"One thing you can say for our wondrous New-Broom-of-the-System Democrats. They may have folded like a two-dollar suitcase faced with the Caligula in the White House, but at least they got rid of Don Imus.
"Well done Democrats!
"Not to exhume the Imus issue. But whatever you thought of Imus there was one great thing about having him on the air: you had somewhere to escape from the appalling Steve Inskeep.
"Inskreep (sorry can't resist), he who hath never met a progressive he didn't feel compelled to patronize or contradict, replaced the much lamented Bob Edwards a year and a half ago as Morning Edition's co-host, where his smug, condescending drone has become a daily reminder of the Republican drive to garrote the last independent voice in national news.
"(Should you need an example of Steve's sympathies check out his deferential serve-up-the-softballs interview last month of war criminal Douglas Feith. Which teaches us, class, that there are other kinds of on-air obscenity than calling college athletes offensive names.
"But it's not really Inskreep I'm gunning for; rather an insidious phenomenon that's been occurring on his watch. As soon as the Dems took control in January, Morning Edition began to include an almost daily diet of 'behind-the-scenes' Iraq-related news stories (Feith-based perhaps?) so pro-war they made you wonder if there wasn't a Pentagon PR flack embedded with this particular NPR unit.
"This is only getting worse. The 'stories' range all over the subject map from the logistical concerns of non-combat units (medical, infrastructure rebuilding, even chaplains) to heartwarming home-front stuff to the trials and lifestyles of Iraqis who work with US forces. There's nothing theoretically wrong with such topics, but the stories all have the pre-packaged uncritical feel of shameless plants. And two relentless messages: A. Iraq is a war like any other, dirty yes, but a just war, justified and justifiable; B. things are going much better than you think, if you'll just stop listening to those lefty naysayers.
"Recently, alas, the disease seems to have spread to other NPR news shows I've listened to for years like the stalwart All Things Considered. Predictably on Memorial Day weekend, it went critical. Some coverage was as it should be: memorials of the men and women -- usually agonizingly young -- whose precious lives have been squandered by our latter-day Caligula and the moral sewage in Congress who enable him.
"But some coverage did not memorialize. Notably the one place you'd never expect to encounter the plague: This American Life. On Saturday, my favorite NPR show ran what amounted to a 30-minute infomercial for something called the Center for Lessons Learned, a Kansas-based US-military outfit whose mission is to learn from previous conflicts how to 'do the job' better in this one.
"Sound harmless? Uh-uh. Nothing could have rammed home more effectively the message that Iraq is not what the entire planet now knows it to be: a genocidal assault on an innocent people by greed-crazed criminals. No, it's a 'normal' war with 'normal' problems to which there are 'normal' solutions which the US has every right to be fighting.
"As a bonus, driving home message B. we got to hear Thomas Ricks of the Washington Post explain that things aren't half as bad as we thought. The brutal ethnic cleansing in Iraq which has created domestically and abroad four million refugees, is 'soft' ethnic cleansing. The raging civil war that's killed as many as half a million humans is only a 'low-level' civil war. The cherry on the cake was hearing Ira Glass -- of all people -- ask Mr Ricks: 'Don't we have a moral obligation to stay in Iraq... until we fix something?'
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