Context is Everything

Just a quick one tonight. I have a very annoying meeting (How's that for redundant?) to prepare for tomorrow morning....

Michelle Malkin reminded me of how I once held her in high regard today with her column on the Newsweek debacle. I recommend the column as both a good catalogue of media abuses by the left and as a warning that we cannot just read the conservative media uncritically.

The members of our military are more than just an expedient means to a titillating magazine cover or juicy scoop or Peabody Award. Too often since the "War on Terror" was declared, eager Bush-bashing journalists have forgotten that the troops are real people who face real threats and real bloodshed as a consequence of loose lips and keyboards.

It's not just Newsweek that needs to learn that lesson.

To her last sentence, I'll say, "Indeed." Read on. I'm making an apparent detour from the war, but I shall return.

Not too long ago, I noted Michelle Malkin's penchant for slipping a religionist agenda behind the appearance of journalistic objectivity. In addition to supporting the religious right's jihad against the judiciary, Michelle Malkin is also a big fan of "hate crime" legislation -- so long as Christians are treated as a protected class of citizens. In this respect, she exemplifies some of the worst traits of the religious right I have observed over the past few months.

The Malkin column focuses on the war, and how our news media have been undermining the war effort, but if the soldier protects us from armed threats, who protects us from the threat of tyranny at home? What does it mean to support the war effort, but to injure freedom at home by siding with religionists? This column eerily reminds me of how the election, which Bush won because of the war, was within days being hijacked by the religious right. Here, staunch support for the war serves to mask strident attacks against freedom at home.

As Ayn Rand once said, "Wars are the second [my emphasis] greatest evil that human societies can perpetrate. (The first is dictatorship, the enslavement of their own citizens, which is the cause of wars.)" For wars, we are fortunate enough to have the best soldiers in the world. But to thwart dictatorships (religious or otherwise), we have only our minds, and we must use them to evaluate the ideas and the tactics of all pundits and politicians. This is what the phrase, "A republic, if you can keep it," means.

Does this column redeem Malkin? Or does it merely distract us from her past transgressions against freedom and journalistic integrity? (Specific examples can be found in the three links before the last.)

As she might put it, "Hmmmm?"

-- CAV