Peeve Farm

g r o t t o 1 1

Peeve Farm
Breeding peeves for show, not just to keep as pets

Brian Tiemann
Silicon Valley-based purveyor of a confusing mixture of Apple punditry and political bile.

btman at grotto11 dot com

Read These Too:

InstaPundit
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James Lileks
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As the Apple Turns
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Cold Fury
Capitalist Lion
Red Letter Day
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Tal G in Jerusalem
Secular Islam
Aziz Poonawalla
Corsair the Rational Pirate
.clue
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Cartago Delenda Est

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Monday, June 20, 2005
11:32 - All propaganda, all the time	(top)
Now I know why, when Narsai David does his "Food News" segments on KCBS every hour, he no longer ends each one by saying the tagline "KCBS All News 74". And it's not just because they're saying "740" now, moving away from the old and not-very-explicable tendency for AM stations to call themselves by their frequency in tens of kilohertz, whatever sense that ever made. It's because KCBS can't really claim to be a 100% "news" station anymore. Oh, sure, they pipe in the CBS News feed every hour. But if what I heard on Saturday night, driving up the Central Valley from the wedding in San Juan Capistrano long after midnight, is any indication, well... all I can say is that it's a shame. It used to be such a great news source. For the three hours that I listened, as the dark fields swooshed past and distant fires burned, KCBS flogged the Downing Street Memos, saying over and over how they "proved" something evil and nefarious about Bush and the war, though they were oddly coy about explaining exactly what, or about quoting them verbatim. They repeatedly played a clip of a BBC anchorwoman who summarized the memos' scandalizing contents thus: "The memos show that the Bush Administration had been planning war with Iraq as early as the spring of 2002." Shock, horror. Guys, we knew by the end of that week in the middle of September 2001 that we would be invading Iraq. Remember that? Remember how we all thought we'd have taken out Syria, Iran, and Saudi Arabia too by now? Once we'd come to terms with the idea that the solution to Arab/Islamic terrorism was to reform the Arab/Islamic world, we knew�or at least some of us knew�that it was pretty much an all-or-nothing affair. Some countries would reform voluntarily; some would require military intervention. But fighting a War on Terror with Saddam still in power�whether he had any WMDs currently in his possession or not�was simply not an option. This was Saddam Hussein. He would have done all he could to thwart us, and he was long overdue for a tumble�besides, a free and US-friendly Iraq would be a huge positive first step toward the rest of the war we knew we'd have to fight, one that would make the remainder a ton easier. We all understood this. Why is it such a huge scandalous surprise now? KCBS even interviewed Joe Wilson, who has a new book out all about this scandal (I guess his publisher gave him two weeks to write it�blast, my record has been blown open!); and it was almost farcical, listening to the CBS interviewer prod him again and again to give them a juicy bite o' sound they could play over and over once the sun came up: CBS: What is your personal impression of George Bush? Wilson: Well, I don't know the man, personally, so I can't say how I feel about his character... (later) CBS: If you could tell us what your personal impression is of George Bush� Wilson: As I said, I don't know him personally, so I can't give you a good personal impression... CBS: His administration, then. Wilson: Well, then I can say that this is the most obstinate, secretive, and authoritarian Presidency that I've seen in all my thirty years in Washington. Thank you. End interview. End story. And if you thought CBS would, you know, bring in someone from the other side of the aisle to, y'know, rebut Wilson's chest-puffing claims that he had made all these BUSH LIED!!!!111 claims a year ago, and now the memos "proved" him right, blah blah blah�to, perhaps, explain that anyone who is surprised to discover that the White House had plans to invade Iraq back in early 2002 had apparently been asleep throughout the entirety of the 1990s, when calls for toppling Saddam were a matter of daily discourse from college campuses to Comedy Central�well, get used to disappointment. Confuse the listener with multiple viewpoints? Bah! We'll tell listeners what to think. Surety makes them feel more comfortable than having to make up their own minds. Don't give people contextual information that might help them decide for themselves whether Guantanamo has any resemblance to the Cambodian killing fields or Auschwitz; don't point out that the worst the Gitmo guards are accused of doing is kicking a book, which some might regard as notably less objectionable an offense than, say, clipping off people's fingers with gardening shears or forcing them to drink motor oil. No, "Invasion of Personal Space by Female" has such a compelling symmetry with "Rape Room" that it's just too good not to use. Remember, we're living in a Nazi dictatorship, so we elites in the mass media have to get the subversive message out, somehow, so the people are informed but so the goons don't smash down our doors. Wait! Look at all this huge broadcasting equipment we have. Let's use that! It's getting so I can't even trust Narsai David anymore not to be giving us recipes that rob us of our precious bodily fluids.