“And on the al-Qaida link, it seems to me [the press] are just not doing their job at all. There are innumerable links between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaida that have been demonstrated very many times. And now every broadcast and every utterance by the Ba’ath Party is as if it was written by Osama bin Laden, and half the fighters in Iraq, half the bandits there, are imported from outside jihad forces. This relationship did not begin yesterday. They are, in effect, now a fusion of those who believe in the one party and those who believe in the one-God state. But the press does a very bad job of reporting that–and I go by, let’s say, The New York Times; we can’t [use] ‘the press’ too generically as David knows, but The New York Times refers to that kind of gangsterism as the ‘Iraqi resistance’… and it refers to the American presence in the country as the ‘American occupation.’ Now just tell me what you think the subliminal effect of those two terms is… , I think you and I could both agree that we know a mentality when we see one. I would say even during the war, when I was partly in the south of Iraq and mainly in Kuwait, I could tell what the press corps thought in general when–remember that slight sag in the first few days of the campaign? It looked as if the Rumsfeld plan wasn’t quite working. There was practically no one in the press, I’d say, that wasn’t pulling for that happen. They all wanted to be able to report a quagmire, a defeat, a disaster; either some of them for ideological reasons or some of them because it’s a better story.” – Christopher Hitchens, telling it like it is, on CNBC yesterday.
BORK CONVERTS: Judge Robert Bork is the latest conservative to become a Catholic under the auspices of Opus Dei, the hyper-orthodox order. Father Jim McCloskey, who has also brought other leading right-wingers into the church, emailed to let me know.
“FRUITCAKE” AND “COCKSUCKER”: Yes, Rep. Pete Stark used both terms against another Congressman. But he’s a Democrat, right? He can’t be a bigot, can he? (By the way, the only reference I can find on the Human Rights Campaign website to Pete Stark is celebrating his voting record on gay rights. But the good news on the website is that HRC is finally rallying people to support marriage rights. Yay! Ten years too late, but it’s progress.)
