Let Sleeping Watchdogs Lie

Last week I criticised the media for giving a free ride to Dubya in the lead-up to his inaugural. This week gave me some cause for hope; Snark in a couple of newsposts. Are the media's watchdogs, somnolent since 9/11/2001, finally starting to stir?

First I noticed this attempt to put Bush's profligate spending in perspective:
At nearly $105 billion, total funding for military operations in 2005 would be more than 13 times larger than Bush's budget for the Environmental Protection Agency, which is charged with keeping the nation's air, water and land pollution-free, and would be nearly as big as the state of California's annual budget.

Bonus points for an analogy that makes the concept of "billions" very clear.

Next up, Art Spiegelman interviews Gore Vidal (America's two crotchety-est men, together at last!), who has this to say:
"I can't believe the speed with which the entire republic fell apart. The U.S. Bill of Rights fell apart with Attorney General John Ashcroft and the Patriot Act,"

"Preventive war became our national policy, which has not been any nation's policy since Hitler. A preventive war is about as un-American as you get. But that doesn't mean we haven't done it before; The worst (previous)* example was the Mexican War. That brave moralist, Ulysses S. Grant, who had been a second lieutenant just out of West Point, hated that war and said ... that nations like individuals suffer for their transgressions."

"I believe the Civil War was the judgment of God on us for what we did to Mexico. God knows what we are going to get for Iraq."

*Note the inclusion of "previous" by the editors, just to clarify that the title of "worst example" is still up for grabs.

Lastly, Bush decided this week to send Dick Cheney as America's representative at the Auschwitz commemoration, when all the other important (and not-so-important, e.g. Adrienne Clarkson) heads of state were attending. (No doubt George needed a vacation to rest his arm after all that hard work signing spending bills.) The press secretary must have gone with him, though, as the official response (page 2) as to why Bush declined to attend was elicited from a "senior administration official" who sounds like he majored in business rather than history or, say, social work:
In Washington, a senior administration official was asked Tuesday about Bush's decision not to attend and replied that the president "sent one of his closest confidants to attend that very important ceremony." The official added: "He's been to Poland. He was just there last year."

I love the childish "need it, need it, got it, need it" undercurrent there - so evocative of Bush's foreign policy and knowledge of world affairs. Also love the irony of the de facto head of the US present amidst the real movers and shakers (and Adrienne Clarkson.)

Of course, all my newfound hopes with the media were dashed when I realised that the first story came from Reuters (an English agency), and the highpoint in the article was so far down the pyramid few American papers will publish to that point. The second story will never be read by anyone outside of blue-states (a Jew interviewing a gay? Gore Vidal? Probably won't be read by most of the people inside the blue-states either!) The third was from the International Herald Tribune.

Three and a half years and two wars later, the mainstream American press is still MIA.