By: Mary Lyon

This is what hurts me most: I’m driving my kid to some weekend Boy Scout merit badge event way up the freeway from our neighborhood, and I see a sticker on the back of a van just ahead of me in the next lane over. It’s an American flag, about four inches by three. And it has one of those big diagonal “NO” lines drawn through it, in bold black. My immediate reaction is what hurts. Was I outraged? Indignant? Motivated to want to pull up alongside the offending driver and flash a dirty look? No. What I felt was a deep-to-the-bone-marrow, profound sadness. Because I recognize that viewpoint. And it is with deep anguish that I’m forced to admit that I share it.

We had some serious computer troubles at my house for most of the past week, so perplexing that even my computer-wonk husband couldn’t get to the bottom of them with any ease. It put me in arears as far as keeping up with emails, column-writing and other obligations, school and Scout updates on the web, and more. It was revealing to me how much I rely on the internet as my main source for news and comment anymore. So I was left with a wash of TV news, mostly CNN, MSNBC, Headline News, CSPAN, and even a wee bit of Fox (my husband says he likes to tune in there every so often just “to see what the enemy is doing”). So I was provided only the more conventional and surface-treatment coverage of current events. As usual, it was lacking, and still somewhat slanted toward the GOP and the Bush machinery. But in the witch’s brew of Plamegate, Judith Miller, Karl Rove, Harriet Miers, Tom DeLay, Bill Frist, Bush’s 37 blinks during one Matt Lauer question, the ever-worsening poll numbers, the continuing carnage in Iraq, the desperate spin to drown all that out with the supposedly-miraculous Iraqi elections, and the leftovers from the hurricanes, one overriding theme stood out. There is – well – in the interest of politeness, let’s call it excrement, being done in my name, and supposedly for my own good, that I tried to prevent and couldn’t. It stinks. And it hurts. It hurts like hell.

It’s so bad it’s simply unavoidable by now. I watched Keith Olbermann querying his usual guest suspects on “Countdown” about the new NBC News/New York Times poll that shows Bush’s job approval ratings among African Americans to have dumped down to two percent. TWO percent. Olbermann and the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank noted that with the typical margin of error of three percent factored in, you might actually extrapolate it out to a level of NEGATIVE ONE percent. It’s suspected beyond some on-camera blurt by Kanye West that “George Bush doesn’t care about black people.” But TWO percent? Meanwhile, back at the ranch, even the loyal mouthpiece Fox News couldn’t spin its own poll’s decline to 40 percent for a Bush approval rating. I guess things are pretty bad for the boy king if even his own personal Pravda network can’t work up better numbers for him. Small comfort. Maybe it’s a signal that people are waking up, at long last.

I doubt that most of those surveyed who have only thumbs down to give Young George would feel so glum about this country that they’d react the same way I did upon seeing that flag decal with the black bar slashed through it. But one thing they evidently share with me is the feeling that this country is going seriously downhill. It cannot be ignored that every poll in America shows a resoundingly lopsided (roughly two to one) tilt toward “things have gotten off on the wrong track.” It’s a big hurt.

I noticed one other thing, too – a MOST telling media development that’s about five years overdue, and perhaps reflects a verification of that hurt. I’ve actually seen two cases in the last week, in the so-called “mainstream media” where the “L” word is now being invoked when speaking about this administration. It’s not “liberal.” It’s “LIE.” Eight paragraphs into Frank Rich’s “The Faith-Based President Defrocked” in the New York Times is a quick but clear bankshot: “Beware of leaders who drink their own Kool-Aid. The most distressing aspect of Mr. Bush’s press conference last week was less his lies and half-truths than the abundance evidence that he is as out of touch as Custer was on the way to Little Bighorn.”

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/100905F.shtml

Ouch!

The other was a mention on the air just days ago by CNN’s Lou Dobbs that “the government has, in point of fact, lied to us…”

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=132x2158340

Ouch, again!

There may have been more besides, which I missed because my computer was down, denying me access to the internet. But there it is in all its painful truth. Two derivatives of the “L” word – “LIE” – dared to be uttered in public.

Considering how outraged I do become, watching my onetime news media colleagues tip-toe around that “L” word in their Bush coverage for five long, arduous years now, when it was the one word I could never avoid, this presented a little salve to the wounds. Too little, maybe too late, but at last, at least, it’s here. Finally, some of them are calling it lies, now, too. For too long I’ve seen Roget’s Thesaurus ridiculously overworked as print and broadcast journalists go through Olympics-caliber acrobatics to avoid calling a lie what it is. For years now, they’ve used every other means to flirt with that fact: “misrepresented,” “may have misspoken,” “misquoted,” “was misunderstood,” “falls short of the facts,” “contradicted,” “wasn’t completely forthcoming,” “not being straight with us,” “disingenuous,” “sidestepped,” “parsed,” every grammatical permutation of the verb “spin,” and even, hilariously enough, “the Prevaricating President.” For years I’ve been wondering why nobody in the media big leagues ever wanted to come straight out and just say it – Bush lied.

Small comfort. An aspirin following major surgery or amputation or something. I guess I’ll take what I can get.

From the polls to the pile-ons by the politicians and pundits, it’s clear that I’m not the only one hurting for our country just now. If more Americans were happy with what’s going on and the way George W. Bush is “leading” us, the polls would show it, for sure. The media would be trumpeting it, predisposed as they are (or maybe just intimidated) toward giving Bush a never-ending benefit of the doubt. Those of us who saw what he is, and what the people around him are, and tried to stop them all, and tried in vain to awaken many of those we know, knew he never deserved that free pass to begin with. And considering that, no matter what he does or how many “important” speeches he delivers or how many pilgrimages he makes to New Orleans, his approval ratings keep dropping. Evidently, increasing numbers of Americans have decided that the seemingly perpetual free pass has finally expired. As one pundit put it recently, noting the consistent bad numbers, it’s becoming clear that this guy will spend the rest of his term governing without the consent of the governed.

For all the time I’ve been politically aware (since the Vietnam/Watergate era), I can NEVER remember the national mood being this glum, even with Richard Nixon. And I never thought I’d find myself thinking Nixon actually looks fairly benign by comparison. The hurt remains, as does a sense of dread about whether we will come out of this even minimally recovered. So great and gross is the damage this White House and its pals on Capitol Hill have done to our country, our treasury, our reputation with the rest of the world, and every principle on which we think we stand. One thing that ameliorated the negatives of Nixon was that we got some closure as a nation, some satisfaction that at least a little justice was served. Nixon resigned into exile for the rest of his days, most of his henchmen were sent to jail and forced to make amends for their crimes, and a Democrat reclaimed the White House, bringing more commendable priorities and a fresh, healing start to a nation’s battered ego, at least for awhile. With the “Culture of Corruption” that pervades Washington, and the apparent lock that the republi-CONS and religious extremists, cronies and robber barons seem to have secured upon the seat of power in government and in the media for the foreseeable future, I’m not sure what kind of justice we’ll get this time. I’m not yet convinced that these bad guys will finally get what they’ve long and richly deserved, or that anyone will see actual jail time, or even exile.

Will we get a satisfactory resolution to ease the hurt? Will we be able to stop this “one-party rule” curse in next year’s midterm elections? Or will conservative paymasters be able to manipulate people and events yet again, to regain their momentum, and lull much of America and most of the media back to sleep? I hate this hurt, this cynicism, and this sense of dread. I hate that the overriding lesson to our children from the Bush-Two era will be that crime pays, the bad guys win, and cheaters do prosper. I hate what I’ve come to feel about my country and my government, as illuminated by my reaction to that flag decal with the bar through it. The soothsayers say pain can be useful, even beneficial, in alerting one to danger or serious illness, and even purifying. In this case, I hope and pray that, at least, it keeps America awake.

Visualize IMPEACHMENT.
Then go DO something about it.

Mary Lyon spent the first 25 years of her adult life as a broadcast journalist, at Los Angeles radio stations KRTH-FM, KFWB-AM, KHJ-AM and KLOS-FM, the NBC, ABC, and RKO Radio Networks, plus KTLA-TV. She retired from day-to-day broadcasting in 1996, after covering Hollywood for nine years in radio, TV, and print, for the Associated Press. She wrote and illustrated "The Frazzled Working Woman's Practical Guide to Motherhood," and is presently at work on a new craft book for kids and friends. A lifelong Democrat who began her political involvement in the Student Coalition for Humphrey-Muskie, and Tom Bradley's first L.A. Mayoral campaign, Mary currently is a weekly columnist for www.democrats.us - from the Left.