the turkey conspiracy

http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull&cid
=1070346682587

For two years now, it's been apparent that increasing numbers of us are
living in entirely self-created realities.
For example, when I switched on the TV last Thursday, I saw US President
George W. Bush being warmly received at Thanksgiving dinner in Baghdad. By
contrast, Wayne Madsen, coauthor of America's Nightmare: The Presidency Of
George Bush II, saw a phony stunt that took place not at dinnertime but at
the crack of dawn.

"Our military men and women," he insisted, "were downing turkey, stuffing,
cranberry sauce, pumpkin pie, and non-alcoholic beer at a time when most
people would be eating eggs, bacon, grits, home fries and toast."

Warming to his theme, Madsen continued: "The abysmal and sycophantic
Washington and New York press corps seems to have completely missed the
Thanksgiving breakfast dinner.

"Chalk that up to the fact that most people in the media never saw a
military chow line or experienced reveille in their lives. So it would
certainly go over their heads that troops would be ordered out of bed to eat
turkey and stuffing before the crack of dawn."

Madsen's column, entitled "Wag the turkey," arose, it quickly transpired,
from reading too much into a typo in a Washington Post story and an apparent
inability to follow complex technicalities like time zones.

But, when Brian O'Connell wrote to Madsen pointing out where he'd gone
wrong, the "investigative journalist" stuck to his guns: "It's all a secret
of course, so no one will ever know," he concluded, darkly.

For those in advanced stages of anti-Bush derangement, it will remain an
article of faith for decades that the president made the troops get out of
bed at 6 a.m. so he could shovel pumpkin pie down them.

Now consider Amr Mohammed al-Faisal's take on the same "little skit" (his
words) for Saudi Arabia's Arab News: "Instead of a dainty starlet trotting
in to entertain the troops," he wrote, "lo and behold, it was George Bush.
Now, dear readers, you mustn't laugh at the Americans; remember they are our
friends and allies."

Al-Faisal then proceeds to explain that the Saudis need to find the
Americans "a face-saving exit out of Iraq," but "before we lift a finger to
help" the Americans must meet certain conditions, among them: "The halt to
the vicious campaign of hatred and lies propagated in the US against Saudi
Arabia. Administration officials starting with President Bush himself must
spare no occasion to praise Saudi Arabia and inform the American people how
lucky they are to have us as allies."
Then he demanded, "the release of all Saudis detained in the US or in
Guantanamo Bay into Saudi custody."

REALLY. WHILE you're at it, why not demand every freed Saudi get a couple of
"dainty starlets" of his choice for the plane ride home? But once in a
while, even those in the most hermetically sealed alternative universes
enjoy a day-trip to reality. On September 11, Dr. Rowan Williams, the
Archbishop of Canterbury, happened to be in New York, a couple of blocks
from the World Trade Center. Made no difference.

To Dr. Williams, the Americans' liberation of Afghanistan was "morally
tainted," an "embarrassment," and an example of the moral equivalence
between the USAF and the suicide bomber, both of whom "can only see from a
distance: the sort of distance from which you can't see a face, meet the
eyes of someone, hear who they are, imagine who and what they love.

All violence works with that sort of distance."
Last month, the archbishop happened to be in Istanbul and was a guest at the
home of the British consul, Roger Short. Within a few hours of his
departure, Short was dead, vaporized in the wreckage of an almighty bombing.
Dr. Williams sounded momentarily shaken, expressing "shock and grief" at the
death of his host, and condemning "these vicious and senseless attacks.
These acts of violence achieve nothing."

In fact, "these acts of violence" achieve quite a bit. Why, only a month
earlier similar acts of violence had led the Archbishop to make a speech at
the Royal Institute for International Affairs at which he'd argued that
terrorism can "have serious moral goals."

"It is possible to use unspeakably wicked means to pursue an aim that is
intelligible or desirable," he said. By ignoring this, America "loses the
power of self-criticism and becomes trapped in a self-referential morality."
Perhaps Dr. Williams would like to explain what precisely is the "serious
moral goal" of the men who killed his host.

One reason George W. Bush comes on a bit strong about "evildoers" and the
like is that the Archbishop of Canterbury and any number of the great and
the good have rendered less primal language meaningless in this sphere: when
Dr. Williams condemns terrorism as "vicious and senseless," that's just the
mood music of the evening news.

When he says "these acts of violence achieve nothing," what he means is that
his "shock" stops at the end of the sound bite; whether or not the
terrorists "achieve nothing," he intends to do so.
We got used to these muzak formulations in Ulster for 30 years: Former
Liberal Democrat Party leader Paddy Ashdown and others liked to turn it into
a Danny Kaye routine about how we mustn't let the bomb and the bullet win
out over the ballot and the bollocks, or whatever it was.

It was just words.

In last week's Northern Ireland elections and the obliteration of moderate
nationalism, we saw the logical consequence of enhancing the prestige of
terrorists. It's the same in the Palestinian Authority.

Will the archbishop's recent run-ins with reality shake him from his
equivalist pap? Islamic terrorism is a beast that has to be killed, not
patted and fed. The Palestinians use children as human shields and as human
bombs.

Would it be too much to expect the archbishop, instead of bleating about
"serious moral goals," to dust off, say, Matthew 18:6 and offer up something
about how it would be better if these fellows shoving their kids into the
suicide bomber belts hung the old millstone round their necks and drowned in
the sea?

Or will we have to wait for such Bushesque "self-referential morality" till
His Grace is brushing the plaster from his cassock after his next close
shave?