No, not the Administration, which I'm coming to believe might be both.
In this case, specificaly, that idiot Glenn Reynolds, whom I will not presently dignify with a link.
I've had it with Reynolds' sanctimonious dwelling on the fact that, yes, other people in other nations and on other continents also do bad things. I wish I could figure out what the hell his point is. He's been seriously beaten by other more sensible and sane bloggers on both sides of the aisle on this, yet he persists.
Does the fact that the Sudanese are engaging in genocide in the Darfur region in any way mitigate what we've done in Iraq? No, of course not. And Reynolds is too canny to come right out and say, "The Sudanese are genocidal maniacs, so what we're doing is okay."
I think even the worst sort of jingoistic idiot would start throwing rotted fruit at him for that... rightly so if they did, and shame on people for not throwing more of it at him presently. So while he can't say it outright, he can just sniggeringly, smirkingly imply it.
And he does this by trying to pretend that the greater coverage of American crimes in Iraq implies that the media (and, indeed, everyone else) simply doesn't care about abuses and crimes anywhere else in the world, or committed by anyone else, to which I can only cry bullshit!
To paraphrase Yglesias, "Yes, Glenn, you absolutely should infer from the coverage patterns that no one in the world is outraged about anything else." You brave, brave soul, making the call that no journalist dares make-- "Genocide is evil."
Thanks, Glenn. We weren't clear on that before, but you set us right. You sanctimonious twerp.
To see how unbelieveably stupid this line of reasoning is, try bringing it down an octave and see how it plays: "Well, gee, all this coverage about Abner Louima and so little about the gang violence going on in Los Angeles... That must logically imply that none of the news media members care about crimes committed by citizens!"
Of course not. The fact that people actually made that argument does not mean that those people were not reprehensibly stupid.
The message is not "Citizen crime is just fine." The message is, "How are we going to get a handle on citizen crime when the police are committing crimes as well?" The message is, "Why are people going to cooperate with us if we engage in practices like this?" The message is, "Isn't it pretty scary when the guys with the power to enforce their will are, in fact, enforcing this?"
The UN oil for food scandal is important precisely because the UN is supposed to exist on something of a higher moral plane than Saddam Hussein. That Saddam Hussein would starve his own people is expected. That the UN would allegedly starve millions of people in the name of simple graft is not expected. Likewise, that Sudanese authorities would roust the Fur people from their lands and send them packing on a replay of the Trail of Tears into Chad, dying in droves all the way is shockingly, distressingly, apallingly, not something at which anyone can really be surprised.
That American military police, whose stated job description is keeping prisoners safe are doing whatever things are necessary to make Arab men so docile that they'll let themselves be assembled into pyramids of naked flesh and be photographed is just a little more newsworthy. So, yes, Reynolds, it's going to get play in the press.
And it rightly should, because for all the sound and fury coming out the Administration and the Military, fixing the problem is going to bring up more dirt than most people are willing to believe. Without the press covering this, and without the public rightly clamoring that it be covered, there would be no pressure to fix this problem, and every pressure to bury it, ignore it, deny it, hope it goes away, which is what this Administration and this Secretary of Defense do about every problem they face in Iraq. And for all your braying about the irrelevancy of mainstream news, you're not only not helping, you're actively hurting the situation.
If we're going to be doing this global cop business-- an ugly job, but clearly a job for which no other nation (or even group of ten nations that I can think of) has the force projection necessary, then we shall be held to a higher standard, as well we should be.
We hold cops walking the beat to higher standards than criminals, because it is their job to get rid of the criminals without becoming criminal. We will likewise hold ourselves to higher standards because it is our self-appointed task to get rid of these practices in the first place.
We hold cops on the beat to higher standards because we let them walk around with loaded guns, and we even let them use them when the situation warrants. We will likewise hold ourselves to higher standards because we sail around with loaded fucking aircraft carriers and we've given ourselves permission to use those, too.
Why is this so hard for some people to understand?