Strange Bedfellows — George W. Bush & the New York Times
One of the curiosities of the New York Times is its habit, since George W. Bush took office, of assigning a gal reporter to the White House, apparently to generate warm and fuzzy puff pieces about the Commander in Chief. I've had difficulty fathoming this obsequious approach to a president who is otherwise diametrically at-odds with the Times' generally liberal profile.
My best guess is that the Times panders to Bush in this respect to "balance" an otherwise critical approach to his policies, including his efforts to dismantle Social Security, his recent veto of health coverage for poor children and, of course, his solipsistic prosecution of the debacle in Iraq - a propaganda-fueled war that has injected into the American discourse words like "gulag," "torture," and "electrodes" that were previously exclusive to paranoid autocracies like Red China and Stalinist Russia.
Perhaps all the Times is seeking is a little "human interest" in its treatment of the president. And who better to cover the up-close and personal George W. than a girl? The current Times ingénue assigned to this beat is Sheryl Gay Stolberg, whose latest softball was a Veterans Day feature entitled "Bush and Relatives of Fallen Lean on Each Other."
(Note that in this usage, "fallen" doesn't mean "oops." It means "dead.")
Dubya, according to Stolberg, isn't just a damn-the-torpedoes warmonger. No, indeed. He has a tearful, gentle, compassionate side, which emerges only in secret meetings with the families of the fallen - er, "dead." However, as Orwell suggested and as Stolberg's story eventually reveals, some fallen are more equal than others.
Stolberg's story starts with Melissa Storey of Palmer, Mass. - whose husband, Army Staff Sgt. Clint Storey, "fell" after a roadside bomb explosion in Iraq. It then rambles on through 73 column inches, including two photos of the president hugging "folks," as Bush likes to call them, whose husbands, fathers, sons and daughters he has sent to their deaths. This is a lot of news space for meetings, according to White House staffers quoted by Stolberg, that are "deeply private" and never, ever publicized.
What went wrong here? How did these "deeply private" meetings with Mrs. Storey and so many other "folks" get exposed? Who leaked?
We know that, normally, the Bush regime is good at secrecy, especially when it comes to Iraq. There was the matter of banning all photos and video of American soldiers' coffins being unloaded - in the wee hours of the morning - at Dover Air Force Base. Moreover, this is the administration that called Ted Koppel a traitor for reading, aloud on TV, the names of the dead. This president established a firm policy of never attending dead soldiers' funerals, lest he emphasize the "negative" aspects of his war. This is the administration that falsified the facts, then stonewalled, then lied about the death of its foremost celebrity GI, Cpl. Pat Tillman, ultimately forcing Tillman's parents to literally sue the government for the truth (which has yet to be declassified). This regime, also, briefly undertook - for reasons of thrift - to ban individual funeral services at stateside Army bases. It failed throughout the first three years of the war to provide body and vehicle armor to its troops, despite the enemy's heavy dependence on the improvised explosive devices (IEDs) that killed Sgt. Storey. This administration failed to provide adequate care for its wounded veterans until a grisly exposé in the Washington Post revealed filth, neglect and needless deaths at Walter Reed Hospital. This administration has been consistently deaf to outcries for a new GI Bill of benefits for combat veterans of the "global war on terror" in the Middle East.
