|
 n
a fascinating column, Washington Post media critic Howard
Kurtz reports on
the growing disconnect between the press's anthrax-related hysteria
and the general calm prevailing in America at large. Kurtz notes
that while the media has been portraying government officials as
"bumblers who failed to move aggressively against anthrax-tainted
mail while offering shifting explanations of the danger," the
majority of Americans have kept cooler heads. "An ABC News
poll," he writes, "found that 92 percent of Americans
think their own mail is safe. In a USA Today survey, 77 percent
said they are confident the government can respond effectively to
a major outbreak of anthrax. And 60 percent say the media are overreacting
to the anthrax threat."
Exhibit A for
this chattering-class overreaction is Frank Rich of the New York
Times, who entitles his
ponderous Saturday column [link requires registration] "How
To Lose a War." (No stiff upper lips here, obviously —
and we've only been fighting for a month.) Mr. Rich, who
was never much for bipartisan spirit anyway, accuses President Bush
of letting "special interests — particularly its high-rolling
campaign contributors and its noisiest theocrats of the right —
have veto power over public safety, public health and economic prudence
in war, it turns out, no less than in peacetime." He pillories
Bush on tax cuts, on the airline bailouts, on refusing to break
Bayer's patent on Cipro — and that's just for starters.
It's not until
midway through the column that Rich gets around to tackling his
real target — the Religious Right, of course. Sure, ordinary,
unsophisticated people might think that it would be a tad difficult
to blame religious conservatives for the government response to
the anthrax outbreak. But where there's a will, there's a way, and
Rich finds it by taking up the cause of "poor Tom Ridge":
Mr. Ridge
... was widely rumored to be a candidate for various jobs, including
the vice presidency. But after being pilloried by the right because
he supports abortion rights, he got zilch. Instead of Mr. Ridge,
the administration signed on the pro-life John Ashcroft and Tommy
Thompson — who have brought us where we are today.
Now, one assumes
that Rich does not actually mean that by appointing pro-lifers
to Cabinet posts, Bush "brought us" to September 11 and
its aftermath, although that might seem to be a logical implication
of his bizarre claim. Rather, he's upset because Thompson backed
Bush's stem-cell decision last summer (what that has to do with
"where we are today" is never made clear), and because
the Health and Human Services Secretary "kept the federal government's
house physician — David Satcher, the surgeon general and a
much-needed honest broker of public health — locked away, presumably
because Dr. Satcher, a Clinton appointee, became persona non grata
in the Bush administration for issuing a June report on teenage
sexuality that angered the religious right."
This failure
to utilize Dr. Satcher's vast powers of reassurance (does anyone
in America even know who he is?) should "be on Mr. Thompson's
conscience" Rich writes, as if people are dying daily just
because the surgeon general was kept off TV. And then, with a typically
hysterical flourish, he adds that "only after Mr. Ridge arrived
on the scene was the surgeon general liberated from the gulag."
Robert
Scheer's post-September-11-America-as-Communist-Russia line
is catching on, apparently.
As for Ashcroft,
Rich gripes that the attorney general has "gone so far as to
turn away firsthand information about domestic terrorism for political
reasons." Specifically, he hasn't met with Planned Parenthood
(yep, there's that abortion issue again) since taking office, even
though they have "a decade's worth of leads on the convergence
of international and domestic terrorism."
So let's get
this straight — with everything that's going on, Ashcroft is
to be faulted because he hasn't tapped into Planned Parenthood's
intelligence network? What's next — a story on the ACLU's
underutilitized Green Berets?
"Not everything
changes that fast — least of all Washington," Rich notes.
Including, apparently, the tedious polemics of certain out-of-touch
columnists. But hey, at least the rest of the country isn't
overreacting.
|
