnage that occurs there every single day is no longer enough to merit special mention by the Commercial Media, but make no mistake; in spite of Saddam's murderous habits,
these people would not be dying if we had acted more responsibly. At the current rate, ordinary Iraqi moms, dads and kids are dying in numbers that equal our 9/11 death toll every 45 days.
The people of the United States are giving Iraqi citizens, people who had nothing to do with the attacks on our country, the equivalent of eight 9/11's every year. People who don't surf for news on the internet won't be able to tell you
how many died in Iraq yesterday, although they can no doubt tell you that Foley is a perv and North Korea is bad. It's nice that NBC has a blog where you can get a
feel for the unbelievable horror show that Iraq has become, but how many Americans read blogs buried deep inside Commercial News sites? (Answer: Not many.) We bear a huge and terrible national responsibility for this, and it should be at the forefront of our collective consciousness every single day.
But those who control our national dialog have other ideas.
