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Hot Type, for the week of April 18, 2003 -- continued
Once GIs started sunbathing in Saddam's palaces, pundits resumed cranking out the same old same old. Wisenheimer Molly Ivins wrote that Donald Rumsfeld, "who seems prepared to run the world," was pushing exile Ahmed Chalabi, General Jay Garner, and former CIA boss James Woolsey to take over in Iraq -- "a crook, a Zionist, and an old spy who thinks this is the beginning of WW IV." William Safire wondered rhetorically, "Where are the supplies of germs and poison gas and plans for nukes to justify pre-emption?" But he wasn't worried. "Freed scientists,"he predicted, "will lead us to caches no inspectors could find." Paul Krugman still had no use for the White House. "There is a pattern to the Bush administration's way of doing business that does not bode well for the future -- a pattern of conquest followed by malign neglect." Powerful editorial pages played their usual ditties. The New York Times fretted: "From the beginning, the chief concern about the Iraqi invasion has not been the Pentagon's ability to prevail on the battlefield, but the Bush administration's ability to plan for the day after victory. So far, nothing has happened to alleviate that concern." The Wall Street Journal sneered at multilateralists: "It's worth remembering that the U.N. drove itself into this ditch." And last Sunday was business as usual at the Tribune, which supported the war but filled its op-ed pages with essayists who did not. "Those nations that wish America ill . . . can no longer assume this country is too afraid of stirring Arab anger or European angst to use its unmatched power if it feels threatened," the editorial page rumbled. On the opposite page, Clarence Page was warning, "Look out, world. The war hawks are on a roll. . . . And if you raise a peep against it, you may find your lack of 'resolve' shouted down by vigilant, self-appointed guardians of the freedoms we hold dear." And Steve Chapman reflected, "Skeptics like me welcomed the end of the Cold War because it relieved the American people of a heavy burden, letting them live their own lives in peace. But those who worship military glory and activist government recoil at the idea that Americans might have nothing more important to worry about than their individual pursuit of happiness." Last week Eric Zorn based an intriguing column on the fact that those Iraqi weapons of mass destruction that Safire wasn't worried about hadn't shown up -- not in battle and not in warehouses. Zorn's support for preemptive war had rested on the assumption they existed, and he wrote that their absence posed an intriguing litmus test -- do you hope we find them or do you hope we don't? Do you really want to see the U.S. knocked down to size -- "humiliated and humbled, exposed as a clumsy, arrogant, paranoid bully"? Interesting question, but possibly not one that matters much. Regardless of where those stockpiles of anthrax, sarin, and plutonium might or might not turn up, the facts on the ground were just as glorious or calamitous as anyone wanted them to be. The mobs that toppled statues one day ransacked Baghdad the next, while Rumsfeld muttered about freedom being untidy and about teaching Syria a lesson, and the Taliban regrouped back in Afghanistan. Hubris abounded, to rage at or wallow in. Somewhere in the Middle East a traumatized intellectual surely was writing an anguished essay about a world that had just changed, utterly and forever. It hadn't here. Safety Second It's easier to write about the politics of an issue than about the issue. "Homeland security is one of the few issues where Democrats can attack a popular wartime president," said an April 3 Tribune piece by the Washington bureau's Jill Zuckman. "And they are doing so with a vengeance, regularly taking President Bush and the Republicans to task for not spending enough to help cities and states protect themselves." Do the Democrats have a point? That question was beyond the scope of the article, whose headline suggested opportunism: "Democrats assail Bush on homeland dollars / Senators focus on public's fears." But a long cover story in the March 10 New Republic by Jonathan Chait argued that tax cuts matter more to the White House than domestic safety, which can't be allowed to cost so much that the tax cuts become unsupportable. Chait offered a list of spending requests slashed or vetoed by President Bush. One was $379.7 million requested by his secretary of energy to protect facilities where nuclear weapons are stored -- cut by the White House to $26.4 million. Paul Krugman, a relentless Bush basher, cited Chait's article on April 1 and advanced it. According to Krugman, the money the Department of Homeland Security has been able to spread around has favored rural states that voted for Bush in 2000: "[Homeland Security] spends 7 times as much protecting each resident of Wyoming as it does protecting each resident of New York." Is that number true? If true, is it significant? Is Illinois getting what it needs, getting what it was promised, doing as well by Washington as Wyoming is? "Bush's record on homeland security ought to be considered a scandal," Chait wrote. "Yet, not only is it not a scandal, it's not even a story, having largely failed to register with the public, the media, or even the political elite." On April 6 the Tribune's Washington bureau weighed in again on the politics of homeland security. "The high cost of increased security," wrote Frank James, "is pitting local and state officials against one another in a scramble for federal dollars. Many municipal officials argue they are responsible for police and other security costs, so the federal aid should go directly to them. State officials, however, insist they should be the conduit." But though he perfunctorily quoted Mayor Daley and a spokesman for Governor Blagojevich, James didn't demonstrate any real argument between them over how the money to Illinois should be allocated -- or tell us how much that money is or whether it's close to what Chicago and Springfield think they need. If Chait was right that the real story about homeland security was still a nonstory, it hasn't become one in Chicago. While They Were Sleeping Four weeks ago I put in a plug for an upcoming public forum at the Northwestern University School of Law on regulatory changes being considered by the Federal Communications Commission. Since that date I've heard from readers wondering if the April 2 forum was actually held. They hadn't read a word of coverage in the daily papers. They hadn't because there wasn't any. FCC commissioner Michael Copps was on hand -- he's highly skeptical of the kind of ongoing deregulation favored by, among others, FCC chairman Michael Powell and the Tribune Company, which stands to get even bigger if the process continues. So was David Crowl, senior vice president of Clear Channel Radio, which, thanks to deregulation, has grown from 120 stations in 1996 to 1,200 today. Tribune Company vice president Shaun Sheehan also participated. The working press stayed home. Send tips, tirades, and comments to hottype@chicagoreader.com |
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