THE POGO PRESS

The most oft-quoted line of Walt Kelly’s comic strip Pogo of the 50s and 60s is “We have met the enemy and he is us.” Given that the liberal media has so clearly become cheerleaders for America’s defeat in Iraq, it is only appropriate that To The Point refer from now on to them as the Pogo Press.

Perhaps such a label will help the Bush White House to realize that the Pogo Press has become so suffused with Bush-hatred that it has become America’s Number One Enemy in the War on Terrorism. That is, the Pogos understand that America cannot be defeated militarily in Iraq, just as we couldn’t in Vietnam, and can only be defeated politically, which we were in Vietnam.

Thus they are determined to engineer a Vietnam-like political defeat in Iraq no matter how catastrophic the loss of Iraqi lives in a resultant civil war or the future of freedom for the entire Middle East or America’s capacity to defend itself against Al Qaeda terrorism – that’s all worth it in order to ensure George Bush’s defeat in November.

As a result, the Pogos refuse to report anything but bad news coming out of Iraq – it is All Gloom, All Doom, All The Time. Whenever a reporter rebels and insists on reporting good news, like Bob Arnot of NBC, he is fired or sent to another part of the world.

And as a result, the American soldiers risking their lives to bring freedom to Iraq hate the American Pogo Press as much as they hate the Baathist thugs of Fallujah.

Yet it’s not simply that the Pogos report only bad news — it’s that their pathological prejudices have turned their brains into monochrome mush.

The Myth of Outrage
For example, aren’t you as tired of hearing about “Arab outrage” and Moslems being “humiliated” as I am? Not only is the Pogo Press’s constant use of the outrage-humiliation mantra stupefyingly boring, it’s also stupefyingly ignorant.

Ignorant because it treats all Arabs and Moslems monolithically – as if they were all the same. How many times, for example, have you heard that Al Jazeera’s satellite TV reports on whatever we are doing in Iraq are “enraging the Arab world”? It turns out that vast numbers of Arabs in Iraq and elsewhere despise Al Jazeera as SNN – the Sunni News Network, a worthless propaganda channel promoting Sunni imperialism.

Of Iraq’s 25 million people, 16 million are not Sunni Moslem. Of the remaining 9 million, two-thirds are not Arab – they are Kurds, Turcomen, Assyrian and others. Only about 12% of Iraqis, 3 million or so, are both Sunni and Arab – and they are loathed as Saddam’s oppressors by everyone else.

The Lynndie England Fan Club
This is why there is a Lynndie England Fan Club in Iraq outside of the Sunni Triangle. The infamous pictures of her holding Abu Ghraib prisoners on a leash or pointing at their privates brought joy, not anger, to millions of folks outside the Triangle. Those prisoners were all Sunni Arabs, all Baathists responsible for countless atrocities perpetrated upon Shia and Kurds by Saddam’s regime. To see a woman – a woman! – making fun of their manhood was cause for celebration by 88% of the people of Iraq.

You could pore through every page, watch every broadcast of the Pogo Press – every article of the New York Times and Washington Post, every story on CNN-CBS-ABC-NBC – and you would never get a clue of this. The Pogos, for all their braying about multiculturalism, treat all Moslems and all Arabs as facelessly the same, as indistinguishable as Coke bottles.

For the Pogos, every “Arab” watches and believes Al Jazeera, loves Osama Bin Laden, roots for the Baathist guerrillas, and hates America as an oppressor worse than Saddam Hussein. For anyone not infected by Pogo perversity and has any knowledge of the actual situation in Iraq, this is imbecilic.

The Abu Ghraib Fizzle
Even in the Sunni Triangle, Al Jazeera has failed to engage the passions of Sunni Arabs themselves. They know all too well how the rest of Iraq reveled in the pictures and are laughing at them. However much the Pogos desperately try to gin up a frenzy over it, the “scandal” of Abu Ghraib has fizzled and died in Iraq – no one there cares. The Sunni Arabs are focused on how best to preserve their lives after independence comes next month – under an Iraqi government not controlled by them but dominated by Kurds and Shias and other such folk who hate their guts.

Busting the Pogo Monopoly
However much the Pogos are giving aid and comfort to the terrorists, their Constitutional protections cannot be anything but inviolate. The way to go after them is by dilution. The Pogos are often referred to in Internet shorthand as the “MSM” – the mainstream media. So – let’s widen the stream, let’s make the new media sources of information technology a part of the “mainstream.”

The White House Press Corps – the guys who sit in the White House briefing room and bug Scott McClellan, ask insulting questions at presidential press conferences, ride on Air Force One – is limited mostly to the MSM. What is needed is to replace some of these people with journalists from online news sites like NewsMax, WorldNetDaily and CNS.com, from talk radio shows like Rush Limbaugh, and from “Blogs” like Instapundit.

These members of the Conservative new media – call it the Patriot Media — have an audience collectively in the scores of millions. Yet the Bush White House won’t give them the time of day – insisting instead on sleeping with the enemy. As an editor of The Washington Times, the premier conservative newspaper in the country, reported to NewsMax recently, “The White House treats us like we’re in Siberia,” cooperating much more with The Washington Post.

There is no other way to describe this as but masochistic. The Bush White House has media allies of enormous potential influence, and media enemies determined to destroy it – yet it ignores the former and panders to the latter. The Patriot Media has to demand this change.

Every conservative news site, talk show host, and blog should ask their readers, viewers, and listeners to call or write the White House Press Office and demand it stop pandering to the Pogo Press and give the Patriot Media seats in the White House Press Room who will report on the good news – of which there is a lot – in Iraq (see The Good News About Iraq in this week’s TTP Report.

Let’s start right here, and let me ask you. The White House switchboard is 202-456-1414. The president’s email is [email protected]. And you know the address: 1600 Pennsylvania Ave, Washington DC 20500.

Further, let me ask you to contact every Patriot Media outlet you know to ask they join the effort to break the Pogo Media Monopoly at the White House.

The White House must learn to stop sleeping with its enemies in the press and start treating them as the enemies of America they have become. The Patriot Media has the power to achieve this. All it has to do is to exercise it – to bang on the White House gate until they are let in the front door and accepted as full-fledged credentialed members of the White House Correspondents Association.

Call it dragging the White House Press Room into the 21st century – and throwing out the Pogo Press’s monopoly of it.