Media's Attention Deficit Helps Republicans and Lieberman Run From Iraq

With their single-threaded attention span and apparent inability to cover more than one story at a time, the folks in the Corporate Media have put me in the uncomfortable position of diagnosing them with a nasty, ongoing case of Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD). At this moment -- at least until a woman goes missing in a Caribbean country -- they're focused like a dime-store laser beam on what they collectively call "The Middle East Crisis."

Which means that the White House, the Republican Congress and people like Joe Lieberman are very happy that the issue Americans care about most, the Iraq war, has again been pushed onto a back burner.

Looking at CNN's web site at mid-afternoon yesterday gave the same picture I saw with most online news sources -- all coverage was about Israel, Hezbollah and Lebanon, with none of the top headlines addressing a disastrous war that is eating our own country alive in so many ways.

Wouldn't it be nice if real life worked that way for all of us? I could gamble away my family's mortgage money, burn my son's college fund on lavish, drunken golf trips with my buddies and ease my midlife pangs by purchasing that bright red, '66 Mustang I've had my eye on -- and my lovely wife would lose track of all of that as soon as I brought home a dozen, half-dead roses from the corner convenience store.

Of course, most spouses are way too smart for that, and we can only hope that Americans continue to keep their eyes on what's directly impacting our country, despite whatever shiny object du jour happens to have temporarily captured the media's attention.

And I truly don't minimize what's going on outside of Iraq in the Middle East. It's a powder keg that has the potential to create instability all over the world. But what kind of amazing windfall will it be for Republicans running for reelection if it becomes such a sinkhole for all news coverage that voters forget how they, and the Bush administration, have dug our country into such a deep, intractable hole?

And the same goes for sometimes-Democrat Lieberman, who has supported Bush's dishonest war at every turn and can only hope that his role in propping up -- and covering up -- America's very own "Middle East Crisis" can be hidden long enough to get by the surging campaign of challenger Ned Lamont in the August 8 Connecticut primary.

But none of them, not Lieberman, 15 GOP Senators whose seats are up for grabs this year or all of those Republicans in the House of Representatives should be allowed to hide from the incredible damage they have brought to our nation.

Focusing on the death toll is certainly the most compelling thing we're inclined to do. Thanks to the Bush/Lieberman/GOP axis of incompetence and lies, we now have almost 2,600 of our troops dead, 19,000 wounded and an untold number who will come back into our society with enough post-traumatic stress to last them and their families a lifetime. And while it may be easy for many of us to forget this reality, the fact is that our country -- and that means us, people -- have killed tens of thousands of innocent Iraqis for absolutely nothing.

And let's consider the cost of the war that Team Bush continues to leave out of the federal budget numbers, much of which they told us would be offset by Iraqi oil revenues that simply never came. The numbers can be hard to pin down, but they are staggering no matter whose estimates are deemed the most valid. Most estimates on the cost of Iraq so far come in at between $300 billion and $500 billion in cash outlay alone with many economists estimating that the ultimate cost could greatly exceed $1 trillion.

Meanwhile, we have the hidden cost of orphaned domestic priorities, as every bit of our nation's governmental attention is focused on the war or on nonsensical wedge issues, such as gay marriage or flag burning, meant specifically to distract Americans from that very subject.

Millions more of our people have lost medical coverage since George W. Bush took office and the Republican party grabbed both houses of Congress. According to the National Priorities Project (NPP), the cost of the war is currently at a bit over $300 billion and, spent on real Americans with real problems at home, that money could have easily provided healthcare for all 46 million of our uninsured citizens.

The NPP also estimates that the current cost of the war could have funded 5.5 million elementary school teachers, 42 million Head Start places for children, 2.8 million affordable housing units or 61 million university scholarships.

But what if you're a Republican and simply don't give a rat's behind about those things? The amount of money we've spent making our country less safe with the Iraq war, could pay for 7.1 million public-safety officers and emergency first responders or enough security inspectors to look at every airplane cargo hold and every single shipping container coming in through our country's ports.

But none of that's going to happen until there's a change at the very top of our government.

And how can the cost of Bush and his crew of miscreants making us the most despised nation in the world, and the effect that will have for the next generation of Americans, be quantified and measured? Certainly we're far less secure now that you can fit the worldwide credibility of our intelligence services into a thimble and the diplomatic word of the United States isn't worth squat anywhere in the world.

Looking at the media's current big story -- at the exclusion of the tragedy of Iraq -- how much more could we be doing to broker peace in the Middle East if we hadn't started a bogus war there ourselves, and if our government had a sliver of credibility left with any other world leaders?

And how can the Corporate Media continue to ignore something this huge, obvious and devastating, while allowing those responsible to escape any accountability whatsoever?

The Republican party -- and people like Lieberman, who enable their heinous policies -- can try to run from Iraq all they want and are currently sustained in that goal by a strangely-compliant media. It's up to the rest of us to spend every day between now and November 7 making sure that, while they can continue to run until election day, there's no damn way they can hide.

You can reach Bob Geiger at [e-mail]