Oprah Is to Iraq as Cronkite Was to Vietnam
Marty Kaplan
Huffington Post
It's the war, stupid.
That's what came to mind as I watched Oprah Winfrey stump for Barack Obama this weekend. It's not about whether a star who can make a book a bestseller can also make a primary candidate the nominee, as the media are framing it. It's about reassuring the overwhelming majority of Americans who oppose the war in Iraq that they are, in fact, an overwhelming majority. It's also about giving courage or cover to every Democratic member of Congress who is tempted to swallow The Surge Is Working™, to take Iraq off the table, to forget that, more than Katrina, more than the mortgage meltdown, more than healthcare, it's the war -- the Cheney Libby Chalabi Blackwater WMD Abu Ghraib Wolfowitz Rumsfeld Feith Perle Yoo Waterboarding Walter Reeding Oedipus Bush war -- that looms over everything else casting lawless shadows across our country.
How do people know what other people think? The sad truth is that it doesn't come from talking to one another; it comes from the media. And the media, for reasons ranging from mercantile to ideological to laziness, frame every issue, including the Iraq war, as (at best) a battle between two plausible sides, or (at worst) as a crusade of the Right against the Wrong.
(Continued here.)
Huffington Post
It's the war, stupid.
That's what came to mind as I watched Oprah Winfrey stump for Barack Obama this weekend. It's not about whether a star who can make a book a bestseller can also make a primary candidate the nominee, as the media are framing it. It's about reassuring the overwhelming majority of Americans who oppose the war in Iraq that they are, in fact, an overwhelming majority. It's also about giving courage or cover to every Democratic member of Congress who is tempted to swallow The Surge Is Working™, to take Iraq off the table, to forget that, more than Katrina, more than the mortgage meltdown, more than healthcare, it's the war -- the Cheney Libby Chalabi Blackwater WMD Abu Ghraib Wolfowitz Rumsfeld Feith Perle Yoo Waterboarding Walter Reeding Oedipus Bush war -- that looms over everything else casting lawless shadows across our country.
How do people know what other people think? The sad truth is that it doesn't come from talking to one another; it comes from the media. And the media, for reasons ranging from mercantile to ideological to laziness, frame every issue, including the Iraq war, as (at best) a battle between two plausible sides, or (at worst) as a crusade of the Right against the Wrong.
(Continued here.)
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