The Blue Voice

Friday, March 24, 2006

How the press can deal with military and government bullying

With the spirit of Spiro Agnew and his paranoid rants about the Liberal Press now in full possession of the Bush administration, it's nice to see the occasional journalist and columnist who knows how to respond to this stuff.

Also, I've been wondering in all the hoopla about WashingtonPost.com hiring a drooling-at-the-mount racist punk as a blogger, why I haven't seen anyone mentioning the Post's excellent blogger on military and national-security affairs William Arkin. The punk fairly quickly resigned. But fortunately Arkin is still around.

In this post of 03/23/06, Arkin tells about appearing before a military audience in 2003. One of our infallible generals asked him a sleazy question during the question period. The exchange went like this:

General: 'Mr. Arkin, do you consider yourself a journalist or an American.'

I took a drink of water as my blood boiled.

Me: 'Well General, because I am an American, I cherish the fact that I can call you a f***ing idiot for asking the question.'

Arkin describes what happened subsequently.

It caused a bit of a stir, it seems:

All hell broke loose: The general lodged a complaint up the chain of command to get me punished and my sponsors were reprimanded.

It was tough for the General to be faced with an inflammatory and insubordinate response that he could do nothing about. Too bad he learned nothing (happily for America, he has since retired).

I was punished as much as the military could punish me. I wasn't disappeared nor thrown in jail. In the America I cherish, I just was dropped from the speaker's list. And even then, it was only for awhile, until the dust settled, and then intellectuals and brave souls in the military who dare to stand up to the conformity machine agitated to get me invited back, knowing that if they were going to ponder the media and information warfare, they'd better listen...

I wish more of our Democratic elected officials would have the gumption to respond in such an appropriate way to sleazy attacks on their patriotism by Karl Rove's drones.

posted at 4:38:00 PM by Bruce Miller

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