The Self-pardoning of a Chickenhawk

In the wake of this disastrous war, the blame games, finger-pointing, and responsibility-shirking is on-going and will continue well into administration of the next president. Nearly every day we are bombarded with reports of petulant candidates pushing accountability around the political plate like overcooked Brussels sprouts.

An important angle in this apportioning of culpability that has gone suspiciously underreported - hell, unreported - is the responsibility of the vast majority of the American media in frothing the post-9/11 waters of discourse into opacity in their role as the crazed cheerleaders agitating the American public into supporting an ill-considered, shoot-from-the-hip war policy.

My brother Marine, Gulf War vet, and author Joel Turnipseed wrote a post on his blog, Hotel Zero, exposing Christopher Hitchens, one of these self-serving media charlatans, for what he truly is - a chickenshit warmonger trying to divest himself of all responsibility (and, reading between the lines, a dose of hidden Lady Macbeth-worthy guilt) by cunningly hijacking the death of Army Lt. Mark Daily, a young man inspired to go to war in Iraq by Hitchens' own words. Hitchens screens his role in Lt. Daily's killing to confer upon himself a self-absolution so sickening and demented that it eclipses the most egregious "journalism" published in Pravda in Stalin's Soviet Union.

This vomit-inducing anti-mea culpa published by Vanity Fair should serve to brand Hitchens and any other chickenhawk member of the media who has not personally and publicly addressed their involvement in preying on the fears and sense of patriotic duty of the American people in the days, months, and years following the September 11th terrorist attacks. I'm personally revolted that any publication would circulate such a calculated piece of self-serving finkery, particularly when it originates from one of the most odiously propagandistic, ignoble jingoists in memory.

I strongly urge you to read Joel's entire post on this subject, which addresses not only the issues I've presented above, but also denudes Hitchens' twisting the words of George Orwell in his maleficent objective of self-palliation.