NP: The Family Guy (TV)

I just want to point out that the White House has been found to have violated federal law. Read that again. The White House broke the law. What, if anything, will result from this?

I've been reading a lot lately, mostly from Glenn Reynolds, about how the media is out to get the adminstration, as evidenced by too much Abu Ghraib and not enough Nick Berg. My initial reaction is that, despite what it says about media proclivities, terrorists acting like terrorists (dog bites man) isn't as "newsworthy" as Americans acting like recently deposed megalomaniacal dictators (man bites dog). You might add that the preponderence of Berg-related search terms has as much to do with some visceral thrill of seeing someone having their head cut off. It's an unfortunate argument, but I think it has to account for some percentage of the footage's popularity (whoa, decending into Gibson's Pattern Recognition world for a second there). People still rent Faces of Death.

Which bring us to the next logical place. Is the current fine-happy FCC climate conducive to airing that sort of thing anyway? I'm sure news organizations get some leeway, but still, this is pretty fucking extreme stuff we're talking about. And again, it happened during sweeps.

That's the initial reaction. After some thought, I have to think you should be careful what you wish for. The notion that "this is what we're fighting for" runs headlong into "this would have never happened without the prison abuse," and you can't just arbitrarily swap cause and effect in this case. Charging that this is somehow endemic of what we're up against, in my view, just doesn't work this time. Much like the idea I saw in an editorial cartoon, among other places, that the abuse victims deserved it 'cause they blew up our buildings, which "they" didn't. The president admitted as much.

Then there are the reports that Bush had several opportunities to take our Zarqawi prior to the onset of "the war that was brought upon us," but passed (I thought it was from Talking Points Memo, but I can't find the reference there now). It's conjecture that he passed because it eradicated the only shred of an al Queda connection, but somewhat compelling conjecture if you're the least bit dubious of Dubya's motives.

So, why do you want to hear more about this, again? It just doesn't seem like a good idea. Focusing on the actual good news coming out of Iraq (and there's plenty -- in fact I heard someone just got married) to balance some of the horror stories is entirely justified, but trying to spin one horrific event to counterbalance another seems to smack of a really poorly thought out tit-for-tat of politicization to me.

Don't know if "politicization" is really a word, but that's probably the least of my worries with this one.