I don’t know if you have the time or inclination to seek out this sort of thing.
Sometimes I wish I didn’t have the inclination. Lord knows I don’t have the time.
I mean if I just wanted a daily blood pressure raising, I could read the “Daily Kos”, but this guy is not just some, even highly successful, “blogger”.
He is a Contributing Editor for Vanity Fair. Who reads that? You might ask.
The answer is – it doesn’t matter – it’s published under an “MSM” rubric. MoveOn and MooreOn will pick it up.
An excerpt from this guy’s Website: How he views the death toll from Katrina:
Any number substantially higher than 3,000 dead presents a political and symbolic dilemma for the most avid advocates of the War on Terror. . . . Since 9/11, “3000” has been elevated to a sacred, symbolic number in political discourse. . . . If 10,000 deaths amount to but a drop of blood in the abattoir of time, 3000 is an even smaller drop, and once you begin to shrug off large numbers of dead to the caprices of fate, striking a militant pose over a smaller number becomes even harder….
Whatever the final numbers are from Hurricane Katrina, it will be harder for the WOT propagandists to ritualistically invoke the “3000 dead” to the same sonorous effect.
The facility with which he cynically mixes opposition to the War with a natural disaster and hopes for a high death toll – nothing less than 5,000 (must be substantially higher than 3,000) Katrina deaths is acceptable – is ghoulish and worse.
The amazing part to me is how much of this is out there, informing all manner of “commentators”.
Oh, it’s on the right and libertarian fringe, too. But that’s just the point – there’s no “”responsible”” press out there actively wishing for a high Katrina death toll except for those who so detest Bush as to have checked in their brains – i.e., the Statist-Left.
Read the whole thing if you’ve the stomach:
From Blame Game to Numbers Game
-James Wolcott
Even the title is sickly cynical.