Tag: CNN

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At Large Opinion

No Ifs, Ands, and Bots

It was not obvious that something could go wrong. (Photo: Devidgrutz | Dreamstime.com)

I was shocked and dismayed recently at the most unlikely of places: a company lunch. I don’t get to the physical office much these days, so a co-worker kindly brought my mail to the get-together. Imagine my horror when four of the letters turned out to be hate mail, each criticizing a different column I’d written in the past few weeks.

The person who wrote the letters didn’t sign them (shocker), but it got me to thinking — maybe I’ve been too harsh lately. Maybe I need to tone down the rhetoric a bit. My wife, who’s much more tuned into the zeitgeist than me, suggested I try one of those new AI bots designed to help writers fine-tune their prose. I thought, why not?

After downloading a popular AI program, I submitted this week’s column to my new digital editor. It bleeped once and told me my options were: Proofread this but only fix grammar; Proofread this strongly; Proofread this lightly, improving clarity and flow; Proofread this significantly, improving clarity and flow. I went for the latter — I mean, why do things halfway? It was a revelation! What follows are samples of the column, followed by the digitally edited version in italics:

Just exactly what level of greed did it take to impel CNN to give twice-impeached, serial philandering, tax-cheating, insurrection-leading, secret-document-stealing, election-tampering, lying douchebag Donald Trump an hour of free television to spew his lies in a “town hall”?

Hello, fellow humans. This week’s column (by me) in the Memphis Flyer newspaper is about the CNN cable television network’s decision to hold an hour-long Town Hall on May 10th with Donald Trump, the former (2016-2020) president of the United States (the country in which we both reside). I think this is a bad idea.

This is the kind of unmitigated media avarice that got us Trump in the first place. From the moment the former president descended on that damned escalator to announce his candidacy in 2015, the television networks swooned, thrilled to learn that letting an orange-colored, poofy-haired, former reality-TV star spout racist, misogynistic garbage and lie his ass off made for stratospheric television ratings. Trump was the golden boy, and the networks gave their viewers wall-to-wall coverage of the candidate from that point forward, raking in unheard of levels of ad revenue all the while. What could go wrong?

When Donald Trump announced his candidacy in 2015, he rode an escalator down two levels. Television networks covered the event — which got excellent ratings — and continued to broadcast coverage of Mr. Trump for many hours a day throughout the campaign for the 2016 presidency. During this period, Mr. Trump made many controversial statements, which raised viewership levels and allowed television networks to earn high profits. It was not obvious that something could go wrong.

CNN says it will have a moderator for the town hall, but that Trump will answer direct questions from the audience, which, according to a network spokesperson, will include “Republicans and other voters.” In other words, Trump will have free rein to continue to lie about the 2020 election, the January 6th insurrection, those missing official documents, his rape trial, President Biden, the “Russia hoax,” and whatever other stream-of-consciousness fantasies erupt from his addled cortex. Awesome stuff, CNN!

CNN has announced that Mr. Trump will answer questions from members of the Republican Party and other voters. There will be a moderator for the discussion, topics for which are expected to include the 2020 election, the January 6th event at the U.S. Capitol, the handling of official government documents, and other possibly controversial subjects. CNN is awesome.

Fact-checking Trump in real-time is like standing under Niagara Falls with a bucket and expecting to keep your shoes dry. It can’t be done. He uses his mouth like an AR-15, and his lies are the bullets. Letting this ass wander around a stage with a microphone and a national television audience will only further normalize this dangerously aberrant behavior. Simply put, it’s journalistic malpractice, CNN. And I have two words for you: “You’re fired!”

No errors detected.

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News News Blog

TN Lawmaker Wants CNN, WaPo Labelled as “Fake News”

CREDIT: Micah Van Huss/Twitter

Micah Van Huss/Twitter

Today a real Tennessee state House committee will hear a real House Joint Resolution from a real Tennessee House member to label CNN and The Washington Post as “fake news.”

On the agenda for the real Constitutional Protections and Sentencing Subcommittee, is HJR 0079 by Rep. Micah Van Huss (R-Jonesborough).

Here is exactly what the resolution would do:

“Resolves to recognize CNN and The Washington Post as fake news and part of the media wing of the Democratic Party, and further resolves to condemn such media outlets for denigrating our citizens and implying that they are weak-minded followers instead of people exercising their rights that our veterans paid for with their blood.”
[pullquote-1] Van Huss explained the resolution to conservative talk show host (and self-proclaimed Memphian) Todd Starnes, on his podcast, “the ToddCast.” Van Huss said the resolution stems from reports last fall from both news outlets that labeled supporters of President Donald Trump as “part of a cult.”

TN Lawmaker Wants CNN, WaPo Labelled as ‘Fake News’

Further, Van Huss said CNN recently “mocked Trump supporters for being rude, basically as hayseed hicks.” Van Huss said in 2016 that more than 60 percent of Tennesseans voted for Trump.

“My constituents are tired of these elitists in the media for denigrating them,” Van Huss told Starnes. “They’re tired of Republicans who don’t fight.”

Van Huss said his Republican colleagues in Nashville were “excited” about the legislation and that he is “looking forward to making this statement on behalf of all Tennesseans.”

TN Lawmaker Wants CNN, WaPo Labelled as ‘Fake News’ (2)

Some northeast Tennessee lawmakers told Bristol, Virginia’s WCYB News 5 that the resolution isn’t necessary.

The resolution has 13 House co-sponsors, including Rep. Andy Holt (R-Dresden).

Categories
News The Fly-By

Fly on the Wall 1487

The Killer

On Sunday, CNN reported that the fire in Jerry Lee Lewis’ great balls had finally been extinguished. Sun Records’ piano-pounding problem child was dead at the tender age of 91.

Improbable as it may seem, Lewis, a notorious hell-raiser who’s already outlived label-mates like Elvis Presley, Carl Perkins, Johnny Cash, Roy Orbison, etc. is still very much alive and only 81 to boot. CNN got the name wrong. It was actually Jerry Lewis, America’s great cinematic clown and mighty lion of the Labor Day telethon who’d gone on to headline that big casino in the sky.

The badly titled obit went viral soon after it went live thanks to the cable news channel’s army of sworn enemies (aka Trump voters) who shared contempt on social media with posts saying, “Oh Wow! They are so used to reporting #FakeNews, when they have a real item to report, they can’t do it. Why are they still on the air?”

and …

“The Clown News Network reports Jerry Lee Lewis died, not Jerry Lewis. These people are the fake news kings. Utterly corrupt and incompetent.”

It’s a pretty ridiculous screw-up and the sort of thing Fly on the Wall would normally make fun of, too. But sometimes an error is just an error and not the CNNd of times.

Categories
Politics Politics Beat Blog

In The Age Of Trump, Remember The Killian Documents

As news organizations and the public struggle to come to grips with salacious new information about Donald Trump contained in a 35-page dossier released this wee by Buzzfeed, it’s a good time to think back to the 2004 campaign between John Kerry and George W. Bush.

Early in that year, The Memphis Flyer’s Jackson Baker broke a story alleging that then-President George W. Bush had, back in the 1970s, taken unauthorized leave of an Alabama Air National Guard unit that he had sought a transfer to from his regular Texas Guard unit in order to spend time working on a political campaign.

This information was an open secret among the former Alabama Air Guard members that Baker used as his sources. Indeed, several of them had heard of the forthcoming transfer to their unit of Bush, son of the prominent political figure and future President George H.W. Bush, and a Guard pilot whose well-deserved reputation as a hell-raiser had traveled far and wide in Guard circles.

These pilots had actively awaited his coming. But, three of them told Baker categorically and for the record, Lt. George W. Bush had never turned up at any point for the entire year of his supposed assignment to their
Guard base. Meanwhile, there was no dearth of Bush-sightings during the ongoing (and ultimately losing) U.S. Senate campaign, elsewhere in Alabama, of Bush-family friend Winton “Red” Blount.

Though rumors of Bush’s year-long no-show at the Alabama air base had been floating about the Internet, Baker’s Flyer story first put the concept, and the concrete first-person evidence for it, firmly into the public record, and thus set the stage for the remarkable series of events that followed.

As the 2004 campaign ground on, neither Bush nor Kerry was able to gain a clear advantage. Then, in September, Democrats got a gift: CBS TV’s 60 Minutes 2 obtained letters from Texas Air Guard commander Col. Jerry B. Killian that seemingly provided further documentary evidence of the allegations against Bush.

Democrats trumpeted the new evidence, presented by Dan Rather himself, as proof that the Commander-In-Chief was unfit for office. But within days, the story began to unravel. Commenters on internet message boards attached to conservative blogs Little Green Footballs and Powerline quickly produced convincing evidence that the Killian Documents were forgeries.

For weeks, the internet and news media were consumed with discussions of the minutiae of the command structure of 1970’s air units and the capabilities of vintage typewriters. Eventually, CBS acknowledged that the Killian Document were likely forged. Dan Rather lost his job, and George W. Bush was reelected.

After the election, not much thought was given to the provenance of the Killian Documents or what effect they had on the course of history. The source of the apparent forgery was never uncovered. But who would produce a forgery like this, and why? And how did semi-anonymous internet commenters know exactly where to look for proof of a forgery when experts CBS hired thought they were authentic?

Surely,Republicans argued, the forgery was done by political opponents of President Bush to discredit him during a tight election. But there was another interpretation of the story. What if the Killian Documents were forged by someone in the Bush campaign — a couple of famous (or infamous) Dirty Tricksters come to mind — and selectively leaked to Rather’s producers at 60 Minutes?

Then, when Rather took the bait, the debunking information was leaked to Bush’s supporters, who amplified it across their numerous media channels., eventually discrediting the campaign’s most hostile media source on television. Regardless, the reveal of the Killian Documents was to shift public debate away from Bush’s character — and the first-evidence evidence of his dereliction from Alabama Air Guard pilots — and onto the truth or untruth of the documents themselves

The publication by Buzzfeed of the new intelligence dossier filled with shocking accusations about Donald Trump’s financial ties to Russia and the possibility that Putin’s intelligence agency the FSB has sexually explicit blackmail material on the Republican has thrown the country into an uproar. But there are enough parallels to the Killian Documents incident to raise red flags for the news consumer and publisher alike.

First, the Killian documents and the Trump dossier both told Democrats and other critics exactly what they wanted to hear at a time when they were most desperate to hear it. Accusations that Trump paid Russian prostitutes to pee on the bed President Obama had once slept in were like catnip to Democrats and the left. Left-leaning social media has been a golden shower of pee jokes for going on 48 hours now.

Second, claims that the dossier was forged popped up on the anonymous message board 4chan within hours of Buzzfeed’s publication. Third, as the story gets bogged down in minutiae and side avenues, the central topic of discussion—is Trump fatally compromised by Russian intelligence?—is being pushed aside in favor of profiles of Christopher Steele, the MI6 agent who allegedly compiled the dossier, amid speculation about the authenticity of the most malicious claims.

The dossier had been passed around to major media outlets for months, all of whom — perhaps having learned the lessons of the Killian Documents — decided not to publish before the issue of authenticity could be verified. After the existence of the dossier was mentioned in a footnote to the CIA/FBI/NSA briefing to Obama, Trump, and Congress on Russian interference in the election, CNN reported on the existence of the docs and Buzzfeed jumped at the chance for a scoop, thus opening the media floodgates.

If the dossier is indeed a black propaganda operation designed to take the heat off Trump, it’s well designed, as were the Killian “letters.” Col. Killian’s son described the contents and form of the apparently forged letters from his father as askillful mixture of truth and fiction.

Associating the really important information about Trump — that, inadvertently or otherwise, he’s a possible Russian intelligence asset about to assume the office of the Presidency — with false information appealing to the preconceptions of his political opponents could have the net effect of neutralizing the issue of potential treasonous behavior with his supporters and the media at large.

Even more dangerously, sewing doubt as to the authenticity of the mainstream news outlets reporting on the story opens up new lines of attack for the Trump team. Already, the President-elect has used the story to accuse CNN of being “fake news”, a term originally coined to describe amateur propaganda designed as Facebook clickbait

Strategic uses of forgeries is nothing new to the world’s intelligence agencies. The Protocols Of The Elders of Zion was a widely circulated fake manuscript produced by Tsarist Russia’s secret police to justify the prosecution of Jews at the turn of the 20th century, for example. In 2002, the Niger Uranium documents were proved to be forgeries designed to help push the US into invading Iraq.

Yet the media and the left remain in deep denial about the nature of CIA and KGB-derived gambits they are facing. The 2015 film Truth, based on an account by Dan Rather’s producer Marla Mapes, showed that the victims of the Killian scam still believe the letters to be authentic.

This article may sound like a paranoid liberal conspiracy theory, but this whole election cycle has exceeded the wildest dreams of even the most crazed of the tin-foil-hat brigade. The Killian Documents gambit is just one arrow in the quiver of the sophisticated and unscrupulous media operators who seek to control the national conversation in these dangerous times. For media consumers, the lesson is, be suspicious of everything, especially if it confirms your biases.

Categories
Letter From The Editor Opinion

All The News That Flits

Do you double-screen? By that, I mean do you watch television with your laptop open or your phone in your hand? According to a report this week from Accenture Consulting, 87 percent of Americans watch TV with another screen in use. We’re Tweeting, posting on Facebook, texting, and reading online articles while catching the latest episode of The Bachelorette, or whatever. We’ve become multi-taskers, even as we goof off. Multi-goofers?

And not only are Americans double-screening, they’re continuing to turn away from traditional television viewing — watching a show as it’s broadcast in its original timeslot — at prodigious rates. According to the Nielson ratings, traditional TV viewing in 2016 is down 11 percent from 2015.

The trend is being driven by young people (I refuse to use the “M” word), who are turning from traditional television in droves, eschewing cable and satellite packages for streaming subscriptions of various kinds and free internet options. The Nielson Report for the first quarter of 2016 showed that Americans between the ages of 18 and 24 watched an average of 15 hours of traditional television a week. Compare that to the 50-to-64 age bracket, which watched an average of 50 hours of traditional television a week.

It’s easy to see that a generational watershed moment is coming for television and cable networks that will be similar in impact to the sea change that has deconstructed the daily newspaper business in the past decade or so. Our consumption of media will continue to “silo” for the foreseeable future.

The trend has been somewhat masked this year because of the presidential race — and Donald Trump — which has brought record increases in viewership and revenues for cable news outfits such Fox, CNN, and MSNBC. Fox News, in fact, is having its best year ever, averaging over 2.37 million viewers in primetime, which surpassed former cable viewing leader, ESPN.

Of course, compared to network news ratings in the years before cable and the internet fragmented the American viewing audience, that number is a pittance. CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite, for example, once averaged 30 million viewers a night. Television news then was a family banquet, one where we all shared the same meal. It’s now a takeout pu-pu platter.

And those seemingly healthy Fox News numbers mask another issue that the fair-and-balanced folks will have to deal with very soon: The median age of their viewers is 68 — mostly male, mostly white, mostly conservative. That means more than half of Fox News viewers are over 68. To say that the network is facing a demographic challenge in the next few years is an understatement.

To the extent that they watch cable news, CNN is the choice of most younger viewers. But at 1.4 million total viewers a night, it’s a bite of leftover dim sum.

It’s gotten so that we only come out of our silos when events force us to do so. A major disaster, a mass shooting, a terrorist attack, a Super Bowl — or possibly a presidential debate — can lure us away from the mind candy we feed ourselves all day long. Not much else.

I guess the silver lining is that the devices we use to cocoon ourselves are also the very things that bring us together instantly — that alert us to events and update us on breaking news faster than Walter Cronkite ever thought about doing. When Gene Wilder died this week, I knew the details of his passing within minutes. Within a half-hour, I’d seen links to his best scenes and to tributes from dozens of people. I could pick and choose what — if anything — I wanted to see or read. I never thought about turning on the TV. It all just popped up in my social media feeds.

And maybe that’s the “news” of the future — instant and self-selected. Maybe we should all start thinking of ourselves as little cable networks.

Categories
Opinion The Last Word

Which is Witch?

There is a great tradition of fist-shaking on this page. I haven’t engaged in that sport too much here. I thought I wanted to be “The Peppy One,” but that goes against every fiber of my being because, to quote Toby Ziegler, “There’s literally no one in the world I don’t hate.”

We’re now in a full-on, DEFCON 3-level election cycle, and I hate election cycles. I know a lot of y’all nutbags live for it. My mother is one of you people. I can’t get into election coverage since Tim Russert left us. It’s nothing against Nate Silver or Chuck Todd, mind you. It’s that no one can convey the unmitigated joy of a kid on Christmas morning like Tim Russert could on election nights.

Now all I think about when I see reporters standing in front of wall-sized iPads on election night is whether or not they got professional training for that from Vanna White. You put Vanna White in front of CNN’s giant wall, and I’d watch the hell out of it. Better yet, get Oprah. YOU GET AN ELECTORAL VOTE AND YOU GET AN ELECTORAL VOTE!

My other problem is witches. But isn’t everyone’s? I’ve started researching my family. I don’t know what happens to us as we approach middle age that we need to know that our 10th great-grandfather once slept in a tavern where George Washington slept, but there it is. I like looking at the wacky names. I’ve found an Experience, Shubael, Jephthah, and my favorite, an uncle named Snowy Drift. It turns out that my ninth great-grandfather and grandmother and their children were charged with witchcraft in Salem. He confessed, knowing that other people who had confessed hadn’t been executed. He recanted and apparently was hanged for lying. Talk about a swing and a miss.

I was looking at a sketch of where these people lived. They were piled on top of each other. Everything was so tiny and close. It’s no wonder gossip and syphilis spread quickly. Add to that property disputes, poor sanitation, and old-fashioned ignorance, it’s no surprise witchcraft charges infected the population like measles.

We’re not — in general — piled on top of each other like our ancestors were, but we’re still disgusting, snotty, leaky, social creatures like they were. And while we have Twitter to tell us that there’s some dude in Scranton who just had the best fish taco like ever, they had a community well to gather around to find out that Keziah and Mercy’s son might actually be Amos and Mercy’s.

In our time, when one mother is desperately trying to find a reason her child has autism and comes across an article saying vaccinating your child is the fiendish cause of everything from autism to scabies, and you shouldn’t trust the chemicals the government is pumping into our bodies, and THEY don’t want you to know the truth, word spreads through Facebook, and Instagram, and whatever app these crazy kids are using this week. It spreads just like the whooping cough she isn’t preventing her child from getting because natural immunity or something. It’s really no different than Patience eating a certain mold on bread with effects similar to an acid trip, and since no one knows about bacteria or acid trips, the logical conclusion is she made a pact with Satan.

The problem is we do know about acid trips and germs now, but yet we have candidates for national offices who love arguing against science and reason because they think the definition of a scientific theory is the same as when Uncle Elmer tells you he’s got a theory about how Bigfoot is actually a CIA agent who’s really good at his job, and that’s why he’ll never be found.

I rid myself of the Republicans in 2005, when Jeb Bush and his merry pranksters intervened by writing one state law, a federal relief bill, and spending untold amounts of money in court costs to cause a seven-year delay to remove the feeding tube of Terri Shiavo, who had tragically suffered major brain damage and was in a persistent vegetative state. It did not matter one whit what their opinion was. Republicans are not supposed to meddle in family decisions. Period.

I rid myself of the Democrats when their platform became one giant plank made from their fear of Republicans. Good God, Lemon. Stand for something. But in honesty, I appreciated Hillary’s reenactment of a decade’s worth of Ross and Rachel’s will-they-or-won’t-they seek the nomination.

I am absolutely bone-tired of dumb politicians. Call me crazy, but I kind of want the person with his or her finger on The Button to be smarter than I am. That’s not even setting the bar real high. I’d be happy if they knew Marcus Aurelius isn’t a question.

Susan Wilson also writes for yeahandanotherthing.com. She and her husband, Chuck, have lived here long enough to know that Midtown does not start at Highland.

Categories
Opinion Viewpoint

Hype Deluge

Like millions of Americans this winter, I sat in front of the TV, freezing and wrapped in a blanket. I kept waiting for the network news shows to utter the two most obvious words raised by the weather patterns of the past several months: climate change. We heard, repeatedly, about yet another “arctic blast,” the “inescapable winter,” and various efforts to describe the wayward ways of the “polar vortex” — “a cyclone that sits over the poles” with a counterclockwise rotation, one CBS meteorologist offered.

But we waited in vain for reporters to interview scientists about how these dramatic weather extremes are related to — and, in fact, evince — what has been unfortunately named “global warming,” a term suggesting that only heat waves could be evidence of climate change. CBS News did, however, interview the general manager of the Edinburgh Golf Course in Minnesota about how the course came through the winter.

Rather than using the drought in California, the oddly tropical weather at the Sochi Olympics, or the unrelentingly frigid temperatures throughout much of the United States as pegs for serious coverage of the costs of climate change, the Weather Channel, went into a naming frenzy, with each storm, however fearsome or tepid, getting a moniker like Kronos or Maximus or, my favorite, Seneca (the wise storm?), all proposed by Bozeman, Montana, high school kids. The channel started personifying storms in 2012, explaining that this was “the best possible ways to communicate severe weather information on all distribution platforms.” But their anthropomorphizing of storms as toga-clad gods trivializes the rise of extreme weather and contributes to what has come to be called “weather porn”: the rabid flogging of the disasterous aspects of storms at the expense of all else.

In February, CBS Morning News sought to explain why northern California was being run over by something named the “Pineapple Express.”

“So, what’s causing all this?” asked host Charlie Rose. “Well,” responded CBS contributor Michio Kaku, “the wacky weather could get even wackier.” Kaku, a physics professor, then explained that the polar vortex was like a “swirling bucket of cold air” that was spilling into the continental United States because the North Pole is melting and tied it to the broader problem of climate change. “I’m really trying to follow you,” said anchor Gayle King, struggling to connect the dots. She then asked, “What can be done about it?”

“Well,” Kaku responded, “it seems to be irreversible at a certain point, so we may have to get used to a new normal.”

How’s that for promoting utter resignation and inaction?

As for the Sunday talk shows, according to Media Matters, they devoted only 27 minutes, collectively, to climate change in 2013. In February, ABC’s This Week and NBC’s Meet the Press finally gave the topic real airtime. However, they did so in the most irresponsible way possible. NBC staged a “debate” between Bill Nye, the “Science Guy,” and a climate-change denier, Tennessee Congressman Marsha Blackburn, who asserted, falsely, that “there is not agreement around the fact of exactly what is causing” climate change.

ABC pitted climatologist Heidi Cullen against Republican Governor Pat McCrory of North Carolina, who said in 2008 that “climate change is in God’s hands” (though he later backtracked). While both shows sought to refute the vacuous bromides of these GOP dunces, the fact that they gave them equal time, when 97 percent of climate scientists agree that climate change is a fact and is human-influenced, suggests there is a real debate when there isn’t and legitimates doing nothing in response.

Of course, if you watch Fox News, the frigid weather “proves” that “global warming” is a myth. Indeed, Fox mentioned climate change nine times in one week in January in order to ridicule it. As its contributor, George Will, asserts, “the climate is always changing.” Well, yes, especially in the past two decades, which were the hottest in 400 years.

We’ve become resigned to event-driven, decontextualized news, but when the issue is as pressing, costly, and dangerous as climate change (floods, water shortages, severe hurricanes and tornadoes, droughts), we need fewer storms named after Greek gods, fewer numbskull climate change deniers, and more coverage about what’s actually happening, what we can and must do, and how we can do it.

Susan J. Douglas writes on a variety of topics for In These Times.

Categories
News

CNN.Money Names Memphis “Most Affordable Place to Retire”

Well, thank God. Yes, it’s another damn survey of American cities in which Memphis places first, but this time it’s actually good.

CNN.Money.com says Memphis is the most affordable place in America to retire. Other factors include air quality, number of restaurants, diversity of culture, tax structures, weather, health-care facilities, etc. But hey, we’re number one when it comes affordability. So there.

Read it all at CNN.Money.com and see how Memphis kicks Louisville, Nashville, and Austin butt. C’mon, geezers. Memphis is calling!

Categories
Opinion The Last Word

The Rant

CREDIT: CNN Photo

Well, leave it to me to rain on the parade of a lot of really good people rushing forth to do something good for an innocent child who was the target of a really horrible crime, but there are a couple of questions that need to be asked: The story of Youssif, the 5-year-old Iraqi boy, who, while playing in the yard of his home in Baghdad back in January, was attacked by masked men and doused with gasoline and set on fire, has been front and center on CNN and on CNN.com for the past few days, with thousands of people writing in to ask how they can help. It is one of the most response-generating stories in CNN’s history. Since January, the family of the disfigured boy has been trying to figure out what to do for him, as they can’t get the proper surgical treatments in Iraq that would help repair the damage done, primarily to his face. They couldn’t afford to move to the United States or Europe to seek treatment. They have been grappling with the idea of leaving their homeland. Youssif’s father can’t openly talk to the media because he is an Iraqi security officer, and coming forward would only put the family in further danger. Fortunately, the director of the Children’s Burn Foundation in Sherman Oaks, California, was so moved by the story that she stated the foundation would pay all of the family’s travel expenses to come to the United States along with medical costs, housing costs, social rehabilitation costs, and whatever else it might take to get this little boy and his family some help. Peter Grossman of the Grossman Burn Center, which is affiliated with the Children’s Burn Foundation, has offered to do all of the necessary surgeries for free. (Thank goodness none of this would take place at Walter Reed Army Hospital, where Youssif might have to fend off rats, cockroaches, black mold, and neglect). These multiple surgeries will take up to one year to perform. And therein lies the rub. After all of this great news came out and thousands of people donated money on CNN.com to help and this was looking like one of the greatest “good news” stories in a long time, it seems that there is a hitch: The family has to get the “proper” passports and visas to come to the United States and live here for a year while Youssif undergoes the surgeries. That’s right: Entry into the Land of the Free and the Brave for this horribly injured child requires a little “paperwork.” We can’t just let any Tom, Dick, Harry, or Youssif get on a plane and get here and get here quickly to get much-needed medical care. Forget the fact that, because of the attack and being set on fire by insurgents that the Bush administration created, Youssif can’t open his mouth wide enough to eat properly. Even if he hadn’t gone into a depression and wanted to smile, he can’t. No, let’s wait. Let’s get the paperwork done. After all, they are Iraqis. Maybe I am missing something here and I am sure I don’t have all the facts, but there seems to be something terribly wrong with this picture. If George W. Bush and his cronies can get on Air Force One and jet about the country and the world anytime they like, whether it be traveling to Republican Party fund-raisers here in the United States or traveling to other countries to expound upon all the “progress” we are making in Iraq since attacking and occupying the country — and watching it basically go to hell — why can’t he get on the plane, fly to Baghdad, get Youssif and his family on board, and fly straight back to Sherman Oaks and let this healing process begin? I know he doesn’t read newspapers and relies on briefings by his quickly ship-jumping staff (thank you, Alberto Gonzales, for finally stepping down), but surely he knows about this by now. Maybe it’s too difficult for him to face the fact that he attacked the wrong country for all the wrong reasons and there would likely be no insurgency and civil war in Iraq today, the product of which has resulted in this horrible thing that happened to this innocent child. Maybe if he were to face this and do something about it, he would have to stop and think about Youssif being just one of thousands of little children killed and/or maimed for life because of his war. Maybe coming face to face with a child who has been set on fire and disfigured would make it just a tiny bit harder somewhere in the back of his little mind to drone on and on and on and on about “staying the course.” Or maybe he is waiting for the Iraqi parliament to get back from its month-long vacation so he can check in with them first. I know he understands how important vacations are. Maybe you should make some special arrangements and let your homeland security freaks and other agencies bend the rules just this once so Youssif can take a little trip of his own, so some good people in the United States can do some good work they have volunteered to do.

CNN.com