Bob Schieffer, mainstream American journalism’s answer to Lou Costello, read the riot act to President George Bush  during his commentary on Monday, March 31st, 2003.  

“Rallying all the public support with all that spin about how easy (the war) would be, bothered me.”

Mr. Schieffer is referring to one comment lifted out of context from a broader description of future possibilities during pre-war commentary by Vice President Dick Cheney.  What Cheney actually said was that the war could take a few days, a few weeks or a few months.  I watched the news clip that started all this, and heard exactly what the man said.  

Actually, I watch more television than this incompetent host of Face the Nation does.  I like to write about the media in this magazine, because I like to write the truth.  And, the truth is that the big media (local or national), including CBS and Mr. Schieffer, wouldn’t know the truth if it was on a billboard in ten foot high letters thirty feet away.

During this morning’s rant, Schieffer demonstrated why literally tens of millions have departed his network to look for their news elsewhere.  Over the many decades of my life, I’ve seen the result of the liberal takeover of the flow of information.  The fact (a term which itself would need explaining to Mr. Schieffer) is that 70% of the American public now get 99% of their news from one of the three big network evening shows.  Since no matter which one you watch you are getting one half hour’s worth of liberal spin, 70% of the American public has to go somewhere else to find out what is going on, where it is going on, and why.  Poll results show 70% support for using the military to dump Hussein, so wherever they are going, they are hearing the truth.  They certainly aren’t getting it from Mr. Schieffer and the mainstream media.

If President Bush got his news from the networks, he would believe that in spite of controlling 80% of Iraq after a less than a fortnight, and in the process suffering fewer  than 100 casualties, our military effort is a badly planned, inefficiently run, laughable failure.

That is the way Mr. Schieffer’s network, and the other two, have presented the situation.

Here, then, is the truth.  The badly planned, inefficiently run, laughable failure here is the war reporting by CBS, NBC and ABC.  The fools of the century are not to be found in the White House.  They are to be found at the networks.  Bumbling clowns almost to a man and a woman, including Schieffer, they couldn’t accurately report an event if their lives depended on it.  From the ludicrous and completely off-target coverage and analysis they presented during last year’s series of sniper shootings adjacent to Washington, D.C., to their abject failure to grasp the most simple of economic concepts (like the fact that ENRON as a company didn’t begin operations after January 20th, 2001), Mr. Schieffer and his network friends have a proven public track record of misunderstanding every event, large and small, they have ever covered.  

From their lionizing of Jesse Jackson as a noble leader while he was blackmailing American corporations with threats of race demonstrations, then spending his ill-gotten gains on a mistress and bastard child, to their promotion of Barney Frank as an intelligent legislator while Dear Barney was unaware his boyfriend was running a house of prostitution in his, Barney’s, own basement, Schieffer and friends have daily demonstrated they haven’t a clue as to what is going on. 

From their worship of JFK, who proposed a massive general tax cut to revive a stagnant economy (which worked) and sent troops to fight for the freedom of others in a foreign land, to their castigation of Bush for his proposal of a massive general tax cut to revive a stagnant economy, and who sent troops to fight for the freedom of others in a foreign land, the American mainstream media makes a Dodo look like a bird with vast intellectual reach.

Schieffer’s CBS compatriot, Andy Rooney, said the other day that he wishes Bush, who sends people to war, had actually been a warrior.  Mr. Rooney, therefore, thinks one, or both, of the following is true.  

Combat fighter jet training is safe.  It is not. From the beginning of this type of training, it has often been more dangerous to learn to fly a combat airplane than to actually fly one in combat. (Mr. Bush faced greater risks doing what he did in Texas than the Stars and Stripes newspaper reporter, Mr. Gore, did in the bistros of Saigon.  Of the two men, the only one who was in danger of facing combat was Bush.) 

Or, Mr. Rooney, like so many others, thinks that the National Guard is a place to hide from combat.  It wasn’t, and isn’t.  There is a reason why the National Guard is called a “reserve force.”  It is the same reason you put reserve funds in a savings account.  Those reserves are, when all regular defenses have broken down, your last best hope of survival.  The first troops to land on the most dangerous beach (Omaha at Normandy) on the most dangerous day in the history of modern warfare, D-Day, were members of the National Guard.  (Virginia, if memory serves.)  Today’s military, like that of Brokaw’s “Greatest Generation,” and every war since, needs the reservists. That is historically appropriate, since it was the citizen soldier, not the professional soldier, who won this nation’s freedom from England in the first place.  Mr.  Rooney apparently doesn’t know any of these facts

CBS, this morning, is using as support of Schieffer’s (and Rooney’s) specious argument European broadcast segments which compare as similar the treatment of  Al Queda prisoners in Guantanamo Bay to American prisoners recently captured by Iraq.  CBS cannot, therefore, tell the difference between an unabused Moslem terrorist being fed three times a day, and the videotaped corpses of American soldiers who after being captured had their brains blown out.

No, Mr. Schieffer, the phony fool, the spinner of false yarns, the boob who does not grasp the truth whirling around him, is somebody other than the President of the United States.  He is the man who made those moronic charges into the CBS camera.

He is you.

The people who have misled the public about the likely length of the war, as well as the skill with which it is being managed, do not work for the administration.  They work for the big three networks, and for worthless rags like the New York Times.  They have names like Melissa and Katie and Terry and Peter and Tom and Dan -- and, even Bob.

Take a look at the calendar, Bob.  Then take a look at the map.  Finally, take a look at your 401K, then start living off it.  Either that, or get a job at which you are at least mildly proficient.

(LL)  

© 2003 Oregon Magazine