Stateside With Rosalea: The Duchy of Craw

My first three weeks in the nation’s capital city have led me to the unhappy conclusion that DC doesn’t stand for District of Columbia — Latin for dove — but for the Duchy of Craw. So much is stuck in my craw, it’s more choked up than a presidential candidate recalling the childhood feel of dirt between their toes. And it’s not just me who feels that way.

::The Duchy-mobile::

According to journalist Connie Lawn, this is the most elitist White House she has covered since first being accredited there back in 1968. Questions are taken only from the favored front two rows of journalists at a press briefing, and invitations to lunch with the President or First Lady are similarly restricted.

Mind you, Lawn probably didn’t earn any Brownie points with the White House for her recent criticism of Cheney’s motorcade, published in one of DC’s daily giveaway papers, The Examiner. When the paper’s political gossip columnists Dufour and Gavin tried to follow up on Lawn’s comments, they were told by then WH press secretary Tony Snow to take it up with the Secret Service, who didn’t return their call.

http://www.examiner.com/blogs/Yeas_and_Nays/2007/9/4

::Mandela as anagram::

Last Thursday’s White House press conference with Bush came as a complete surprise to the journalists given 45 minutes to get there. Since the President himself was going to be speaking, they expected some earthshattering news and they were given it. “Mandela’s dead,” said the President in reply to a question about Iraq. He quickly clarified that he meant Sadaam Hussein had killed all the Iraqi Mandelas, but his comment became columnist fodder nonetheless.

While some wondered if the President is losing it, I think something was stuck in his craw and he was just trying to get rid of it. Coming as it did just at the time of the September 21st release of yet another fake Bin Laden audiotape—spoken in Pashtun, a fact not one US news source commented on—I think the President’s comment was simply stating the obvious. Anagrammatically. (Hey, Ma Laden is as close to Bin Laden as anyone, right?)

Jesting aside, I have yet to meet anyone in DC who hails from South or Southwest Asia—and you only have to take a cab or stay in a hotel to meet many such folks—who believes that Bin Laden is alive. But I guess US journalists will dutifully salute any tatty old piece of misinformation that’s run up the flagpole if it gets them into those coveted front two rows at the White House.

Watch this video of Bush’s comments at APEC to see if he mentions Bin Laden even once in relation to the videotape that was released at the beginning of the month when he was in Australia:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=leIjbGp6sPM

::NRA: No Rookies Allowed::

Not that I get to sit in at White House press briefings. No surprise there, but it sticks in my craw that I couldn’t even get accredited to the National Rifle Association’s conference at the Capital Hilton on Friday and had to sit across the street at Starbuck’s listening to the event on C-SPAN radio, while watching the Code Pink ladies wave their Honk for Peace placards in the street outside the entrance to the hotel.

Some of them got into the conference and disrupted Senator McCain’s speech shouting Bring the troops home! No war with Iran! Iraqi people have rights too!—eliciting such witty responses as “Get yourself a boyfriend” from the conference attendees. McCain intoned, “Well, my friends, we beat you yesterday, we’ll beat you today, and we’ll beat you tomorrow”. He also vowed to take every opportunity to reject moveon.org’s “assault on the officer corps of America”—a reference to that organization’s full-page ad the previous week calling General Petraeus “General Betray Us”.

::The crawdaddy of them all::

The NRA’s two-day conference was entitled Celebration of American Values and presidential hopeful after presidential hopeful—some by video only—asserted that interpreting the Second Amendment as the right for the individual to bear arms as an individual, not just as part of a militia, is a sacrosanct American value : “a fundamental foundational freedom” in the words of former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee. Naturally, it stuck in everyone’s craw that the host city for the conference has a handgun ban.

Other speakers included former US Attorney General John Ashcroft, who said that in his youth he thought that America was great because Americans are better than other people, but now he realizes “we can’t be better than other people—we ARE other people.” Quoting the words of the Emma Lazarus poem on the base of the Statue of Liberty, he pointed out that it doesn’t say “Give me your richest and best-educated,” but “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses”. America is great, he said, because its people are “willing to take risks and suffer the consequences and reap the benefits”.

But the saddest, sickest, most craw-stickingest thing the NRA did was get a wounded Afghanistan War vet to come up on stage and praise Crimson Trace Corporation, Smith and Wesson, Surefire and Yamaha for their corporate support of an organization called HAVA (Honored American Veterans Afield), which uses shooting sports as a therapeutic tool for traumatized war vets.

Greg Stube’s description of how relentlessly he was pursued by the PR people from Crimson Trace to go out on hunting trips was said in praise but heard by these ears in disbelief. Of course I understand that it probably is very good therapy and I’m all for rehabilitating soldiers and families whose lives have been shattered by war, but it’s kind of like someone who has been seriously injured in a car accident that also killed somebody being courted by automakers to go be a racecar driver for a day.

In what seemed to be a speech scripted by the NRA, Stube also saw fit to condemn moveon.org for their Petraeus/Betray Us ad, saying, “The deaths and wounded soldiers rest on his shoulders and on his heart. How in the world can you criticize someone like that?”

http://www.thehuntingwire.com/docdetail.php?id=124

rosalea.barker @ gmail.com

--PEACE--

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