Since Grayson Harper’s city hall campaign has kind of made the Bush & Cheney impeachment effort a local issue (like it wasn’t already), Static took special note last week of something missing from the pages of many newspapers.
That would be coverage of U. S. Rep. Dennis Kucinich’s presentation to the House Judiciary Committee about why the Shrub and his shadow should be impeached.
Now Kucinich, a Cleveland Democrat, is having about as much success at convincing his congressional colleagues to support impeachment as Grayson is in convincing city hall to join his little “Boot Bush” bandwagon. In fact, the leaders of Kucinich’s own party were the ones who put the kibosh on any actual impeachment hearings, back in June. They did allow him, however, to present witnesses in a show-and-tell session on Friday, in support of his arguments that the president fraudulently used the bugaboo of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq to illegally get this country into the current unpopular war.
If you want to hear about the session, you can find it on the web – people started showing up at the U.S. Capitol building at 5 a.m. that day to testify or observe, and some of the earliest arrivals were military veterans. According to one independent news web site – from New Zealand – one early arrival was a woman who, with her 7-year-old daughter, had been removed from a Fourth of July celebration in Richmond, Va., this summer because she displayed a sign suggesting impeachment.
But a web search also reveals something else: There was no coverage of the hearing by The New York Times, The Dallas Morning News, or many other major newspapers. The Fort Worth Star-Telegram web site ran an Associated Press story. The Washington Post weighed in with a column that made fun of the hearings.
There probably aren’t more than a handful of adults left in this country who honestly think there are, or ever were, weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and there is plenty of evidence to suggest that Bush knew there were none.
So whether you believe the presence of U.S. troops in Iraq is serving any good purpose now, the questions Kucinich has been trying to raise seem worthwhile and profound. Static, having worked much of its professional life in the “mainstream media” and being a fan of many of the journalists who still labor there (if not, generally, of the corporations that employ them) hates to step up onto that anti-MSM bandwagon. But on this one, the big guns misfired.
And maybe the growing ranks of critics of mainstream news organizations are right, and such failings in coverage are due to the concentration of news media ownership in the hands of conservative, non-journalistic corporations that support Bush and his tax cuts for the rich. The way things are going in the news world, unsuspecting readers may wake up one day to find that all the big papers still kicking have become little more than mouthpieces for their rich owners and political allies. When that day comes, if there is a God, your favorite little alternative weekly will still be kicking ass and taking names.
(Of course, on most days, Static is agnostic, so … .)
