Sometimes, you wish both parties to a fight could lose.

Round One: Insult-to-Wine-Lovers Alabama Sen. Spence Bachus vs. No Longer Funny HBO Sneering Head Bill Maher.

The fight: Maher said the U.S. military has been reduced to recruiting “low-hanging” fruit. Bachus called that “treason,” and has demanded that HBO take Maher off the air.

Who wins: Tough call. A high-school journalist in Colorado more or less prooved Maher’s point last month. He taped himself and a friend investigating just how low local U.S. Army recruiters would stop to sign them up. When told one he was a high school dropout, the recruiter showed him how to assemble a fake diploma. When his friend told another recruiter he was a frequent marijuana smoker, the recruiter took him to buy a kit that dupes drug tests (you wonder what they might have done if he told them he was gay).

Those two moronic recruiters aside, I don’t think the military’s troubles recruiting are reflection of the military so much as a reflection of U.S. foreign policy. When the war is just (see World War II, Afghanistan), volunteers line up. Nobody wants to go get his arm blown off in Iraq for a cause that’s murky, a goal that’s undefined, and a war that was launched under false pretenses.

That means the military is reduced to signing up just about any body it can get its hands on.

The winner: I’m going to go with Hit & Run commenter “Handsome Dan.” His response to Julian’s post on this dust-up (see the ninth comment down) made me laugh out loud.

Round Two: Affable Bigot Pat Buchanan vs. Not-Necessarily-the-Newsweek

The Fight: Buchanan calls the magazine’s “Koran in the toilet” debacle “seditious.”

Who Wins: Tough call. It obviously wasn’t seditious. But I think Buchanan might have a point when he says that Newsweek shouldn’t have run the snippet even if it had been true.

Obviously, I believe the news media reporting abuses by the U.S. military. But it’s difficult for me to call disrespecting a religious text “abuse.” It’s symbolism. If I’m the editor at Newsweeek, I have to consider that running the item could potentially cause enormous anti-American backlash. It’s a no-brainer if we’re talking about something like Abu Ghraib. But who’s really hurt when short-fused U.S. interrogator flushes words on paper down a commode? There are far worse abuses going on in this war that the media has barely touched. If I’m going to run an item that might spark serious anti-American hatred, it had better involve some real abuses, not mere wounded souls or soiled symbolism.

Of course, Buchanan took it too far. As did the White House. Awfully ballsy for the same administration that took us to war based on faulty, anonymous sources to go after Newsweek the way it did, isn’t it?

I’ll call this one a draw.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 26th, 2005 at 10:28 am by Radley Balko and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.