Monday, January 15

A Modish Proposal

As I mentioned, I watched some of the Sunday morning newsfests yesterday. On This Week Fareed Zakaria says, "I think most people would like to see this given one more chance to succeed," to which Georgie Stephanopolous replies, "70% say they're opposed to the surge." (Say what you will about Stephanopolous, he's the only network pundit who can perform the complex task of listening to what someone else says and setting off a bullshit alarm using facts, or at least factoids, rather than his own ponderousness.)

Anyhow, two minutes later Zakaria responds to a Katrina vanden Heuvel remark about the majority wanting us out of Iraq by saying that majorities aren't always right, using as an example the majority support for the war! Never once did he mention his own support for the war, and of course it's against the rules for someone else to have said, "Uh, you supported your own position by making up a fucking majority opinion, then you dispute someone else's proper use of actual majority opinion by damning majority opinion!"

And there also was no chance that Zakaria would resign from public life there on the spot, so I got to thinking about what sort of legal sanction would be appropriate. Bear in mind that this is a country which went to pieces when a sitting President, in a civil procedure centering on his dick, asked the attorney for the opposition to clarify a verb tense. Shouldn't the pitchforks and torches come out when someone urges spilling more blood to preserve the standing of his Newsweek byline?

Well, it turns out there are laws against such matters unless you're under oath, so my solution will have to be voluntary, but I stand here today to urge that every warflogging pundit remit to the US treasury the value of any and all wages, remunerations, emoluments, enticements, junkets, annuities, hair and skin-care products received while flogging said war to aid in paying for it. It's probably not gonna total $500 billion, but it'll be a good start.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

In fact, all the major wrong pundits have seen their speaking fees increase since the war started.

D. Sidhe said...

I continue to believe that they don't understand the nature of recordings. They'll say one thing and ten minutes later say something completely different, and then *lie* about having said the first thing. I can sort of understand this cluelessness in politicians--but shouldn't guys like Rush Limbaugh, on radio, and Fareed Zakariah, on TV, realize there's an actual objective record of the dumbass thing they just said?

They never seem to.