The Permanent Coalition; Tom Brokaw: Anthrax Warrior

The Permanent Coalition

I'm with Ariel Sharon.

And so is President Bush, despite the public doubts of cushion-chair generals in Washington, DC (Bill Kristol, Robert Kagan, Charles Krauthammer, Robert L. Pollack, etc.), to the contrary. The media's strident hawks, who'd just as soon Colin Powell take a powder and write another book, are actually providing a useful service to the Bush administration. By braying so loudly that the United States can't win the war against terrorism without the elimination of Saddam Hussein and Yasir Arafat, they're providing cover for the President as he prosecutes the "first phase" of the war in Afghanistan. It's also helpful that Sen. Joe Lieberman made the following statement last week: "As long as Saddam is there, Iraq is not just going to be a thorn in our side, but a threat to our lives."

(Not that Powell hasn't appeared soft-or to use the current cliche, wobbly-at times. When he made the absurd comment last week that "moderate" Taliban officials might be included in a new Afghan government, the only charitable conclusion is that he was horribly jetlagged.)

Given that Kristol, for example, was Sen. John McCain's right thumb last year, some might believe that he's sincerely worried Bush will declare victory by merely parading bin Laden's head on a spike on the grounds of his Crawford ranch. But Kristol's far too smart to reach such a narrowminded conclusion, for Bush has repeatedly stated that the overseas campaign will most likely take two years; no one believes that toppling the Taliban and capturing bin Laden will take that long. As Donald Rumsfeld has succinctly telegraphed (unlike his understudy Paul Wolfowitz, whose mission is to make "bellicose" pronouncements on the future of U.S. military action, incurring the wrath of the anti-Israel New York Times), to anyone who's paying attention, once bin Laden is dispatched, Iraq will be next on the agenda.

I don't think Kristol's writing partner Kagan is quite as surefooted. On Oct. 17, he wrote in The Washington Post: "When the refreshingly blunt-spoken deputy secretary of state, Richard Armitage, was asked for the umpteenth time on Sunday whether the United States might target any other terrorist-supporting countries besides Afghanistan, he responded with this curious formulation: If 'the coalition felt it was necessary to go after terrorist groups in other countries, this would be a matter for the coalition to discuss among themselves.' Well, thanks. Maybe when 'the coalition' finishes discussing the matter, someone will let us Americans know what they decide."

Where do you begin deconstructing such a naive opinion? First, the Bush administration is wisely not conducting military briefings with the likes of Kagan, let alone the entire country, about its strategy. Second, in this very beginning of the United States' war-just six weeks old-it's imperative to make temporary alliances with shifty leaders of nondemocratic nations.

But how clear does Bush have to be to satisfy hawks that any state that harbors terrorists is an enemy of the U.S.? He's only repeated that about 40 times since Sept. 11.

In the meantime, while American spokesmen suck it up and urge Sharon not to escalate tensions in the Mideast, even after the targeted assassination of Israeli hero and cabinet minister Rehavam Zeevi, there's little doubt in my mind that Bush and Sharon are in agreement about the ultimate result of this campaign. The President has taken a lot of grief for stating a few weeks ago that he envisioned a future Palestinian state, leading alarmists to bark that Bush is retreating into Bill Clinton's feckless, legacy-driven foreign policy. But unlike Clinton, who along with Ehud Barak was willing to sell Israel down the river by giving Arafat a sweetheart deal, only to have the PLO fanatic turn it down, Bush is speaking, like Sharon, about a distant time when Arafat is either deposed or, one hopes, shot three times in the head and throat like Zeevi.

The Times, in an incredible editorial on Oct. 19, which barely scolded Arafat, said: "Mr. Sharon also needs to exercise restraint. He is under enormous pressure to respond forcefully... During the 1991 Persian Gulf war Israel wisely honored American requests for military restraint, even in the face of Scud missile attacks on Tel Aviv. After [Zeevi's] killing, Israel must again summon the political strength to act wisely and carefully." You'd think the Times management, after witnessing the WTC attacks and the serial murders of Israeli citizens by suicide bombers, might not be so cavalier with its advice. But regular readers know better.

I believe that Sharon should proceed with his escalation of Israel's war against Arafat and the PLO: the United States will be right beside him. (And so will Britain's Tony Blair, once he clears up some domestic opposition, such as scuttling that antiquated "Third Way" gibberish, as well as presenting "evidence" that Saddam Hussein was complicit in the 9/11 atrocities, which ought to take about a minute.) One hopes that Rumsfeld and his military team are covertly recruiting expert Israeli commandos in the Afghanistan battle, but even if they're not, in the end it'll probably come down to the United States, Britain and Israel (aided perhaps by less farsighted European allies) to fully demolish the world's leading practitioners of terrorism. As for greedy and unappreciative states like Kuwait, Egypt and Saudi Arabia, to name just a few, if they don't want to cooperate it'll be their own funeral.

It's time, in the parlance of the 80s, to let Sharon be Sharon. In Monday's Wall Street Journal, Morton Klein, president of the Zionist Organization of America, echoed a growing sentiment of many citizens here. He said: "Would the U.S. respond with restraint if one of our cabinet ministers was murdered by a terrorist? I don't think so. George Bush should follow the mission he stated initially: to destroy all regimes that harbor terrorists or promote terrorism."

Obviously, all-out bloodshed in the Mideast will exacerbate the already tense atmosphere in the world. But it seems to me that a concentrated period of eradicating as much evil as possible is preferable to a protracted, step-by-step orchestration of the war against terrorism.

No single image in the past week captured the self-absorbed media's anthrax hysteria more forcefully than the New York Post's cover of Oct. 20. A picture of Post editorial page assistant Johanna Huden, one of fewer than 50 Americans stricken by the bacterium, consumed half the front page, her bandaged middle finger raised, with the headline above reading "ANTHRAX THIS."

Inside, she wrote about her ordeal, concluding: "I had watched the World Trade Center come down from my Lower East Side roof. And now I was the victim of a terrorist act. Not the same thing. Yet, to me, very scary. But I'm on Cipro. My finger is healing. I'll be OK. Am I quitting my job? Absolutely not. I've been kicking butt in this town for 7 years-trying to make it as a journalist in the biggest and best city in the world. And I will. Too bad, Osama. You loser."

Still, that reaction was a welcome antidote to Denny Hastert and Dick Gephardt shutting down the House of Representatives last week in Washington. The Senate, to its credit, stayed open for business. It's understandable that the country's top legislators want to protect the thousands of congressional employees from the anthrax threat; but you'd think, in the midst of a national frenzy sparked by the shameless Tom Brokaw (what, has another printing of The Greatest Generation just arrived at bookstores?), Hastert and his Chicken Little colleagues could've relocated to another building in DC and not taken a snow day.

One of the more stomach-turning tributes to Brokaw, a staple of New York's party circuit, came, predictably, from the president of the Center for Media and Public Affairs. Speaking to The Washington Post's reverential Howard Kurtz, Robert Lichter said: "Brokaw has always been the Jimmy Stewart anchor, the straight-up, down-home, plain-spoken Midwesterner. An attack on Tom Brokaw seems like an attack on America... At times of crisis, television's role is less to provide information than to provide emotional bonding. Brokaw projects the emotions of one who feels the reality of terrorism most directly."

Thanks just the same, but I'll skip the "emotional bonding," especially if it includes Brokaw's Dan Rather-esque sign-off of "In Cipro we trust." The folksy (for a tv personality) new anchor for CNN, Aaron Brown, looks better all the time. It's because of Brokaw's grandstanding that Mike Barnicle was able to write in last Sunday's Daily News: "On Thursday, at the drugstore where I buy fistfuls of horribly expensive pills aimed at keeping my heart beating, the pharmacist told me with great disgust about the number of fools who had managed to hound their doctors into writing a prescription for Cipro. We both were wondering what will happen when flu season hits. Right now, many firefighters, EMTs and too many hospital emergency rooms are near collapse dealing with the daffy who assume a common chest cold and allergies mean they will be in the front parlor of a funeral home by dusk."

And let's not forget the pre-Halloween sickos who're aiding the work of bin Laden/Arafat/Hussein with asinine pranks. Last week, an Iowa tv news reporter was fired, according to the Des Moines Register, after he "sprinkled face powder around the newsroom in front of a group of co-workers." On Oct. 18, the Orlando Sentinel reported: "James Smith, a class cutup and 'social butterfly,' was just trying to get out of school for the day when he poured a white substance on a chair in his classroom Tuesday at Flagler Palm Coast High School, said his mother, Peggy Smith." If the 17-year-old is prosecuted as an adult, he could be sentenced to a maximum of 15 years in prison, for the second-degree felony of "using a hoax weapon of mass destruction." The kid won't serve 15 years-and he shouldn't-but (pardon me) paraphrasing Janis Ian, one would think Master James would've learned the truth at 17. As in, don't scare the wits out of friends and acquaintances just to get your rocks off.

Johanna Huden's resolve was especially refreshing in light of New York's house soothsayer and failed entrepreneur/media critic Michael Wolff's prediction that that Post owner Rupert Murdoch would shutter the paper by Christmas. As usual, Wolff offers no facts-coincidentally, on the same day his column appeared, Oct. 15, Crain's New York Business ran an article, citing an Audit of Bureau Circulation (ABC) report, titled "Over-the-top style boosts Post sales"-relying instead on his own bleeding-heart instincts and secondhand gossip that Daily News owner Mort Zuckerman believes that Murdoch is ready to give up on his tabloid.

Here's part of Wolff's solipsistic theory: "Nobody reads just the Post. You read the Times, or the News, or Newsday, and then, if it catches your eye, the Post. And here's the truism that has reshaped newspapers over the past half-century. Nobody advertises in a second-read."

I'll concede that historically the Post has lost millions each year and is light on advertising; on the other hand, the News, which is fatter, is the subject of the same consistent rumors that it'll fold. Which chatter you choose to follow depends on your newspaper preferences, and Wolff clearly feels dirty when even thinking about the Post. I'll bet he doesn't even refer to it as a "guilty pleasure" anymore. Post-WTC, Wolff believes, the tabloid has run out of juice, citing, for example, political cartoonist Sean Delonas' masterpiece of Freddy Ferrer kissing Al Sharpton's ass as, well, uncouth. Wolff's a delicate guy.

He continues his analysis with a dopey line of logic that now that trivial newspaper fare-Gary Condit, Lizzie Grubman and Derek Jeter's love life-has been shelved or buried, the Post just can't compete. Wolff: "It's hopeless when the Post is forced to cover a story that the Times is using all its resources to cover. When a second-read paper can't offer something beyond the first-read-when gossip and Bill Clinton and any other passing piece of nonsense loses its currency-it's a mortal failing... [T]here was almost a sense-which people [meaning Wolff's gasmask-wearing lunch companions, I assume] took to calling 'the tone thing'-that the Post wasn't in New York and somehow hadn't experienced the same thing that everyone else had experienced."

What garbage. First of all, not all New Yorkers cling to the Times for a security blanket. Wolff doesn't even mention The Wall Street Journal, which has day-in, day-out provided war coverage superior to that of the Times (in one-tenth the space) mostly because it's believable. Also, just how condescending can this third-rate critic get? I'd say the Post accurately reflects the anger and rage most New Yorkers feel after the deplorable events of Sept. 11.

When the Post's Andrea Peyser calls CNN's horrendous Christiane Amanpour a "war slut," that's fairly accurate; and Steve Dunleavy's lead for his Oct. 18 column-"Today, four of the lice in Osama bin Laden's bug brigade will be sentenced to life in prison [for the embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania]"-was poetry of the moment. Peyser, a writer I normally rate below even the Times' Murray Chass, was dead-on last week with her sendup of CNN's dubious project of submitting written questions to bin Laden, which, even if the cable network doesn't use the answers, will be disseminated in the Muslim world by the Al-Jazeera tv station. She wrote: "My third question... How do you feel about this gun we're about to discharge into your forehead?... The cable channel has its priorities: First, go for the ratings. Then, avoid any possibility of helping the government catch or kill the man who threatens the lives of Americans."

Like all New York dailies the Post has its failings: Rod Dreher, for example, after terrific investigative work on the scams of Jesse Jackson, has turned in one embarrassing column after another. Dreher wrote a repulsive brief for National Review Online on Oct. 16, exulting in the joys of his profession now that the country's at war. Talking about his wife, Dreher said: "Every day now, she...isn't sure if I'm coming home with deadly spores on my cuff. The only American journalists who, with their families, live with this daily life-or-death uncertainty are war correspondents. Now, we are all war correspondents. And not only war correspondents, but combatants. What we write or broadcast makes us special targets."

Paging Edward R. Murrow! Should lightning strike and Dreher join the one (so far) unfortunate victim lost to anthrax poisoning, he'd make a fine fifth-rate intern for the late World War II reporter in the heavens above. Not bad for a young fella who not long ago was a crummy and pious film reviewer for the Post.

On the whole, the Post is certainly my second-read, right after the Journal. I read the Times strictly as an occupational hazard; the News is a loser, aside from columnist Michael Daly and the unintentional humor of Juan Gonzalez. As for Newsday, that paper's a mess from start to finish. The layout is confusing; the editorials schizophrenic; the arts coverage bush-league; and the roster of pundits (save James Pinkerton) simply maddening. Marie Cocco's in the same boat as Salon/New York Observer writer Joe Conason: she doesn't yet realize that it's 2001 and apologias for every breathing Democrat are as anachronistic as the editorial content of Talk. Jimmy Breslin probably isn't a day over 80, but he might as well be 110, such are the baby-food, incoherent ramblings that define his columns.

And then there's Newsday's number-one ethical scab: Robert Reno. The brother of Clinton's attorney general and current candidate to displace Gov. Jeb Bush in Florida, Reno never discloses that relationship, even when scribbling virtual press releases for the Democratic Party. On Oct. 18, Reno offered an assessment of Rush Limbaugh's hearing loss, bemoaning the sympathy the country's most popular talk-radio host has been receiving. He writes: "Face it, for years millions of Americans have wished something dreadful would happen to Rush Limbaugh. But if they had the true heart of a liberal [maybe like Hillary Clinton?], it was that Limbaugh would suffer bad ratings or that advertisers would desert his show after marketing research revealed his audiences had the consumer-buying patterns of a Third World nation and low IQs."

Granted, there's a temporary notion that every American is a New Yorker, but it's this kind of drivel from one of our op-ed slimeballs that makes you understand why some "flyover" citizens take a dim view of NYC's inhabitants.

Reno plods on: "If his downfall had come from a general weariness with the fact that he is second-rate, sloppy, imprecise and hopeless with facts, who could have viewed it as anything but a sign that quality and clear thinking had found new standing in radioland's shrieking dreariness? Now we must all wish him a speedy recovery from the hearing disease that threatens his very ability to communicate intelligently and we must retract all the vile things we said that suggested he couldn't."

It goes without saying that Reno wouldn't include the Berkeley-like, government-funded NPR in that "shrieking dreariness," but if this snake really thinks Limbaugh is "hopeless with facts," I suggest he read The New York Times on a daily basis and quit after he's found 100 errors, 5 percent of which will make it to the paper's corrections column in the subsequent week. The Times' own failure at the rudiments of factual reporting is all the more damning since it employs as many Ivy League-educated editorial drones as there are trial lawyers in Manhattan; by contrast, Limbaugh has a small staff for his three-hour broadcast that airs five times a week.

OCT. 22

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