Hugh Hewitt's got a blog. At the moment, he's taking apart Robert Scheer of the LA Crimes Times. Glenn Reynolds and Roger Simon (and a host of others) also administer well-deserved lumps to Scheer, who seems to have swallowed whole the BBC story asserting that Jessica Lynch's rescue was a staged event, complete with blanks and flash-bangs to make it look neat, thereby drawing even more support for the war from a gullible public."We were surprised," Dr. Anmar Uday told the BBC about the supposed rescue. "There was no military, there were no soldiers in the hospital. It was like a Hollywood film. [The U.S. forces] cried 'Go, go, go,' with guns and blanks without bullets, blanks and the sound of explosions," Uday said. "They made a show for the American attack on the hospital — [like] action movies [starring] Sylvester Stallone or Jackie Chan."
The footage from the raid, shot not by journalists but by soldiers with night-vision cameras, was fed in real time to the central command in Qatar. The video was artfully edited by the Pentagon and released as proof that a battle to free Lynch had occurred when it had not.
This fabrication has already been celebrated by an A&E special and will soon be an NBC movie. The Lynch rescue story — a made-for-TV bit of official propaganda — will probably survive as the war's most heroic moment, despite proving as fictitious as the stated rationales for the invasion itself.
If the movies, books and other renditions of "saving Private Lynch" were to be honestly presented, it would expose this caper as merely one in a series of egregious lies marketed to us by the Bush administration. Beebs had already begun backing off the story by the time Scheer bought it, making him look even more mendacious (Andrew Sullivan's term, I believe) than usual, which is difficult. It's amusing to watch the process, and Scheer certainly deserves the bruising, but I think by now most people put him in the same class as Maureen Dowd — they're not analyzing anything, not producing real thought, they just hate Bush. And the rest of us had better straighten up, too. |