Guided by the Beauty of Our Weapons
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Here’s perhaps an even more egregious example of the phenomenon Paul wrote about yesterday, courtesy of Brian Williams:
The footage, provided by the Pentagon, showed several Tomahawk missiles launching from U.S. Navy destroyers in the Mediterranean Sea, illuminating the decks of the ships and leaving long trails of smoke in the night sky.
It was a sight that seemed to dazzle Williams, who described the images as “beautiful” in a segment on his show, “The 11th Hour.”“We see these beautiful pictures at night from the decks of these two U.S. Navy vessels in the eastern Mediterranean,” Williams said. “I am tempted to quote the great Leonard Cohen: ‘I am guided by the beauty of our weapons.’”
“They are beautiful pictures of fearsome armaments making what is for them what is a brief flight over to this airfield,” he added, then asked his guest, “What did they hit?”
In 2000, George W. Bush became president in substantial measure because the media, erroneously perceiving nothing much of substance to be a stake, was relentlessly focused on inane and sometimes made-up trivia about the candidate of the incumbent party. We can safely say the lesson was not learned, although the Bush administration was a catastrophic failure. The most catastrophic failure of all was the Iraq War, which the mainstream media cheerleaded uncritically. The airstrikes against Syria being greeted by claims that this is making Trump even more PRESIDENTIAL than the time he pulled off the remarkably PRESIDENTIAL act of reading sentences off of a teleprompter without literally drooling would seem to suggest that the lessons of the Iraq War haven’t been learned either. Hopefully we can at least get to the bottom of Hillary Clinton’s email server.