----- Original Message -----
From: "Andy Mensah" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Friday, February 06, 2004 10:24 AM
Subject: [unioNews] Fwd: The Powells, father and son


Friday, February 6, 2004
<H3>The Powells, father and son</H3>
Maureen Dowd NYT



WASHINGTON
Washington is in the virtue business this week. Center stage is a
riveting father-son drama. (No, not that one.)

At the Federal Communications Commission, Michael Powell is trying to
save America's virtue, while over at the State Department, his
father, Colin, is trying to save his own virtue.

They are both obsessing about something that should have been there,
but suddenly wasn't.

The son demanded an explanation for Janet Jackson's missing material,
while the father wrestled with an explanation for Saddam Hussein's
missing materiel.

The son opened an inquiry into something everyone had already seen,
as the father defended his speech making the case for war based on
something nobody has yet seen.

(Who could have guessed that Saddam's WMD would be less scary than
Jackson's pierced, pointy metal sunburst, a Weapon of Mammary
Destruction aimed at the CBS chairman, Les Moonves? Or, as Jon
Stewart points out, that a government so reluctant to investigate
intelligence lapses is so eager to investigate a lapse of breast?)

Asked in a Washington Post interview on Monday whether he would have
recommended an invasion if he'd known that Iraq had no weapons, the
secretary of state replied, "I don't know," adding that the "absence
of a stockpile changes the political calculus; it changes the answer
you get."

But the words had barely left his mouth before furious White House
aides forced Powell to eat them. Just as Janet Jackson had to repent
for revealing too much, so did the top diplomat. Secretary Powell had
to go out and clarify his remarks to reporters, telling them the war
was justified even if weapons are never found.

Rummy stuck to his Orwellian guns, telling Congress on Wednesday that
just because we don't find the weapons doesn't mean they're not
there. Or, as postmodern professors say, absence is presence. (At
least Janet Jackson, like David Kay, had the grace to
say, "Unfortunately, the whole thing went wrong in the end.") Once
more, Colin Powell was left trying to square being a good soldier
with preserving what's left of his reputation. His twin concerns -
wanting everyone to think he is a man of purity and not wanting to
fight a battle he might lose - have come into fatal conflict.

The younger Powell failed to appreciate the consequences of not
curbing big media companies gobbling up rivals. Colin Powell failed
to appreciate the consequences of not curbing Dick Cheney, Rummy and
Wolfie as they gobbled up foreign policy.

The son vowed in 2001 that he would be patient with cultural
excesses: "I don't want the government as my nanny. I still have
never understood why something as simple as turning it off is not
part of the answer."

But here he is, the biggest nanny in government since William
Bennett, starting a little culture war to improve his ratings. The
FCC asked the television network CBS for a Super Bowl halftime tape
to determine whether standards were violated. Next, the FCC will ask
the CIA to provide satellite photography of the rogue bustier.

The Janet and Justin show was unbelievably tawdry, but also
unbelievably banal - another rehearsed pseudoshock that the media,
and now the government, gladly play along with. Isn't the power of
social opprobrium in a free society enough? It's already out of
control. Jackson lost her spot as a presenter at the Grammys. And
NBC's affiliates forced the network to take out a scene from
Thursday's episode of "ER" because a breast was exposed for a second
and a half. It was the breast of an 80-year-old woman dying of a
heart attack. Sizzle, sizzle.

Besides, should all the indignation be about a "wardrobe malfunction"
when there were all those icky ads - financing our annual festival of
testosterone - about erectile dysfunction? (One father I know tried
telling his curious 10-year-old son the ads were about "electile
dysfunction.")

<B>Michael Powell should stop interfering where he doesn't belong.
Colin Powell should start interfering where he does belong. The
secretary should get off the sidelines where the vice president and
Pentagon banished him and stop waiting for them to fail so he can be
vindicated. He should get more involved in rescuing Iraq from chaos.
The hawks' war to make Iraq free and secure is slowly descending into
chaos and ethnic conflict. That's indecent.</B>

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 Copyright © 2002 The International Herald Tribune








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