Are We Winning?

Watching the news each day, reading the paper, occasionally watching the network news, I really have to wonder if we as a country are winning not only the war on terror, but the "war of ideas", that being the constant struggle to convince the rest of the world that we're not such a bunch of bad guys after all. Even when good news happens, it seems like they are fodder for more problems, more criticism, more negativity. Tough to keep up a positive front when confronted with all this.

Take, for example, the recent arrests of the terror suspects who were plotting to blow up fuel lines at JFK. First of all, the arrests were reported on Saturday morning, and while that's really no fault of the FBI or Department of Homeland Security, it happened during what is called in the media the "down news cycle." This is because when news breaks on Saturday, a lot of people miss it because fewer people watch the news on the weekend. Yes there is the Sunday paper, but at least here in Syracuse, the local Sub-Standard, errrr... Post-Standard barely mentioned the arrests on the front page sidebar, and relegated the main story to page 4. By Monday morning, nobody was really talking about it anymore. Way to bury the successes of our Department of Homeland Security, mainstream media.

And just in case burying the story didn't work, for the people who DID watch the news Sunday night, we were treated (at least on CBS) to the reminder that critics think the evidence against terrorists in cases like this one is flimsy and that they were only caught because they were stupid. So either way, the great work of our much-maligned DHS gets ignored. After all, to praise DHS is to praise the president who created it and whose administration it serves under, and that just wouldn't do. However, when Scooter Libby got sentenced, don't you know that it got wall-to-wall coverage for going on 2 days now... with most of it centering around the growing "big lie" that is starting to spread about President Bush pardoning Libby. He's NOT GOING TO PARDON HIM. This is not up for debate. However, the media starts asking if it will happen, and then come the letters saying, "Of course Bush is going to pardon him, EVERYBODY KNOWS that..." and you know how it goes from there; at least you do if you read this blog on a regular basis.

Although I guess I can understand the media's motivation to not make a big deal out of a terrorist plot getting busted up; after all, in the past when such plots have been sniffed out, there was an immediate backlash from the usual suspects about how this was just timed perfectly to help the president and how dare the media keep trying to scare us. All right, there's a difference between the kind of junk the media throws at us around sweeps time, when your local TV affiliate teases their nightly newscasts with things like, "What's in your sock drawer could kill you, more at 11...", and the actual reporting of the snuffing out of a nascent threat to our nation's security. But the media has to mind its P's and Q's apparently, so come Monday morning, instead of continuing coverage of the pursuit of the fourth suspect in this plot or attempts to bring people who missed the weekend's coverage up to speed, we get wall-to-wall coverage of... Paris Hilton going to jail. Thank god.

Reporting things like the terror arrests is not, despite what some may think, spreading a "climate of fear". It is instead spreading a climate of awareness, and that's the media's job, to make you aware of what is going on in the world. We need to know how other nations are seeing us, we need to know what's going on in Iraq, we need to know how this will affect us. I've said previously that I could do without spin, but it will be there; the point is at least report it, even with the spin. We are at war, so an informed public is more important now than ever.

Of course that depends on whether or not you consider what is going on right now a war on terror, or as John Edwards claims it is, "a bumper sticker." Call me naive, but I've never heard of a bumper sticker stopping a terror plot. Want to know what I fear? I fear John Edwards. I fear him for his outright attempts to become the darling of the 23% Crowd, for chiding his fellow front-runners Sens. Clinton and Obama for not doing enough to keep our troops from being funded, for belittling a policy that has resulted in ZERO terrorist attacks on U.S. soil since its creation. I fear him because he advocates massive tax increases, because he wants to pull us out of Iraq (and probably Afghanistan) as soon as possible, and now because he hobnobs with Danny Glover, America's biggest cheerleader for Hugo Chavez's Venezuela. The same Venezuela that almost came into play over the weekend when the police in Trinidad made their big arrests. See, one of the suspects, the former parliament member from Guyana, was nabbed when he was just about to board a plane for Venezuela, on his way to Iran for a forum on Islam. Had he made it onto that plane and gotten to Venezuela, I'm sure upon news of the other arrests and word that this man was himself a suspect, Chavez would have probably granted him safe harbor and refused to turn him over to us.

Most of all, I fear that Edwards will find a way to win the Democratic nomination (perhaps just by winning Iowa and New Hampshire while Obama and Clinton split the more moderate voters, then cruising from there through the shortened primary season), and then will win the White House just because he's not a Republican. I fear that more than Vladimir Putin threatening to restart the Cold War, more than any al-Qaida video, more than any threat by the president of Iran to wipe out Israel. See, we are just as capable of losing the war on terror as radical Islam is of winning it, and as much as I find fault with President Bush (and believe me, I do), I do sleep better at night knowing the people in charge of our country have proven themselves quite capable of protecting us. I just wonder how many other Americans feel the same way...