Yesterday, roughly one kilometer from where Prime Minister Tony Blair delivered a spot of hip-hip hurray boosterism in Baghdad, "gunmen in police uniforms seized 25 employees of an Iraqi aid organization."
"Hazim Hamis stood in the winter cold in socks and sandals ..., shouting to anyone who would listen that his brother, a driver for the [aid agency], was among the captives. He had lost four relatives in a large bombing in a central square last week, and he demanded in a voice that verged on hysterical to know where his brother had been taken."
That brother, whom the gunmen later released after realizing his name was "not the name we were looking for," "told of hours in a blindfold and handcuffs, of kicks and punches, and of questions about his last name, his tribe, and his address...." Apparently his surname was not sufficiently Sunni.
"Abductees who are not released often end up dead, their bodies found in sewers and garbage dumps. Those bodies add to the daily death toll, which in Baghdad on Sunday was 32."
If you wonder who those hearty 27 percent of Americans who still "support our troops" as referees of this sectarian madness are, wonder no longer. Just tune in to AM talk radio. You'll find them in spades.
Blindness is their chief defense mechanism. They simply tune out the bad with a stiff upper lip, much as Mr. Blair did yesterday when he pronounced things in Basra to the south as going "quite well."
Yes, it is true that in Iraq, wherever buildings aren't being bombed, innocents aren't being blown to smithereens and mutilated bodies aren't being discovered daily, things are indeed going "quite well." It's a kind of relativity thing.
But for the talk radio crowd, to acknowledge the carnage in the quite unwell areas is to surrender one's Americanism to the Bush-bashing, freedom-hating, bad-news bears of the liberal media, who, I have learned from the 27 percent, love and admire Saddam Hussein and Kim Jong Il and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
I'm still a bit fuzzy on why, exactly, the media -- and I, by extension -- love these tyrants and hate America, but every so often my intellectual masochism kicks in and I tune the AM dial to further my graduate education in robust blindness. I am never disappointed.
Best I can tell, theirs -- the 27 percent -- is a world of supreme simplicity and non sequiturs to the max. America:good, foes:bad, end of story, plug the curiosity. It therefore follows that if one questions the innate goodness of any American action, the questioner is innately bad.
Got it? It's really quite simple. And if you differ with the logical conclusion, or so I have learned further, then you're simply mired in the swampland of liberal overanalysis, which brings on discomfiting urges to question the inherent purity of one's own tribe. And that's bad.
How to rein in this victimization by liberal heresy? The answer to this urgency, I learned yesterday: Just turn off the bad news, which, I also learned, isn't really bad to begin with -- only a series of aberrations from goodness.
But here's the kicker. They don't mean you should turn off the bad news -- pardon me ... the aberrational goodness. No, you should be spared this burden. Instead, the media should voluntarily refrain from reporting it. In the absence of this good-natured volunteerism -- and I kid you not, this is what they were saying yesterday in Talk Radio Land -- our tribal leaders should unleash the joy of prior restraint (although that word coupling wasn't employed specifically).
Just block 'em, shut 'em down -- the whole stinking news system of infectious antiAmericanism be gone. It upsets us, and causes some good Americans to lose their way, to start hating George Bush, to start loving Saddam Hussein and Kim Jong Il and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
Next time you're feeling masochistic, join me in jumping on the phone and fraternizing in Mad-Hatter Land. I could use the company. Poke all the holes in the peculiar logic of the 27 percent that you want. But it won't shake them. Believe me, I've tried. For they're a hearty bunch -- good Americans all.