Using Jessica Lynch

I was afraid that the story of Jessica Lynch’s setting the story straight would disappear in a day or two, and it has. What is it about the Bushite-era media that it can’t nurture a potential scandal?

Some of the highlights to air in an ABC “Primetime” special with Diane Sawyer (what, “60 Minutes” wasn’t interested?) include:

US military allegations that she was anally raped are untrue. (Now they say she forgot. Uh-huh.)

She didn’t go down fighting because her weapon jammed. (US-issue weaponry often did that in Afghanistan because of the dust; Iraq has similar conditions.)

Her Iraqi doctors never slapped her around; quite the contrary, they saved her life and tried to turn her over to US troops–who shot at them.

“They used me as a way to symbolize all this stuff,” Lynch told Sawyer. “It’s wrong.”

By itself the elaborate Pentagon put-on isn’t that big a deal..although you have to wonder why they felt it was necessary to stage an elaborate shoot-’em-up “rescue” into an undefended hospital. Were they that desperate to make Iraq look like a real war?

The spinning of Jessica Lynch is just one of countless Bush Administration lies about Iraq, Afghanistan, the economy and their methods of governance. The pattern is the same: big boner of a lie, followed by cautious unmasking of the same by the media, which are then shouted down by faux “patriot” right-wingers, followed by the passage of a few months, culminating with the revelation that the cynics had it right all along. Naturally, the right-wingers never admit that they were, as they always, inexorably are, all along.

It’s boring, and funny, and stupid, all at the same time. And it’s amazing that the American people are putting up with it.