Why CNN Sucks as Much as Fox News

Napoleon, Moscow; GW Bush, Baghdad: Why CNN Sucks as Much as Fox News

Americans love history but make no pretense of understanding or appreciating it.

Anyone who has ever read War and Peace knows what happens when you conquer a distant foreign capital for all the wrong reasons: you get a great trophy to hang on the wall (some people must have saved copies of GWB on the deck of the warship acting like a stud, claiming the war was over), and you end up losing things far more important than the war you think you just won.

At Borodino, Napoleon behaved just the way he was expected to, sending his army into the Russians, chewing them up, cutting them down, while the Russians died, fought back, and began the retreat to Moscow.

The U.S. rolled into Baghdad like a bus coming down Broadway, sweeping the opposition aside and acting important.

What have we got to show for it? About what Napoleon ended up with: a burned, toxic, tragic city that killed his soldiers one by one.

His retreat from Moscow is one of the tragic epics of military history. Men and horses died for every mile. Crops and villages were destroyed. Everyone’s future was compromised, none more than Napoleon’s.

The retreat from Baghdad has left America in a position where, to many of us, Donald Trump appeared to be the lesser evil. That alone shows how far we have fallen.

France has never again been a military power that anyone needed to concern themselves with, which in the Bush era became the root of nasty Franco-detestation which went so far that some knuckleheads tried to re-name French fries “Freedom Fries,” which of course did not work.

America probably peaked as a military power during the devastating bombing on the night of March 19, 2003, when we showed how tough we were by destroying a defenseless city on the entirely fictitious grounds that it possessed frightening weapons. The only frightening weapons on display that night, or anywhere in Iraq since then, were ours.

The fact that the Islamic State now uses some of those weapons to harass and attack innocent people is our modern equivalent to the French army in retreat across Russia, eating their horses, eating gophers and rats, sucking on marrow bones, finally starving in the snow and falling dead in their tracks.

The failure to admit that ISIS is a result of Bush’s invasion is blindness of a high order.

Tolstoy’s afterword to War and Peace is a long meditation on how easily truth is distorted, and the peculiar reasons for this distortion. Those who fight the battles know the truth, but can’t repeat it. Those who don’t fight the battles know only a distortion of the truth and have trouble accepting the unexpurgated version.

Everything we think we know about 9-1-1 is a lie. Everything we think we know about Operation Mission Accomplished is a big, fat lie.

You may see the revolution on television, if you care to look, but you won’t find much truth. CNN was as guilty as Fox News of accepting the lies handed to them from government officials without any sort of critical analysis in 2002 and 2003, which is one reason I laugh when my rightwing relatives refer to the cable outlet as socialist or liberal. If anything, they are bland capitalist opportunists, trying to cash in. Hoping to find a political conscience or consciousness there is like looking for truffles in a sand box.

#Napoleon #Iraq #moscow