The Shame Game

Guilty Liberals have mastered the art of eliminating shame. Their own shame, that is.

They simply press it onto others.

While living in a comfortable world built on the so-called injustices they decry, Guilty Liberals call those who oppose them racists, homophobes, religious fanatics, demagogues, Right Wing conspirators, or just plain evil in an shallow attempt to dismiss viewpoints and beliefs they refuse to tolerate.

Guilty Liberal intolerance runs far deeper than the intolerances they claim to fight against. In fact, it is their foremost self-defining feature. As diverse as their events and conventions seem to be, the only quality they share is a gut-level hatred of people who won't sit in their tent.

So, they demand tolerance for Islam while castigating Christians, they demand self-determination for Arabs in the occupied territories while calling for the dissolution of Israel, they champion human rights monsters like Castro while calling Bush a terrorist.

The question: Is Liberal Guilt a result of feeble genetics or is it an infectious dementia?

I'll come back to this idea in a moment. First I need to recommend an excellent book.

Embedded, The Media at War in Iraq, a book by Bill Katovsky and Timothy Carlson, features interviews with 60 embedded journalists who accompanied U.S. troops into battle. The book packs a powerful punch as the stories impart a rare glimpse of front-line journalism that most of us will never see firsthand.

But these spellbinding accounts don't prepare us for a far more disturbing accusation made in an interview with then New York Times Baghdad Bureau Chief, John Burns.

And there are a lot of journalists who want to bury book and wish that Burns would shut up.

But they can't and he won't.

An excerpt from Burns' interview:

"There were correspondents who thought it appropriate to seek the approbation of the people who governed their lives. This was the ministry of information, and particularly the director of the ministry. By taking him out for long candlelit dinners, plying him with sweet cakes, plying him with mobile phones at $600 each for members of his family, and giving bribes of thousands of dollars.

"Senior members of the information ministry took hundreds of thousands of dollars of bribes from these television correspondents who then behaved as if they were in Belgium. They never mentioned the function of minders. Never mentioned terror.

"In one case, a correspondent actually went to the Internet Center at the Al-Rashid Hotel and printed out copies of his and other people's stories, mine included, specifically in order to be able to show the difference between himself and the others. He wanted to show what a good boy he was compared to this enemy of the state. He was with a major American newspaper. Yeah, it was an absolutely disgraceful performance.

"Editors of great newspapers, and small newspapers, and editors of great television networks should exact from their correspondents the obligation of telling the truth about these places. It's not impossible to tell the truth. I have a conviction about closed societies - that they're actually much easier to report on than they seem, because the act of closure is itself revealing. Every lie tells you a truth. If you just leave your eyes and ears open, it's extremely revealing.

"We now know that this place was a lot more terrible than even people like me had thought. There is such a thing as absolute evil. I think people just simply didn't recognize it. They rationalized it away. I cannot tell you with what fury I listened to people tell me throughout the autumn that I must be on a kamikaze mission. They said it with a great deal of glee, over the years, that this was not a place like the others."

So, faced with the fact that many journalists "sold their credibility" for a visa and favor, deliberately mis-reported, mis-represented, and in some cases, collaborated with Baathist Information Ministers to mislead the rest of the world, the New York Time has "nothing to report."

Nothing to report about collaboration with thieves, rapists and murderers who wore the uniform of Saddam's Death Regime: wives raped in front of their horrified children, men run through wood-chippers feet first so the monsters could watch their faces in excruciating death agonies, kids hung on meat hooks and flayed alive. Reporters couldn't mention this and still count on their entitlement to hot baths, and clean sheets and sweet cakes, so they looked the other way and dreamed of leaping to the big time like Wolf Blitzer, and Christiane Amanpour.

These compromised reporters effectively became associates of the Baath Party Ministry Of Information and immediately leapt to another big time - Peter Arnett's big time.

Ironically, we were laughing at Baghdad Bob for being such a fool, while reading and watching the reports of journalists who were feeding us an infinitely more damaging pile of rubbish.

During the war, I noticed a pattern among the American-bashing reprorters. While other were reporting from Humvees and Bradley Fighting vehicles, the Baath appeasers often started a report with a strange attribution, "A taxi driver told me..." or "One of the hotel workers said..." or "My translator said that his brother said..."

These reporters went for a drive and questioned the driver or reported from the hotel, or worse yet relayed hearsay from government employees.

But not Burns. His experiences in other totalitarian hellholes taught him how to get to the story and hold the depots at bay. In reading his recounting of how he went face-to-face with the Iraqi brass, I could only think of one appropriate word for his actions - fearless.

Burns' fearless brand of reporting has elicited dramatic responses by repressive governments. In 1986, the Chinese government tried to silence him with a six-day day incarceration. In Iraq, he flummoxed his Mukhabarat minders by detailing the horrors of Saddam's notorious Abu Ghraib prison.

Now, the New York Time is steadfastly ignoring his accusation, preferring to leave their readership in the dark and sit silently on this enormous credibility time bomb.

The Gray Lady, in not acknowledging this media liaison and complicity with the enemy, is rapidly moving from merely dingy gray to positively hoary.

Keep in mind that the New York Times, as the house organ of the Liberal Left, is guided primarily by its own shame and guilt. Don't expect any self-examination or confessions. Just as the Jayson Blair incident, emblemic of wrongheaded affirmative action and preferential treatment, blew over in a flurry of terse e-mails and bluster, the NYT hopes no one important reads Katovsky and Carlson's book.

But that hope is a pittance against Embedded, The Media at War in Iraq's position at 112 on the Amazon sales ranking (09/21/03).


To the NYT and Guilty Liberals, honesty and introspection causes political psychosis and, in this regard, it appears to be neither a genetic disorder nor an infectious dementia.

It reads more like a cult.

In fact, Liberal Guilt most closely resembles a religion that lacks a crucial sacrament. The outward, participatory ceremonies are there; rallies are a type of mob vulgus communion and being an American while indicting America serves as a schizophrenic form of confession.

But the internal ritual of absolution is missing, so even true believers can never achieve redemption.

By example: A Guilty Liberal attends a protest, feels the strength of the crowd and the communitas of its unified spirits. By carrying a sign or chanting a slogan, he redefines his sense of self and retains "person living in America" while discarding "American." The result is a now-familiar absurdity where people (Americans) yell at America (people). These temporary Ana-Americans decry a system they say has been wrong since its inception, yet live comfortably within it.

Here's the bind. After the chanting is over, after the last sappy folksong, after the celebrities have returned to their limousines and the streets are littered and the police return to their normal duties, where do the protesters go?

Regardless of whether the post-protest activity is merely returning home to watch the event replayed on the news, reveling with new-found acquaintances, or languishing in a jail cell, nothing has changed. The oppressed are still oppressed, the victims are still victims, the war machine is still the war machine.

The city streets were alive with defiant spirit and mob-mentality just hours ago, and now, the milk still sits in the refrigerator, the dog still needs a bath, and other than for the buzz on the TV, the net effect of the protest can only be seen in overtime hours accrued by cops and sanitation workers.

The hour-long Anti-American chant has melted into the other 8,759 hours of simply being a disgruntled American who voted for Gore and feels cheated, who enjoys ever modern convenience but feels shame for having an abundant life, and makes his most profound political statement by drinking only shade-grown coffee with soymilk and turbinado sugar at a non-franchised coffeshop while listening to culturally pure ethnic songs, sung in a language he doesn't speak.

The let-down after a protest must be staggering. A half-day of faux empowerment makes the protester feel as though the world must bend to the crowd's will, followed by nothing more than promises to do it again, in a week or a month, or when summoned.

Chronic, political coitus interruptus - an exercise that never gives relief or release to the participant, while intensifying the desire to dominate the situation. And with each frustration, the energy can only grow more violent.

Hmmm. I seem to have drawn a line from the mindset of the protester to the mind of a rapist.