Monday, October 10, 2005
Rescue the Pony! (2)
In today's New York Times:
FEMA Director Under Clinton Profits From Experience
A former Clinton official is putting his experience to use in the private sector! He's got potential conflicts of interest! He's a CRONY! BAD Clinton official!
The article does give James Lee Witt due credit for competence — and occasional diligence above and beyond the call of duty, as when he "rode a Greyhound bus through the night, sitting next to the bathroom, to get to the Midwest floods when no plane was available". (Try and imagine any Bushevik doing that.) But it repeatedly mentions "potential" conflicts of interest in Witt's current work for the state of Louisiana. And it includes the quotation, "He had a very strong personal relationship with the president."
So pay no attention to those Bush cronies, Michael Brown and Harriet Miers (and all the others). Pay no attention to Halliburton sucking up money in Louisiana while minority-owned businesses get no rebuilding contracts. The real outrage is that Louisiana's Democratic governor gave a no-bid contract to a former Clinton official.
I call this journalistic propaganda technique Rabbitholing. As you recall, after Alice fell down the Rabbithole, and had fallen for a very long time, she found a cake and a bottle of some potion that made her larger or smaller. Her actual size ceased to exist and she simply became the size necessary to fit through the door. And so journalists do with the relative sins of the people they cover, destroying any sense of perspective in the service of what amounts to propaganda.
In a world where proportion holds, Clinton would have gotten slapped by Hillary, and that would have been the end to the Lewinsky affair. Bush would have been impeached over lying the country into war, and that would have been the end of the Iraq occupation. In fact, Bush would have never been elected.
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