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Upon
their return from a fact-finding mission to Iraq late in 2003, members of a
congressional delegation expressed keen dismay at what they perceived as
excessively negative media coverage of American involvement there. “I'm
afraid,”” said Representative Jim
Marshall (D-GA), “the news media are hurting our chances [of success]; they are
dwelling upon the mistakes, the ambushes, the soldiers killed.... The falsely
bleak picture weakens our national resolve, discourages Iraqi cooperation, and
emboldens our enemy.”[1] One of Marshall's companions, Rep. Todd Tiahart (R-KS),
spoke in the same vein, decrying the media reports of “chaos in the streets” of
Iraq and of “Iraqis resent[ing] our presence” as “totally false.”[2]
Other
commentators have since echoed Marshall and Tiahart's complaints. Editorialist John Leo has characterized
media coverage of the Iraq war as “skewed,” asserting that there is “not much
room for good news in [the] media's view of Iraq.”[3] And journalist Rod Blum has deplored the way the mainstream
media have become so negative in their coverage of the war that they have been “ignoring the positive and dramatic changes occurring in Iraq.”[4]
Why
have the media depicted American involvement in Iraq in such a negative
light? One thing seems certain: in
depicting the war in Iraq unfavorably, the mainstream media are not taking
their cues from “anti-war conservatives.”
Yes, there are people on the right who argue that invading Iraq was
imprudent and wonder why President Bush ever abandoned the conservative
principles he espoused in 2000 when attacking the Clinton Administration for
“extending our troops all around the world in nation-building missions.”[5] But it has been neither anti-war
conservatives nor pro-war conservatives who have generally set the agenda for media
coverage of the war in Iraq.
Nationally syndicated columnist Joseph Perkins clearly identifies just
who has set the media agenda when he asserts that those governing “much of the
U.S. media...[have been] blinded by their contempt for President Bush.”[6]
Perkins
indeed links the negative portrayal of the war in Iraq to the much more
pervasive bias which aligned the national media with Blue America (its champion
the liberal Senator Kerry) and against Red America (its standard bearer the
conservative President Bush).
Writing in October of 2004, Perkins remarked, “The mainstream media have
chosen sides in the presidential election. The news networks, the major newspapers (and magazines)
overwhelmingly favor Kerry.”[7]
Because Bush advocated invasion of Iraq as essential to the war on
terror, while Kerry withdrew his initial support, accusing the President of
using misleading justifications for sending U.S. forces to Iraq, negative
coverage of the Iraq war fitted quite naturally into a broader effort to elect
Kerry and to discredit Bush and his conservative allies.[8] In a remarkably candid essay, Kerry
partisan Bob Levin frankly acknowledged that opposition to the “senseless march
to Baghdad” was part of the Blue ideological package of urban media types like
him, people who are less religious, more liberal and Democratic, and more
favorable to gay marriage and elective abortion than are the Red-thinking
supporters of President Bush.[9]
The
surprisingly deep connection in Blue ideology linking liberal positions on
family issues such as gay marriage and elective abortion on the one hand and
ideological opposition to the war on the other shows through in a remarkable
way when the media focus shifts away from the anti-terrorist actions of the
American military in general or the decisions of the Commander in Chief in
particular and toward the non-traditional activities of female soldiers in Iraq
(or Afghanistan or Guantanamo Bay).
Revealingly, news commentators who usually can say nothing good about
American involvement in Iraq dissolve in unrestrained enthusiasm when the
camera focuses on a woman soldier who has rejected the traditional at-home
roles of wife or mother in order to fly an attack helicopter or drive a Humvee
in Baghdad.
In
the astonishing shift in media attitudes whenever female soldiers come into view,
Americans can glimpse something of the profound difference between the war
efforts Red America supports and the ones that Blue America endorses. For while Red America (including even
its anti-war conservatives) cherishes America's family-centered cultural and
social traditions and will defend them against the violent threat of terrorism,
Blue America disdains every American cultural norm or social tradition that
reinforces family life and would rather attack than defend such norms and
traditions.
Red
America is willing to wage a military war to defend America as the
family-centered country it has been since its founding. Blue America supports the military war
only insofar as it coincides with their cultural war to destroy every
family-centered practice that impedes the march toward a Brave New World of
trans-gendered and post-familial lifestyle freedom. So while Red America recognizes in Osama Bin-Laden and his
allies a terrible threat to what America is and has always been, Blue America
fears these terrorists principally because they threaten to interrupt their own
project of ideologically remaking America into a post-familial society it has
never been before. Even as it
criticizes the Bush Administration for a costly military neo-imperialism that turns
foreign countries into dependents or into captive markets, Blue America quietly
enlarges an even more costly bureaucratic empire at home that turns ever more
socially rootless citizens into captive clients of a burgeoning government
apparatus for social engineering.
Red America wants to use tanks and smart bombs to destroy al-Qaeda and
the remnants of the Afghan Taliban and the Iraqi Republican Guard. Blue America relies on an enfilade of
subversive laws (many created by judicial fiat) and intrusive bureaucracies to
decimate even more families; the most fundamental of what Edmund Burke aptly
called “the little platoons” of society.[10]
Given
Blue America's political agenda for undermining the traditional gender
complementarity under girding marriage and family, perhaps it should come as no
real surprise that the media periodically interrupt their generally negative
coverage of the war in Iraq to laud and praise the female soldiers in the
theater. Looking specifically at media coverage of the Iraq War, a Chicago
Sun-Times reporter
acknowledges a clear pattern: “The news is different when women are
involved.”[11] And behind that
difference we see the pronounced effects of Blue American feminism. “They buckle themselves into B-52s,”
writes one typical journalist covering the Iraq war. “They deploy bombs by the ton. They launch missiles.
They question suspicious Iraqis. More than ever, women are involved in
combat. Women are being taken
prisoner—and proving their heroism—on ever murkier battlefields where nearly
everyone is at risk, whether on the front lines or ferrying food or supplies.”
In all of this expanded female militarism, the writer sees “women gain[ing]
ground,” as their exploits provide new opportunities “to smash barriers” that
have limited women in the past.[12]
In
the same feminist spirit, another media representative hails the fight for Iraq
as “an historic moment for American women on the fields of war. More women are fighting—and dying—in
military combat zones now than at any time in the past 50 years, and maybe
ever.” To drive home the
ideological point, she quotes a female sergeant in the Military Police in Iraq:
“This is not (just) a man's job anymore.”[13] The gender egalitarianism of Blue America likewise weaves
itself through the commentary of a reporter thrilled that “the war in Iraq has
placed women in harm's way as never before ... [as] their [military] roles have
greatly expanded.” This overawed
reporter listens with rapture to a female pilot of an attack helicopter, who “sounded as gung-ho as any of her male colleagues, whose ships took heavy
fire. ‘It made me a little bit mad
to think I didn't even get a bullet,' she said.” The reporter's ideological focus could almost make one
forget that the war is between Americans and Iraqi Bathists, not between women
and their patriarchal oppressors: “In the war zone...,” he writes, “the women have won.” So confident is he in the prowess of
the new generation of G.I. Janes that the reporter turns fears about their
security into a bravado warning to their foes: “The enemy isn't safe from the
women of the U.S. military, either.”[14]
The
choir of usually anti-war reporters, who still cannot help but see portents of
Blue ideological progress in female soldiers' involvement in Iraq includes yet
another journalist delighted that “American women have participated more
extensively in combat in Iraq than in any previous war in U.S. history. They've taken roles nearly
inconceivable just a decade or two ago—flying fighter jets and attack
helicopters, patrolling streets armed with machine guns and commanding units of
mostly male soldiers.”[15]
When
the media are reporting on female soldiers, reporters frequently underscore the
Blue feminism that justifies the temporary abandonment of their generally
anti-war Blue posture. One
commentator draws “a lesson on gender equality” from the death of a female
civil-affairs specialist killed in Iraq by a roadside bomb: “Women should be
respected more than what they are. They are doing this tremendous duty for us....
[I]t takes courage for women to do that.
It does. Women are out
there on the battlefields. Fighting for us, for our freedom. Just like a man.” The ideological
transformation of female soldiers of women into creatures “just like a man”
requires, of course, the repudiation of traditional femininity: the reporter
stresses that the civil-affairs specialist killed by the roadside bomb had left
behind a world in which she was “so girly-like” that she “could spend hours
piling her curly hair atop her head” and would pick “a new dress for every
dance.”[16]
Perhaps
more important to most Blue Americans, however, is that the gender
transformation of female soldiers into male-equivalents requires the rejection
of women's traditional family roles.
And in this rejection, the Blue media positively exult. “A single mother Army cook,” one
reporter rhapsodizes, “...faces death or captivity [just] like [her] male
counterparts.”[17] Another excited
reporter hands the microphone to one of the forward-thinking female soldiers
who has left children behind to become like a man on the battlefields of Iraq: “I would love to be at home with my kids, but I'm doing this for them. I wouldn't want to do anything else.”[18]
Because
media excitement about female soldiers as post-family gender pioneers springs
from Blue feminist ideology, reporters particularly relish the way these
soldiers are defying the traditional patriarchy of the lands where they are now
deployed. For a Blue reporter, few
things could be sweeter than the “delicious irony” of female soldiers deployed
in Afghanistan, “the birthplace of the Taliban, the hard-line Islamist regime
that forced women to quit their jobs and wear head-to-toe veils.” “Afghan men,” the reporter rejoiced,
“are
getting an object lesson in women's empowerment.”[19] The object lessons are even more pointed at the prison at
Guantanamo Bay, where the media take keen delight in the spectacle of “Taliban
fighters who wouldn't allow women to study in Afghanistan and punished them if
a veil slipped or ankle showed are now getting orders from women guards.”
“In their culture,” one of Guantanamo's
female guards asserts, “they [the detainees] get to tell the females what to
do. Well, they are now in a new
culture, and I get to tell them what to do.” “I believe everything should be 50/50,” one of the
glamorized guards explains. “If a
woman does dishes, a man should too.
I'm sure they (the detainees) don't feel that way.”[20] Nor do Blue commentators take pleasure
just in what America's female soldiers are doing to Muslim males; they are also
thrilled that the deployment of America's female soldiers to their country
helped inspire 47 Saudi women to take an illegal joy ride in Riyadh to protest
Saudi Arabia's ban on female drivers.[21]
But
the fullest, most convincing dramatization of the foundational premise of Blue
feminism, requires female soldiers to match or eclipse the battlefield heroics
of the men traditional family-oriented women relied on to protect them. So eager were the nation's Blue media
to find such a dramatization that they made a woman (Jessica Lynch) “the Iraq
War's most famous soldier” on the basis of wildly inaccurate and irresponsible
journalism.[22] In a front-page
story published in April 2003, The Washington Post (among the Bluest of Blue newspapers)
reported that Lynch, who had just been rescued from an Iraqi hospital by a male
special operations team, was initially captured “fighting to the death.” The breathless Washington Post reporters asserted that Lynch had
“fought fiercely and shot several enemy soldiers,” that she had continued “firing her weapon until she ran out of ammunition,” that she
“didn't want to
be taken alive,” and that she had been both shot and stabbed before being taken
captive.[23] This inspiring story
quickly went out over the wires and was loudly amplified by the Blue media
throughout the country. Very
quickly, Lynch found herself one of Glamour magazine's Women of the Year, received
an offer from CBS for the rights for her story for a made-for-TV movie, and
became the subject of a laudatory book written by a Pulitzer Prize winner (for
which the publisher—Alfred A. Knopf—paid a large advance), and received
invitations to join the nation's glitterati at Golden Globe parties.[24] At last Blue America had found the
heroic post-family Amazon they had been seeking.
Unfortunately,
later investigation revealed “the coverage about Lynch [to be], in nearly every
particular, inaccurate.”[25] Far
from fighting ferociously until her ammunition ran out at the time of her
capture, Lynch did not fire a single shot and “spent much of the firefight
curled up in a fetal position.”
And contrary to the early reports, Lynch sustained not even one gunshot
or knife wound from her captors: her injuries (which were indeed serious)
resulted from the crash of the vehicle she was riding in. Military officers issued a 15-page
report thoroughly discrediting the Blue media reporting that had turned Lynch
into “Barbie Army,” and The Washington Post was compelled to retract its original
story of her capture after its own ombudsman sharply criticized that story as
“wrong in its most compelling aspects.”[26]
Of
course, the Blue media handled the retraction of the Lynch-as-hero story
quietly enough that many Americans never even realized how erroneous the
initial hype had been. Certainly,
the Blue media were less than eager to acknowledge that “the Iraq War's most
famous soldier,” the female warrior on whose shoulders “a nation's expectations
r[o]de,” had behaved like “a terrified little girl” during the firefight
preceding her capture and had suffered the ugly indignity of having been anally
raped by her captors.[27] Indeed,
some Blue commentators still cling with remarkable tenacity to the initial
Lynch-as-hero story even after the brutal realities of Lynch's very sad
experience has been exposed. Thus,
although a Blue reporter for Gannett News Service grudgingly acknowledges that
the early reports of Lynch's battlefield exploits “were later questioned,” he
persists in viewing Lynch as a hero who has “challenge[d] old conventions.” “The very fact that [Lynch]... survived capture with a back injury,” writes this
dogged Blue ideologue, “has made her one of the war's first named heroes.”[28]
The
glaring discrepancy between media image of Jessica Lynch and the unfortunate reality
she experienced never in any way reflected a lack of truthfulness and candor on
the part of the 19-year-old female supply clerk, who never asked to face
battlefield danger and who never sought the media celebrityhood thrust upon
her. She has indeed repeatedly
rebutted the fantasies built up around her name. But feminist ideology had given Blue America such a
tremendous appetite for female heroics that the Blue media enthusiastically
generated these remarkably long-lived fantasies before even trying to learn the
facts of her case. It was not the
merely random inaccuracies that inevitably mar wartime reportage but rather the
deeply Blue ideology of feminism that created the Lynch fantasies. “The gender factor,” Roeper admits,
“played a huge role in the initial burst of publicity that [surrounded]
Lynch.”[29]
Feminist
skewing of war reportage is even more apparent in the way the Blue media handle
the grim news of battlefield deaths.
The deaths of male soldiers in Iraq frequently occasion sharp Blue criticisms
of the Bush Administration's handling of the war, frequently drawing unpleasant
comparisons to Vietnam. The tragic
deaths of over 1,000 male soldiers in Iraq is thus often cited by Blue
commentators as strong evidence that Bush's wrongheaded war policy has landed
the United States in “another Vietnam.”[30]
The deaths of thousands of Iraqis—especially Iraqi civilians—likewise
receive attention in Blue attacks on “[Bush's] invasion over false claims of
weapons of mass destruction.”[31] But the Blue media shift into a remarkably
positive tone—almost ebullient—when they begin reporting on the female soldiers
who have fallen beneath the Grim Reaper's scythe.
Thus,
when male GIs kill enemy soldiers, the Blue media report that fact as a deeply
unfortunate wartime necessity. But
Blue reporters can scarcely restrain their excitement when reporting that
“female American troops in Iraq have killed Iraqis with bombs and
bullets.”[32] A tone of feminist
triumph, verging on blood thirst, even pervades reports of the deaths of
America's female soldiers themselves.
For the Blue media, the fact that more women have died in Iraq than in
any American war in the last century occasions far less grief and dismay than
pleasure and satisfaction over the mortuary evidence that we have reached “a
historic moment” in gender equality.[33]
The Blue media seem to take it as a kind of social accomplishment that
an unprecedented number of “female American troops in Iraq...[have been] killed by
enemy fire and buried as heroes in Arlington National Cemetery.”[34] So determined are the feminist Blue
media to see progress in the female military role in Iraq, that they apparently
see “women gain[ing] ground” even when that ground is the soil shoveled over
female soldiers' coffins.[35]
Blue
feminist commentators have particularly celebrated—even exulted in-the
battlefield death of 23-year-old supply clerk Lori Piestewa, the first Native
American woman ever to die in foreign combat. Killed in the same military action in which Jessica Lynch
was taken captive, this economically struggling single mother of two young
children has been the focal point of numerous laudatory media reports about her
as an exemplary “Hopi warrior.”
She has had a mountain peak in Arizona re-named for her and now holds a
place in the women's military memorial at Arlington.[36] But for the progressive
Blue media, “the best way to honor [Piestewa] would be to remove the
prohibition on women in combat.”[37] Never mind that the death of Piestewa itself
resulted from the previous Clinton-era success of feminist ideologues crusading
for the removal of restrictions on combat involvement of female soldiers. Blue America apparently does not mind
that Piestewa never herself asked for exposure to battlefield danger that would
imperil her life. Nor does it
bother Blue America that putting women into front-line combat roles cruelly
contradicts the pacific Hopi traditions in which Piestewa was reared. And Blue America seems utterly blind to
the plight of Piestewa's two young children, left now with no parent to care
for them.
But
while Blue America seizes upon Piestewa's tragic death as a wonderful
opportunity to press for policies drawing young mothers more deeply into deadly
combat, Red America laments Piestewa's passing and worries deeply about the
difficult circumstances her children will face. Consequently, while Blue America applauds mothers killed in
combat as gender revolutionaries, Red America calls for renewed protection of
these women in their traditional maternal roles. Historian Allan Carlson thus spoke for the deepest feelings
of Red America when he responded to Piestewa's death by decrying the policies
that put her in harm's way: “Healthy, responsible nations do not send the
mothers of small children to or near the front lines—that violates the most
basic human instincts.”[38] Another
voice for Red America, conservative columnist Linda Chavez marveled at the
social blindness of Blue Americans who could not see the special tragedy of a
single mother such as Piestewa: “As tragic as the death of a father is in a
young child's life, it simply can't compare to the loss of a mother.”[39]
What
Chavez—and other Red Americans like her—cannot quite grasp is that when Blue
ideologues celebrate rather than mourn the battlefield death of military
mothers such as Piestewa, it is precisely because they despise motherhood,
precisely because they despise the traditional family. It is motherhood and all
the other traditional family roles assigned to women that Blue ideologues most
want to kill. So when single
mothers die in battle, these ideologues hope above all that traditional family
roles are perishing with them. So
while Red America fervently wages a war against terrorism in order to defend
motherhood and family, the ideologues of Blue America reserve their fervor for
those aspects of the war that can be turned against motherhood and family.
Of
course, Blue feminists understand that not all of the American women they want
to coax, persuade, or push into non-family social roles will need to face
battlefield danger. But advancing
the Blue feminist project for re-making American society does require putting
ever more women into the unmarried social status shared by Lynch and Piestewa. For it is deep hostility to wedlock and
the complementary social roles that have traditionally defined it that explains
much of the Blue media's enthusiasm for female soldiers, very few of whom are
married and none of whom are dependent upon husbands for economic support. As one of the more candid authorities
in Women's Studies, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese well understands the anti-marital
dynamics of Blue feminist psychology. “If truth be told,” Fox-Genovese has written,
“...feminists do not much
like marriage. Indeed, many
feminists would credit marriage with a primary responsibility for women's
centuries-long subordination to men.... Second-wave feminists ...sought not
marriage's reform but...its abolition.”[40]
But
the Blue feminist project of undermining wedlock does not in itself make women
economically independent. Particularly
if they become mothers, unmarried women need income and support from some
surrogate. As economist Jennifer
Roback Morse has pointed out, the “single mother” is almost always a myth: “Some third party is always in the background, helping the mother who is
unconnected to the father of her child.... The person who appears to be raising a
child all by herself has substituted for the other parent some combination of
market-provided child care, employment income, and government assistance.”[41] It is, of course, the militarized State
that looms large as a surrogate parent in the lives of the tens of thousands of
single mothers now in the military, relying on the armed forces for a paycheck
and on the growing number of feminist-lauded military day-care centers for
child care.[42]
But
the fatherless families of single military mothers are actually only one
manifestation of “the mother-state-child family” that Blue ideologues would
like to multiply in their social engineering of the country. True, sociologists typically have in
view welfare-dependent mothers when they speak of “the mother-state-child
family.”[43]
But the family of the single military mother answers well to the same label.
And even single mothers who receive benefits neither from a welfare office or a
military paymaster are often noticeably dependent upon the State to subsidize
the care of their young children, to supervise the after-school activities of
their older children, to collect child support from former lovers or husbands,
and to advance their careers through Affirmative Action and Equal Opportunity
programs. Is it any wonder that Blue America is distinctively supportive
of Big Government?[44]
Blue
America's partisan support for Big Government lends piquant irony to Blue
criticisms of the Bush Administration for advancing a costly “neo-imperialism”
that benefits profiteering corporations and jeopardizes human rights by sending
the military abroad. For with
every year it becomes clearer that Blue ideologues are building their own
fiefdoms here at home, fiefdoms that grow rich and powerful by first attacking
the “little platoons” of the family and then supplying palliative services to
the rootless and legally disenfranchised remnants of those platoons.
Except
when focusing on the female soldiers involved in its prosecution, Blue
ideologues have voiced numerous fears about the negative domestic and
international consequences of the war against terrorism. The Blue media are greatly worried
about “the soaring costs of the war in Iraq” and how those costs will affect
the American economy.[45] Some of these ideologues have expressed suspicions that
as a result of the war in Iraq, “American corporations will colonize Iraq, and
they'll make billions of dollars in the process.”[46] These Blue activists have discerned dark ulterior motives
behind the official justifications for foreign campaigns against
terrorism. They see the Bush
Administration using the military to establish an Iraqi regime that will “guarantee
unfettered American access and influence,” a puppet regime under which “the
United States will unilaterally assume responsibility for decisions that will
determine the future course of Iraq's oil and gas industries.”[47] Some Blue radicals even darkly suggest
that the real reason for the invasion of Afghanistan was that of installing a
puppet regime that would permit U.S. interests to build an oil pipeline through
the country.[48]
Mainstream
Blue media commentators have, it is true, generally not endorsed the more
sweeping and ideological accusations allegations of corporate imperialism. But the captains of the Blue media have
zealously pressed charges of wartime profiteering leveled against the
Halliburton Corporation (former employer of the Vice President, Dick Cheney),
so fostering the impressing that America is now “fighting Halliburton's
War.”[49] What is more, the
mainstream Blue media have frequently opened their forums to radicals
characterizing the war against terrorism as merely a cover for neo-imperialism
and warning that such imperialism will bring upon America “the sorrows of
Empire,” including “a state of perpetual war” and “a loss of democracy and
constitutional rights.”[50] Far from
protecting America, the war in Iraq serves—in the view of Blue critics—”only
[to] create more terrorists and a more dangerous world for our children.”[51]
These Blue critics decry the way abusive military guards have violated the
rights of foreign prisoners and the way overzealous national security agents
fighting the war against terrorism here at home have violated the rights of
American citizens, especially Arab Americans.[52]
With
ceaseless vigilance, Blue ideologues point out the high costs and political
liabilities of a Big Government that tries to defend American families by sending (male)
soldiers to fight terrorism abroad or empowers security agents to guard against
terrorist strikes at home. But
these same Blue ideologues turn blind and mute when Big Government tries to weaken American families by paying a huge army
of bureaucrats, lawyers, judges, and therapists to undermine traditional family
ties and to supplant them with new politically engineered ties. Blue ideologues recognize
“the sorrows
of empire” when the American military effects the hegemony of American
interests over foreign interests.
They somehow cannot see the sorrows of empire when an American court or
bureaucracy establishes an ideological fiefdom in which a partisan coterie
takes unjust advantage of—and often dismembers—ordinary families.
Thus
Blue commentators complaining about the high costs to the taxpayer of putting
men in Iraq will never complain about the rapidly escalating public costs of
putting children in day care, of putting state officers on staff to collect
child support, of putting lawyers on retainer to speak on behalf of children
involved in divorce proceedings, or of putting more corrections officers into
youth correction centers. These
Blue commentators will indeed only rarely acknowledge the way in which casual
divorce and out-of-wedlock childbearing has driven up the public costs of
providing Americans with welfare benefits, medical and psychological care,
remedial education, drug therapy, and protection from crime.[53] Blue ideologues may allege that
America's foreign wars serve to set up puppet foreign regimes serving the
interests of profiteering corporations; they will rarely acknowledge that in
the endless ideological war against the family, single mothers have become mere
puppets for “those who ha[ve] made an industry of ‘helping them.”[54] (Just how much they had become puppets
of Blue government bureaucrats came as something of a shock to some single
welfare mothers when welfare reform suddenly forced them into employment. They suddenly discovered that they were
as subject to the orders of government masters as female soldiers were subject
to orders of military commanders. Poor single mothers who felt their children
were “too young” to leave in day care while they went to work found that they
were in much the same situation as single military mothers on orders to leave
for Iraq.[55] But Blue commentators
who never cared much about the disappearance of fathers have not worried
overmuch about taking welfare mothers away from their children: Blue pundits have pronounced welfare
reform “largely successful,” while still complaining about the low pay in the
jobs welfare mothers typically must take and calling for more public funding
for pre-employment training, for housing and medical care, and—above all—for
day care.[56] A renewed appreciation
for wedlock and for maternal child care has never been part of the Blue
critique of welfare reform.)
The
Blue media often complain that conservative Republicans are “playing politics”
with the War on Terror as they engage in “scare-mongering” that wins them
votes.[57] The Blue media never
suggest that liberal Democrats are finding political advantage in excusing the
divorces and non-marital childbirths and full-time maternal employment that
make women more feminist (and therefore more Blue).[58] Nor do the Blue media criticize politicians whose political
fortunes rise when policies encourage young people to cut their ties to family
and to “shift allegiance increasingly to themselves and to the
State.”[59] The Blue media
frequently air suspicions about contracts granted to corporations linked to
conservative Republicans. The Blue
media remain mute about the cozy ties between feminist politicians and the
public bureaucracies that have become “almost a woman's preserve.”[60]
Blue
editorialists inveigh against Bush Administration policies that helped foster
the abuse of Afghan and Iraqi prisoners at Guantanamo Bay and Abu
Ghraib.[61] But they never
acknowledge that policies that foster divorce and illegitimacy also foster the
abuse of American children in Detroit, Philadelphia, and Atlanta.[62] Nor do the Blue intelligentsia
acknowledge that the programs they favor for preventing child abuse—namely,
educational programs in the schools—yield no demonstrable benefits and yet
“overload children with suspicion and fear” in ways that “adversely affect
[them] in their comfort with nonsexual contact between themselves and their
parents.”[63] The Blue media blame Bush's invasion of Iraq for
“chaos in the streets” of Baghdad. The Blue media rarely acknowledge that
the root cause of “the wave of black inner-city male violence that began
building during the 1960s and 1970s...was the decline of stable two-parent
families.”[64]
Blue
guardians of the First Amendment complain that the Bush Administration has
tried to censor and manipulate media coverage of the war against terrorism,
thus “prevent[ing] the American people from seeing the truth about what's
happening.”[65] No Blue watchdogs
worry about the way a left-leaning professoriate enforces a “family taboo” that
prevents young students from even considering the possibility that “the nuclear
family proves the best unit of social well-being.”[66]
In
the Bush Administration's handling of Afghan and Iraqi prisoners, Blue
commentators see policies “allowing the war on terrorism to trump basic rights”
and court proceedings that “d[o]n't look anything like justice” and instead
suggest “kangaroo courts.” Some
Blue media writers have even described “a legal black hole” in proceedings that
pronounce prisoners “‘guilty' without any trial.” Even in its legal proceedings involving American citizens,
Blue critics accuse the Bush Administration of “open hostility to protecting
civil liberties” and of committing “egregious governmental abuses of power, all
in the name of combating terrorism.”[67]
But Americans may well wonder just where all these Blue defenders of
legal rights have been the last three decades when anti-family politicians,
judges, and bureaucrats have stripped wives and husbands, mothers and fathers
of many fundamental legal protections.
True,
on rare occasions, a Blue commentator has protested against the way permissive
no-fault divorce statutes have impoverished betrayed wives denied the economic
settlement and alimony that traditional divorce law would have given them.[68]
But where are the Blue guardians of legal rights who have ever decried the way
new divorce laws have scripted a scenario in which “a blameless father ...emerges
from divorce courts with all the financial responsibilities of marriage and
none of its emotional or economic rewards,” as he is “saddled with children
whom he never sees and who may even have been turned against him”?[69] Where are the Blue defenders of civil
rights ready to denounce the legally abusive bureaucracy collecting child
support (almost exclusively from non-custodial fathers, many of whom did not
want to lose wife or children and did nothing to violate their wedding
vows)? Judging from their
thundering silence on the issue, Americans can only assume that Blue legal
theorists see nothing wrong with a bureaucracy that treats divorced fathers as
“quasi-criminals,” monitors their employment through computerized system
allowing “the government [to] keep closer tabs on where everyone is
working,” and adopts a presumption of
guilt under which thousands of innocent men are “erroneously ensnared by
computer error,” and then are forced to prove their innocence.[70]
The
vocal Blue champions of the legal rights of Afghans and Iraqis imprisoned in
the war against terrorism have likewise been utterly silent about the
judicial-bureaucratic apparatus that has forced tens of thousands of blameless
parents into costly court proceedings to prove their innocence and regain
custody of their children. For all
of their solicitude for imprisoned Afghans and Iraqis and for all their outrage
over the legal defects in the way they have been handled, Blue commentators
seem remarkably insouciant about a national child-abuse system that “seems
determined to err on the side of assuming [parental] guilt” and that
consequently devastates “increasing numbers of families falsely accused of
abuse.” The same Blue media who
have roundly denounced the erosion of civil rights in the war against terrorism
have said almost nothing about the emergence of a child-protection system marred
by “a bias toward over-reporting and over-labeling child abuse and neglect” and
by legal proceedings conducted entirely without “the legal system's traditional
truth-finding tools-witness confrontation, cross examination, restrictions on
hearsay and ‘expert' opinion.'”[71]
Apparently, Blue ideologues care much more about Afghans captured in Kandahar or Iraqis taken in Mosul than about parents falsely accused of abuse
in Denver or Indianapolis.
In
Afghanistan and Iraq, along the nation's borders and in its courtrooms, the war
against terrorism will go on.
Unfortunately, it promises to last a long time and to make demands upon
all Americans. But let no one
suppose that in their objectives or their hopes, the ordinary family-loving
citizens of Red America will be fighting the same war as the ideologues of the
Blue confederacy.
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