Scenes from a protest, part 3
When the president's limo came screaming down 18th Street, the crowd surged to the intersection of Tremont and Broadway to greet it. The limo sped by. But the press bus was not so lucky. Protestors surrounded the bus, knocking on the windows and rocking the bus. The police finally cleared a hole and the bus inched through, circling the block and coming back up 17th. I saw NBC's David Gregory, among others, emerge from the bus with disbelieving smiles and raised eyebrows. Protestors screamed, "Have you no decency? Why are you reporting Bush's lies?"It's easy to make sarcastic jokes about a president who has ballooned the deficit, wasted $400 billion overthrowing secular dictators, ignored the threat posed by terrorism, rolled back environmental protections, overseen a huge expansion of government into the private lives of U.S. citizens, refused to deal with the hurricaine crisis, and tried to buy popularity with boondoggles like steroid investigations and missions to Mars. Bush has been such a bad president, it is almost like he couldn't possibly exist in the real world. But being that close to him, it's impossible not to react emotionally. Bush isn't just a bad president. He is a bad person. And anyone who supports him after all he's done must have a hole in their soul so big you could drive a press bus through it.
2 Comments:
David Alexander is actually a very fine reporter. On the occasions when he has substituted for Chris Matthews on Hardball he has been much better than Matthews at forcing people back to the question instead of just letting them blather their talking points and he has been merciless with Scott McClellan, the Bush administration press secretary. I do applaud the protesters for targeting the press bus because that technique is getting a relatively small protest national coverage. But not every member of the media is the enemy. While most of the mainstream media got caught up in the patriotic frenzy following 9/11 there was also a lot of coverage of dissenting experts leading up to the war, all over cable and in some publications. It was our own Dem leadership that let us down, supporting Bush on going into Iraq out of political cowardice, not because they were so taken in or that there was no coverage of the lack of proof for the Bush team's assertions. They never had the votes to stop it, but they would have brought much more credibility to the 2004 campaign if they had stood their ground and been able to present a more compelling answer to the question "How would you have done it better?" then the lame "Well, we'd have done pretty much the same thing only better". They'd have been able to come up with a much stronger, more coherent stance on the whole thing, something they still struggle with.
Oops, just noticed that for some reason I wrote Alexander instead of Gregory. I meant David Gregory of course. Otherwise my response makes no sense. Chalk it up to Holiday eating induced stupor!
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