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the things you hear on NPR
Oct. 28th, 2003 04:03 amWe were listening to the pretentious classical music on NPR this evening, on the FM station (the text is from an early Icelandic edda, informed by a flavor of the instrumentation of the Renaissance and, if you listen carefully, a soupcon of early Iggy Pop) and for some reason they were playing both feeds, the FM feed for music and the AM feed, with Brian Lehrer (that link's to the feed).
What made my ears prick up was this: we tuned in, apparently, for an interview with Midge Decter, who is apparently a fan of Mr. Rumsfeld. The spin appears to be that he released his own memo because he's so appalled by the bad things that the people in the administration are doing to mess up his nice war that he had to let the country know so that we could pressure the administration to fix things.
Message: It wasn't his idea.
Is this Lehrer supposed to be a liberal? I couldn't tell. He let people get over with the most spectacular boners.
For instance: Jonathan Alter from Newsweek. Throughout the interview, he kept saying "well, of course we had no way of knowing that everything wasn't exactly as the White House said, but if we knew then what we know now we would _never_ have supported it".
His version of the dark secret of the Bush administration, the one they're stonewalling the 9/11 Commission to try to hide, is that there was some faint, not-at-all-credible reason to believe that the Enemy might use planes against terrorist targets, but since that evidence wasn't credible they ignored it, and rightly so, but now the poor babies are all embarassed.
It was at that point that my husband told me that Jonathan Alter couldn't hear me, and even if I talked to the radio louder Jonathan Alter still wouldn't, being on tape and all.
Parenthetically, he referred to himself in the third person numerous times throughout the interview (I know you may want to ask me, Jonathan Alter, why did you...), which you'd've thought he would have skipped, as what he had to say was entirely memorable enough.
Anyway, he also brought forth as a theory that when the army had taken over Baghdad, they needed more MPs but would have had to call up reservists to replace them, and Rumsfeld was so determined not to do that and prove the retired generals right that he allowed the nuclear facilities and libraries and museums to go unguarded.
To interject, have you seen that in Newsweek?
AAR, as stupid as this is, and as transparent an attempt as it is to walk away from the responsibility of leading the country with your eyes open into a horrifically stupid war, damn it's useful.
It's useful because if this becomes the Received Wisdom of the media, it's all we're going to hear for the next year.
And they're going to like it. It gets them off the hook.
Still, for this one brief shining moment, and because only a small core group of fellow zealots read this, let me say "Jonathan Alter: You suck"
That said, let me research electronic voting. Go 'way. Off my damn lawn, you kids.
What made my ears prick up was this: we tuned in, apparently, for an interview with Midge Decter, who is apparently a fan of Mr. Rumsfeld. The spin appears to be that he released his own memo because he's so appalled by the bad things that the people in the administration are doing to mess up his nice war that he had to let the country know so that we could pressure the administration to fix things.
Message: It wasn't his idea.
Is this Lehrer supposed to be a liberal? I couldn't tell. He let people get over with the most spectacular boners.
For instance: Jonathan Alter from Newsweek. Throughout the interview, he kept saying "well, of course we had no way of knowing that everything wasn't exactly as the White House said, but if we knew then what we know now we would _never_ have supported it".
His version of the dark secret of the Bush administration, the one they're stonewalling the 9/11 Commission to try to hide, is that there was some faint, not-at-all-credible reason to believe that the Enemy might use planes against terrorist targets, but since that evidence wasn't credible they ignored it, and rightly so, but now the poor babies are all embarassed.
It was at that point that my husband told me that Jonathan Alter couldn't hear me, and even if I talked to the radio louder Jonathan Alter still wouldn't, being on tape and all.
Parenthetically, he referred to himself in the third person numerous times throughout the interview (I know you may want to ask me, Jonathan Alter, why did you...), which you'd've thought he would have skipped, as what he had to say was entirely memorable enough.
Anyway, he also brought forth as a theory that when the army had taken over Baghdad, they needed more MPs but would have had to call up reservists to replace them, and Rumsfeld was so determined not to do that and prove the retired generals right that he allowed the nuclear facilities and libraries and museums to go unguarded.
To interject, have you seen that in Newsweek?
AAR, as stupid as this is, and as transparent an attempt as it is to walk away from the responsibility of leading the country with your eyes open into a horrifically stupid war, damn it's useful.
It's useful because if this becomes the Received Wisdom of the media, it's all we're going to hear for the next year.
And they're going to like it. It gets them off the hook.
Still, for this one brief shining moment, and because only a small core group of fellow zealots read this, let me say "Jonathan Alter: You suck"
That said, let me research electronic voting. Go 'way. Off my damn lawn, you kids.
