The New (Cold-Blooded) Democrats
Less than 24 hours after four American civilians working under contract for the U.S. government were brutally murdered in Falluja, Iraq, last week–their corpses mutilated on camera by an anti-American mob–the pseudonymous Daily Kos, a star of the liberal blogger set, chimed in on his website (www.dailykos.com) with this bit of political analysis, headlined “Every Death Should be on the front page”:
The uninitiated should know that “Kos” is not by reputation a far-left lunatic. He’s a Democratic political consultant on the make. “Kos” is the pseudonym for Markos Zúniga, a 27-year-old lawyer in California. He started writing his political blog in the summer of 2002, and in January 2003 became partners with Jerome Armstrong, who had spent the previous couple of years helping Vermont governor Howard Dean cement his Internet presence. Last April, their political consultancy, Armstrong Zúniga, helped orchestrate grassroots efforts to draft Gen. Wesley Clark for president. And last May, they signed a contract with Dean for America.
Zúniga told THE SCRAPBOOK that his firm has no ties to John Kerry’s presidential campaign. But he’s very much in the Democratic mainstream–or at least he was until his outburst against the four dead Americans, who worked for a North Carolina firm, Blackwater Security Consulting.
Because Daily Kos is one of the web’s most popular blogs, it is able to charge between $700 and $2,000 a month to host online advertisements, almost all of which are spots for national Democratic candidates or organizations. The sponsors include the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and the Democratic National Committee.
Texas Democrat Martin Frost, to his credit, quickly pulled his ads from the site last week after another blogger drew the Frost campaign’s attention to the “screw them” diatribe. “The views expressed by that website in no way reflect Martin’s positions and as stated earlier his advertising has been pulled,” Frost campaign manager Jess Fassler said in an email. “Congressman Frost supported the President’s efforts to remove Saddam Hussein and his murderous regime and stands 100% behind our troops who are fighting terrorism both abroad and right here at home. There is no place for these disgusting remarks in this nation’s discussion on foreign policy.”
Speaking of diatribes, Zúniga followed up the next day with a non-apology titled “Mercenaries, war, and my childhood.” “Nobody deserves to die,” he said. But he was “angry,” because “these mercenaries” (the civilian security contractors) “make more in a day than our brave men and women in uniform make in an entire month.” He was angry because “these mercenaries” would “leave their wives and children behind” to help build the new Iraq.
From what THE SCRAPBOOK could make out, Zúniga is also angry because, having been raised in El Salvador, he “actually grew up in a war zone.” So he “lived in the midst of hate the likes of which most of you will never understand.” Which means it really gets his goat whenever a “mercenary” willingly enters a war zone “because the money is DAMN good.”
Here, then, are the names of the “mercenaries” who, at the time of their death, were providing security for food shipments into Falluja: Jerry Zovko, a 32-year-old Army veteran whose brother told the New York Times that he went to Iraq “to make it a better place”; Mike Teague, a former special operations officer and Army veteran with 12 years experience; and Scott Helvenston, of Leesburg, Fla., who spent 12 years as a Navy Seal. The fourth victim, burned and mutilated beyond recognition, has not been identified.
Clarke’s Free Ride
Pundits and commentators last week worked overtime decrying the Bush administration’s “character assassination” of ex-NSC staffer Richard Clarke, yet we have heard nothing at all about Clarke’s personal life (except from Bush-despising websites fantasizing about how low the White House is supposedly about to stoop). The Pentagon’s “talking points” on Clarke left in a Washington, D.C., Starbucks by an aide to Donald Rumsfeld are notable for their focus on the substance of Clarke’s terror-war critique.
Meanwhile, journalists have done remarkably little substantive work themselves. Thus several of Clarke’s implausible claims have gone almost unnoticed.
* In his 60 Minutes interview, Clarke declared that “there’s no evidence of Iraqi support for al Qaeda, ever.” But in January 1999, Clarke told the Washington Post that the U.S. government was “sure” that Iraqi scientists worked on chemical weapons at the al Shifa pharmaceutical plant in Sudan that we destroyed after al Qaeda bombed two U.S. embassies in Africa.
* On page 237 of his book, Clarke recounts a September 4, 2001, “principals” meeting at which “Rumsfeld, who looked distracted throughout the session, took the Wolfowitz line that there were other terrorist concerns, like Iraq, and that whatever we did on this al Qaeda business, we had to deal with the other sources of terrorism.” Nice story. Except Rumsfeld was not there.
* Clarke writes that another NSC staffer, Franklin Miller, told Rumsfeld on 9/11 to leave the burning Pentagon in a helicopter. Dramatic? Yes. True? No. Miller told the New York Times‘s David Sanger, one of the few journalists to scrutinize the Clarke narrative, that he never spoke to Rumsfeld that day.
* The morning of 9/11 was a blur for many Americans and must have been for Clarke, too. But Clarke relates in vivid detail a secure videoconference of the national security team. The World Trade Center had been hit moments earlier. “As I entered the Video Center, Lisa Gordon-Hagerty was taking the roll and I could see people rushing into studios around the city: Donald Rumsfeld at Defense and George Tenet at CIA.” Moments later, according to Clarke, NSC staffer Roger Cressey “stepped back in to the video conference and announced: ‘A plane just hit the Pentagon.'”
Clarke replied: “I can still see Rumsfeld on the screen, so the whole building didn’t get hit.”
Very perceptive. But it didn’t happen like that. Rumsfeld was in his office when the plane hit the Pentagon but not on video. He had come directly from a meeting with members of Congress and, after the attack, in one of the most-chronicled events of that day, went to the site of the impact to help load the injured onto stretchers.
Press Critic Extraordinaire
If there’s any group more liberal than journalists, it’s communications professors. That makes it all the harder to accept the loss of one of the best, Ted J. Smith, a prominent dissenter from the conventional campus wisdom, who recently died from a heart attack.
Smith was a rare blend of theorist, social scientist, and activist. A longtime board member of the National Association of Scholars, he sued his own university and succeeded in overturning its “gender equity” program in a precedent-setting case (Smith et al. v. Virginia Commonwealth University) by showing that salary differences need not imply discrimination.
But his most lasting legacy was his critique of the “Socrates syndrome” in journalism. In numerous studies of political and economic news, he traced liberal and negative bias to the arrogant assumption that journalists alone uphold the public interest and have a duty to unmask the claims of every other group as merely self-interested. In the words of his mentor Richard Weaver, Ted Smith showed how journalists’ ideas have consequences for all of us.
