Bush-hating author and the "5 a.m. Thanksgiving dinner"

Bush-hating author and the “5 a.m. Thanksgiving dinner”

While many of us are deeply, though rationally, opposed to most of what President Bush has done, not a few people are insanely hostile to him. Mark Steyn writes:

For two years now, it’s been apparent that increasing numbers of us are living in entirely self-created realities. For example, when I switched on the TV the other day, I saw President Bush being warmly received at Thanksgiving Dinner in Baghdad. By contrast, Wayne Madsen, co-author of America’s Nightmare: The Presidency of George Bush II, saw a phony stunt that took place not at dinner time but at 6 a.m.
”Our military men and women,” he insisted, ”were downing turkey, stuffing, cranberry sauce, pumpkin pie, and non-alcoholic beer at a time when most people would be eating eggs, bacon, grits, home fries, and toast.” Warming to his theme, Madsen continued, ”The abysmal and sycophantic Washington and New York press corps seems to have completely missed the Thanksgiving ‘breakfast dinner.’ Chalk that up to the fact that most people in the media never saw a military chow line or experienced reveille in their lives. So it would certainly go over their heads that troops would be ordered out of bed to eat turkey and stuffing before the crack of dawn.”
Madsen’s column, ”Wag The Turkey,” arose, it quickly transpired, from reading too much into an a.m./p.m. typo in a Washington Post story and an apparent inability to follow complex technicalities like time zones. But, when Brian O’Connell wrote to Madsen pointing out where he’d gone wrong, the ”investigative journalist” stuck to his guns: ”It’s all a secret of, course, so no one will ever know,” he concluded, darkly. For those in advanced stages of anti-Bush derangement, it will remain an article of faith for decades that the president made the troops get out of bed at 6 in the morning so he could shovel pumpkin pie down them.

I would just add that Madsen’s problem was not that he couldn’t figure time zones. As I understand it, one of the newspapers did make a mistake as to a.m. and p.m. and Madsen figured correctly based on that wrong data, and so reached a wrong result. What is completely amazing, even if we assume that his base data was correct, is that he immediately believed that it had to be true that the Army forced 600 men out of bed before dawn to eat a turkey dinner in order to arrange a photo op for the President. It didn’t occur to him that this scenario was incredibly unlikely, and that he ought to check it out further before he published his conclusions. He simply assumed that the U.S. Army and the U.S. government do things of this nature. That is the proof (as Steyn puts it) that Madsen and fervid Bush-haters like him (on the left and right) are living in entirely self-created realities.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at December 11, 2003 07:35 PM | Send

Comments

The next step, I suppose, will be to refer to “Turkeygate” in a manner suggesting that Madsen’s view is received fact. :)

Posted by: paul on December 11, 2003 7:38 PM

It wasn’t the anti-war Right that created the unreality of Saddam’s WMD program. It came courtesy of the lying neocons who swindled America into war.

Posted by: edwin weller on December 12, 2003 2:35 AM

Madsen does appear to be a shrill Leftist who let his prejudices get in the way of his reporting.

Pace Mr. Auster, though: you must not have spent much time around the armed forces. The scenario of the Army’s forcing 600 GIs out of the rack for an 0600 presidential photo-op is very likely indeed. (Which is not to say that is what happened in Baghdad on Thanksgiving.) Since being burned by the press many times in Vietnam, our armed forces are acutely aware of the value of propaganda for the home front. Our generals and admirals (especially the people who reach those grades in today’s PC military) have also long understood the payoffs of pleasing politicians, especially the commander-in-chief himself. HRS

Posted by: Howard Sutherland on December 12, 2003 9:07 AM

At first Mr. Sutherland agrees that Madsen let his prejudiced assumptions lead him into false reporting, then he defends the very assumptions that Madsen based his story on.

I’m sure the armed forces are capable of doing all sorts of maddening bureaucratically or politically driven things. But does Mr. Sutherland seriously mean to suggest that if a calculation he had derived from a clock time mentioned in a newspaper article led to the conclusion that the Army had FORCED 600 SOLDIERS INTO A MESS HALL AT DAWN TO EAT A THANKSGIVING DINNER and to hear speeches by their top general and by the civilian administrator of Iraq, and all for the purpose of serving as stage props for a surprise visit by the President, that Mr. Sutherland would, WITHOUT FURTHER VERIFICATION, automatically assume that to be true?

If Madsen was plainly wrong and prejudiced to publish what he did without further verification, then the scenario of 600 men being made to eat Thanksgiving dinner at dawn is NOT likely. Mr. Sutherland can’t have it both ways.

Posted by: Lawrence Auster on December 12, 2003 11:49 AM

Mr. Auster,

You are reading too much into what I wrote. The military is a maddening bureaucracy more than capable of making soldiers turn out at dawn for a presidential photo-op; it’s part of the federal government, after all. To that extent, Madsen’s mistake is comprehensible. That still doesn’t excuse his failing to check the facts. The story as Madsen thought he understood it was screwy enough not to take at face value (why not have the photo-op at normal chowtime?), unless blinded by prejudice, as Madsen seems to be. HRS

Posted by: Howard Sutherland on December 12, 2003 3:05 PM

If I misunderstood Mr. Sutherland, it was based on his saying: “The scenario of the Army’s forcing 600 GIs out of the rack for an 0600 presidential photo-op is very likely indeed.” Now, I read that to mean that he was saying that the particular scenario dealt with by Madsen, which involved the turkey dinner at 0600 hours, was very likely. But by “likely scenario” it now appears Mr. Sutherland just meant a 0600 photo op, sans turkey. In fact, reading him that way is the only way to remove the contradiction.

Also, presumably, if Madsen’s theory had been correct, the reason for not having the photo-op at normal chow time would have been that Bush could only be there between 0600 and 0800.

Posted by: Lawrence Auster on December 12, 2003 3:48 PM