Back in the saddle

Well, after spending a week acclimating to my new habitat (cohabitating!), I've starting watching the news again. The Scalia thing is gone, and thus forgotten by the masses, to our peril. Two stories have captured my fancy today.

First, this story about the pair of hawks in Manhattan who have been evicted from their posh 5th Avenue digs. I don't have much to say about this story, except that I honestly and viscerally detest the motives behind destroying the hawk nest. This quote is very revealing: " '... it was a hazard that probably violated city regulations.' " Thus sayeth the engineer of the co-op where this all happened. My thought: Probably?! Are you kidding me? It seems to me that you might want to check with the city first before blaming this on the city. It really seems like nothing but some rich folks having their way, everyone else be damned. In the end, it's just bad karma for them.

Hopefully there's some more amenable spot these two will discover. Then they can revisit their old place and eat the little, annoying dogs of these annoying, little people.

The second story is the one that seems to have a bit more life to it (ie, it may survive an entire 24-hour news cycle). It's this thing about the soldier questioning Rumsfeld, asking him why they have to pick through garbage to find armor for their vehicles. The questioner, a National Guard Specialist, asked the question, and a mass of cheers erupted from the crowd comprised entirely of other servicefolk. Rummy asked Specialist Dude to repeat, and he did, then Rummy basically stammered his way to saying, essentially 1) Deal with it, and 2) Isn't it great that we allow our military to ask questions like this?

Then, it came out today (if Drudge is to be believed), that a reporter fed the question to Specialist Dude, and as luck would have it Specialist Dude just happened to get called on. And the Other Side has absolutely erupted into one of their patented fits of hysteria over the MSM (their cutesy, derogatory acronym for Main Stream Media, which they classify as anything that doesn't agree with their viewpoint). The soldier was a plant, or the reporter was creating news... those are the chief objections.

Something has failed to dawn on them yet, though. There was cheering after this question was asked. Hundreds of other soldiers backing up this guy because he had the cajones (prompted or not) to place a flaming shitbomb of a question right at Rummy's doorstep. Did the MSM plant every soldier at the event. Did this reporter go around to each and every one of them and choreograph the sentiment? I think not.

Specialist Dude's point must be taken seriously. There has been a US presence in Iraq for two years now, three-quarters of that time while the country has been under US occupation. How is it that the greatest military on earth (to listen to its commanders) can't coordinate armor upgrade shipments from here to there, or from wherever to there, or can't get the right vehicles over there in the first place, or whatever the freaking problem is.

But the problem isn't Specialist Dude asking the question (President Bush agrees - see first paragraph), or even the reporter "planting" the question. (If the memo is legit, there's really nothing in there to suggest anything more than the reporter prodding Specialist Dude to talk to Rummy about a very real problem.) The problem is that the right will go to any length to call the MSM to the mat. Sadly for the right, the MSM appears to have come down on the side of the soldiers on this issue. They just don't know what to do about it, since they now have to cope with a GI vs Pentagon schism.