Random Political Intrigue Items

The press can be infuriating.

I think that there are prevailing myths about the press.

One is the liberal media bias. That's a lazy observation from people who don't have a clue as to what the liberal media is. When you compare Mother Jones, Utne Reader, and The Nation to the New York Times or CNN, you'll notice that the differences are huge. The observations of this bias are generally anecdotal and trite in nature. Of course, when our political process is broken down into talking points, one can understand a trite approach.

Frankly, the mainstream media is lazy and pursues foolhardy items. Tim Russert spent an eternity trying to pin Hillary Clinton down on race when there were so many other issues that needed to be addressed and questioned. Russert surprised me. He's usually pretty good at asking difficult questions nicely, but he did a poor job on Sunday.

Sadly, we see this a great deal. For all the coverage the election has had, there has been very little insightful coverage as to what each candidates policies happen to be and how they are comparable and different.

I thought that President Bush had a history degree from Yale. His observations about Auschwitz made me wonder about the history department at Yale. Seriously. He made the statement that had he been the Commander in Chief during World War II, he'd have bombed Auschwitz. One can only speculate what it would have been like had he been the Commander in Chief during World War II.

Here are some facts about Auschwitz and bombing during World War II. It was near a strategic site which we did bomb, but we didn't bomb any of these camps, including POW camps for some very good reasons.

For one, the only bombers that had the capability of traveling the distance were the large, heavy bombers. These planes were most effective from high altitude and often attempted to fly high enough to avoid anti-aircraft fire. Flying low put them at far greater risk.

Secondly, the Norton Bombsight was a magnificent piece of equipment that literally controlled the plane in bombing mode. The inventors said that they could drop a bomb in a pickle barrel from 5 miles up. They couldn't. The chances of bombing the victims inside the camp were as high as hitting the fences.

Thirdly, even blowing the fences off of the camps didn't guarantee very much. The people in the camps were malnourished and often suffering from dreadful communicative diseases. Their chances of escape were very, very slip.

Fourthly, these kinds of precision raids had proven to be incredibly unreliable. In the breakout of Normandy a huge bombing run was made over German lines. The problem was that a portion of that huge bombing run was over American lines. American General Lesley McNair, a major commander in the field, was killed in this run.

World War II was painful and ugly and President Bush's comments were, frankly, foolish. One could only wish that a student of history would have either the insight or the wisdom to do research before speaking about events that have taken place and surmising that they would have done things differently.

Presidents Roosevelt and Truman built on Allied coalition and fought the Germans to defeat on numerous fronts. Concurrently, they managed a campaign to defeat Japan in a completely different part of the world. In history, before the United States did this, no nation had been in two separate wars in two separate parts of the world, and won both of them decisively. Roosevelt and Truman did this. No matter what one may think of them and no matter what political party a person is a part of, what they accomplished had never been done before and has not yet been repeated.