I like to watch the Sports Reporters on ESPN on Sunday Mornings. Outside of the sublime, PTI, it's the best show on the network. It has one fatal flaw, the sneering, shrill Mike Lupica.
Naturally, this morning the sports pundits discussed the tragic death of Pat Tillman. Lupica, however, decided he wanted to use Tillman's death to attack some Bush policies. Specifically, Lupica's all in a twitter because of the Pentagon's restrictions on showing caskets. According to Lupica, Bush shouldn't be allowed to "use" Tillman's death, and the patriotic reasons that caused him to join the Rangers in the first place because the administration wants to put restrictions on photographs of war deaths.
Of course, Bush's official Blog quotes the Arizona Republic article on Tillman. However, I hardly think that qualifies as using Tillman's death in some unseemly manner. The fact is that Tillman did believe that we need to fight in Afghanistan & Iraq. If some liberals didn't agree with him, then that's too bad. Every good man isn't going to comply with your views.
Of course, war deaths happen too. That's a fact. And, I think the Pentagon policies are silly. I understand the desire to protect families, but no government should be in the business of hiding these kind of ugly truths from their people. In fact, due to the Freedom of Information Act, they are readily available online anyway.
How come the news media only apply this standard when it suits a leftist cause (inciting public opinion against the war)? When President Bush used brief images from 9/11, the liberal media cried foul. In fact, the elite media themselves have refrained from showing images of 9/11 on that day as well as after because they didn't want to incite that murderous rage and anger that we all felt that day.
The media understand the incredible power of some images. Does anything demonstrate big media bias better than the fact that they are so eager to show American caskets, yet so hesitant to show the images that explain why these men and women fought and died?
Posted by kris at April 25, 2004 10:08 AM | TrackBack"all in a twitter." haha.
Posted by: jkhat at April 25, 2004 11:45 AMInteresting dichotomy on the whole "war" issue and the lefties - they cry foul whenever the president even remotely refers to the war, but the war is all they talk about in this campaign. Well, that and taxes, but their message on taxes is only that they should be higher, and, well, I just don't understand that strategy.
Posted by: jkhat at April 25, 2004 11:49 AMExcerpts from three of Lupica's recent "sports" columns in the NY Daily News:
April 17, 2004:
The President of the United States made questions about having made mistakes in his life sound tougher the other night than standing in there against a Randy Johnson fastball.
May 2, 2004:
If I'm following all the talk from Cable America this week, President Bush didn't ask Donald Rumsfeld if Rummy thought we should go to war against Iraq.
And he didn't ask Colin Powell.
You know who he asked?
War Lover Cheney.
Who only used five deferments, which has to be some kind of record, to keep himself out of Vietnam.
May 9, 2004
People keep asking if Bush would throw Rummy over the side, and the answer is simple:
Bush would replace Donald Rumsfeld with Bobby Valentine, his old Rangers manager, if he thought it would help him keep his job.
By the way, you have to say that the administration's outrage about prisoner torture over there certainly escalated the minute the pictures got out.