Putting in the Boot

Tool extraordinaire Max Boot joins the chorus of nutters demanding the incarceration of Pulitzer Prize winners:

It is hard to see how media apologists can deny their political bias when no fewer than four prizes were given at least in part for Bush-bashing. These included awards to Mike Luckovich, the left-wing cartoonist of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, who routinely portrays President Bush as a malevolent dolt, and Robin Givhan, the catty fashion critic of the Washington Post, who devoted an entire column to ridiculing Vice President Dick Cheney's attire at an Auschwitz ceremony.

There's nothing wrong with caustic criticism, but two of the award winners went further, into areas that may hamper our battle against Islamist terrorism. The Washington Post's Dana Priest won a prize for revealing the existence of secret CIA-operated prisons in Eastern Europe, and the New York Times' James Risen and Eric Lichtblau won for revealing the existence of a secret program to intercept communications between terrorists abroad and their domestic contacts.

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Los Angeles Times media columnist Tim Rutten, in defending the Pulitzers, claimed that critics "don't want an unbiased news media, they want a press that reflects their bias."

Right. I want journalists to cover the present struggle as a fight between good and evil. And when the good guys — that would be U.S. officials — say that certain revelations would help the bad guys, I want them to be given the benefit of the doubt. So, I suspect, do most Americans.

Right. Y'see, Max, when the "good guys" lie, are serial (and openly proud) law-breakers, and use the threat of prison against those who point this out they are, by definition, not "good guys".

Really, Max, this isn't a difficult concept to grasp. Unless, of course, you value the rule of one man over the rule of law. There's a word for that: dictatorship.

And surely you don't want a dictatorship, do you Max? Right? Right?


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