Bono & The National Prayer Breakfast

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MSNBC poll - Should the U.S. Take Bono's Advice?

AP - "Bono’s speech riveted the ballroom audience that included the president and first lady and leaders from Congress, the Cabinet, the military, the clergy and countries from around the world."


Bono remarks at the National Prayer Breakfast

Remarks — as prepared for delivery and courtesy of DATA
Feb. 2, 2006.

BONO: Thank you.

Mr. President, First Lady, King Abdullah, Other heads of State, Members of Congress, distinguished guests …

Please join me in praying that I don't say something we'll all regret.

That was for the FCC.

If you're wondering what I'm doing here, at a prayer breakfast, well, so am I. I'm certainly not here as a man of the cloth, unless that cloth is leather. It's certainly not because I'm a rock star. Which leaves one possible explanation: I'm here because I've got a messianic complex.

Yes, it's true. And for anyone who knows me, it's hardly a revelation.

Well, I'm the first to admit that there's something unnatural… something unseemly… about rock stars mounting the pulpit and preaching at presidents, and then disappearing to their villas in the South of France. Talk about a fish out of water. It was weird enough when Jesse Helms showed up at a U2 concert… but this is really weird, isn't it?

You know, one of the things I love about this country is its separation of church and state. Although I have to say: in inviting me here, both church and state have been separated from something else completely: their mind. .

Mr. President, are you sure about this?

It's very humbling and I will try to keep my homily brief. But be warned—I'm Irish.

I'd like to talk about the laws of man, here in this city where those laws are written. And I'd like to talk about higher laws. It would be great to assume that the one serves the other; that the laws of man serve these higher laws… but of course, they don't always. And I presume that, in a sense, is why you're here.

I presume the reason for this gathering is that all of us here—Muslims, Jews, Christians—all are searching our souls for how to better serve our family, our community, our nation, our God.

I know I am. Searching, I mean. And that, I suppose, is what led me here, too.

Yes, it's odd, having a rock star here—but maybe it's odder for me than for you. You see, I avoided religious people most of my life. Maybe it had something to do with having a father who was Protestant and a mother who was Catholic in a country where the line between the two was, quite literally, a battle line. Where the line between church and state was… well, a little blurry, and hard to see.

I remember how my mother would bring us to chapel on Sundays… and my father used to wait outside. One of the things that I picked up from my father and my mother was the sense that religion often gets in the way of God.

For me, at least, it got in the way. Seeing what religious people, in the name of God, did to my native land… and in this country, seeing God's second-hand car salesmen on the cable TV channels, offering indulgences for cash… in fact, all over the world, seeing the self-righteousness roll down like a mighty stream from certain corners of the religious establishment…

I must confess, I changed the channel. I wanted my MTV.

Even though I was a believer.

Perhaps because I was a believer.

I was cynical… not about God, but about God's politics. (There you are, Jim.)

Then, in 1997, a couple of eccentric, septuagenarian British Christians went and ruined my shtick—my reproachfulness. They did it by describing the Millennium, the year 2000, as a Jubilee year, as an opportunity to cancel the chronic debts of the world's poorest people. They had the audacity to renew the Lord's call—and were joined by Pope John Paul II, who, from an Irish half-Catholic's point of view, may have had a more direct line to the Almighty.

'Jubilee'—why 'Jubilee'?

What was this year of Jubilee, this year of our Lords favor?

I'd always read the Scriptures, even the obscure stuff. There it was in Leviticus (25:35)…

'If your brother becomes poor,' the Scriptures say, 'and cannot maintain himself… you shall maintain him… You shall not lend him your money at interest, not give him your food for profit.'

It is such an important idea, Jubilee, that Jesus begins his ministry with this. Jesus is a young man, he's met with the rabbis, impressed everyone, people are talking. The elders say, he's a clever guy, this Jesus, but he hasn't done much… yet. He hasn't spoken in public before…

When he does, is first words are from Isaiah: 'The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,' he says, 'because He has anointed me to preach good news to the poor.' And Jesus proclaims the year of the Lord's favour, the year of Jubilee. (Luke 4:18)

What he was really talking about was an era of grace—and we're still in it.

So fast-forward 2,000 years. That same thought, grace, was made incarnate—in a movement of all kinds of people. It wasn't a bless-me club… it wasn't a holy huddle. These religious guys were willing to get out in the streets, get their boots dirty, wave the placards, follow their convictions with actions… making it really hard for people like me to keep their distance. It was amazing. I almost started to like these church people.

But then my cynicism got another helping hand.

It was what Colin Powell, a five-star general, called the greatest W.M.D. of them all: a tiny little virus called A.I.D.S. And the religious community, in large part, missed it. The one's that didn't miss it could only see it as divine retribution for bad behaviour. Even on children… Even fastest growing group of HIV infections were married, faithful women.

Aha, there they go again! I thought to myself Judgmentalism is back!

But in truth, I was wrong again. The church was slow but the church got busy on this the leprosy of our age.

Love was on the move.

Mercy was on the move.

God was on the move.

Moving people of all kinds to work with others they had never met, never would have cared to meet… Conservative church groups hanging out with spokesmen for the gay community, all singing off the same hymn sheet on AIDS… Soccer moms and quarterbacks… hip-hop stars and country stars… This is what happens when God gets on the move: crazy stuff happens!

Popes were seen wearing sunglasses!

Jesse Helms was seen with a ghetto blaster!

Crazy stuff. Evidence of the spirit.

It was breathtaking. Literally. It stopped the world in its tracks.

When churches started demonstrating on debt, governments listened—and acted. When churches starting organising, petitioning, and even—that most unholy of acts today, God forbid, lobbying… on AIDS and global health, governments listened—and acted.

I'm here today in all humility to say: you changed minds; you changed policy; you changed the world.

Look, whatever thoughts you have about God, who He is or if He exists, most will agree that if there is a God, He has a special place for the poor. In fact, the poor are where God lives.

Check Judaism. Check Islam. Check pretty much anyone.

I mean, God may well be with us in our mansions on the hill… I hope so. He may well be with us as in all manner of controversial stuff… maybe, maybe not… But the one thing we can all agree, all faiths and ideologies, is that God is with the vulnerable and poor.

God is in the slums, in the cardboard boxes where the poor play house… God is in the silence of a mother who has infected her child with a virus that will end both their lives… God is in the cries heard under the rubble of war… God is in the debris of wasted opportunity and lives, and God is with us if we are with them. "If you remove the yolk from your midst, the pointing of the finger and speaking wickedness, and if you give yourself to the hungry and satisfy the desire of the afflicted, then your light will rise in darkness and your gloom with become like midday and the Lord will continually guide you and satisfy your desire in scorched places"

It's not a coincidence that in the Scriptures, poverty is mentioned more than 2,100 times. It's not an accident. That's a lot of air time, 2,100 mentions. [You know, the only time Christ is judgmental is on the subject of the poor.] 'As you have done it unto the least of these my brethren, you have done it unto me.' (Matthew 25:40). As I say, good news to the poor.

Here's some good news for the President. After 9-11 we were told America would have no time for the World's poor. America would be taken up with its own problems of safety. And it's true these are dangerous times, but America has not drawn the blinds and double-locked the doors.

In fact, you have double aid to Africa. You have tripled funding for global health. Mr. President, your emergency plan for AIDS relief and support for the Global Fund—you and Congress—have put 700,000 people onto life-saving anti-retroviral drugs and provided 8 million bed nets to protect children from malaria.

Outstanding human achievements. Counterintuitive. Historic. Be very, very proud.

But here's the bad news. From charity to justice, the good news is yet to come. There's is much more to do. There's a gigantic chasm between the scale of the emergency and the scale of the response.

And finally, it's not about charity after all, is it? It's about justice.

Let me repeat that: It's not about charity, it's about justice.

And that's too bad.

Because you're good at charity. Americans, like the Irish, are good at it. We like to give, and we give a lot, even those who can't afford it.

But justice is a higher standard. Africa makes a fool of our idea of justice; it makes a farce of our idea of equality. It mocks our pieties, it doubts our concern, it questions our commitment.

6,500 Africans are still dying every day of a preventable, treatable disease, for lack of drugs we can buy at any drugstore. This is not about charity, this is about Justice and Equality.

Because there's no way we can look at what's happening in Africa and, if we're honest, conclude that deep down, we really accept that Africans are equal to us. Anywhere else in the world, we wouldn't accept it. Look at what happened in South East Asia with the Tsunami. 150, 000 lives lost to that misnomer of all misnomers, "mother nature". In Africa, 150,000 lives are lost every month. A tsunami every month. And it's a completely avoidable catastrophe.

It's annoying but justice and equality are mates. Aren't they? Justice always wants to hang out with equality. And equality is a real pain.

You know, think of those Jewish sheep-herders going to meet the Pharaoh, mud on their shoes, and the Pharaoh says, "Equal?" A preposterous idea: rich and poor are equal? And they say, "Yeah, 'equal,' that's what it says here in this book. We're all made in the image of God."

And eventually the Pharaoh says, "OK, I can accept that. I can accept the Jews—but not the blacks."

"Not the women. Not the gays. Not the Irish. No way, man."

So on we go with our journey of equality.

On we go in the pursuit of justice.

We hear that call in the ONE Campaign, a growing movement of more than two million Americans… left and right together… united in the belief that where you live should no longer determine whether you live.

We hear that call even more powerfully today, as we mourn the loss of Coretta Scott King—mother of a movement for equality, one that changed the world but is only just getting started. These issues are as alive as they ever were; they just change shape and cross the seas.

Preventing the poorest of the poor from selling their products while we sing the virtues of the free market… that's a justice issue. Holding children to ransom for the debts of their grandparents… That's a justice issue. Withholding life-saving medicines out of deference to the Office of Patents… that's a justice issue.

And while the law is what we say it is, God is not silent on the subject.

That's why I say there's the law of the land… and then there is a higher standard. There's the law of the land, and we can hire experts to write them so they benefit us, so the laws say it's OK to protect our agriculture but it's not OK for African farmers to do the same, to earn a living?

As the laws of man are written, that's what they say.

God will not accept that.

Mine won't, at least. Will yours?

[pause]

I close this morning on … very… thin… ice.

This is a dangerous idea I've put on the table: my God vs. your God, their God vs. our God… vs. no God. It is very easy, in these times, to see religion as a force for division rather than unity.

And this is a town—Washington—that knows something of division.

But the reason I am here, and the reason I keep coming back to Washington, is because this is a town that is proving it can come together on behalf of what the Scriptures call the least of these.

This is not a Republican idea. It is not a Democratic idea. It is not even, with all due respect, an American idea. Nor it is unique to any one faith.

Do to others as you would have them do to you.' (Luke 6:30) Jesus says that.

'Righteousness is this: that one should… give away wealth out of love for Him to the near of kin and the orphans and the needy and the wayfarer and the beggars and for the emancipation of the captives.' The Koran says that. (2.177)

Thus sayeth the Lord: 'Bring the homeless poor into the house, when you see the naked, cover him, then your light will break out like the dawn and your recovery will speedily spring fourth, then your Lord will be your rear guard.' The jewish scripture says that. Isaiah 58 again.

That is a powerful incentive: 'The Lord will watch your back.' Sounds like a good deal to me, right now.

A number of years ago, I met a wise man who changed my life. In countless ways, large and small, I was always seeking the Lord's blessing. I was saying, you know, I have a new song, look after it… I have a family, please look after them… I have this crazy idea…

And this wise man said: stop.

He said, stop asking God to bless what you're doing.

Get involved in what God is doing—because it's already blessed.

Well, God, as I said, is with the poor. That, I believe, is what God is doing.

And that is what He's calling us to do.

I was amazed when I first got to this country and I learned how much some churchgoers tithe. Up to ten percent of the family budget. Well, how does that compare the federal budget, the budget for the entire American family? How much of that goes to the poorest people in the world? Less than one percent.

Mr. President, Congress, people of faith, people of America:

I want to suggest to you today that you see the flow of effective foreign assistance as tithing…. Which, to be truly meaningful, will mean an additional one percent of the federal budget tithed to the poor.

What is one percent?

One percent is not merely a number on a balance sheet.

One percent is the girl in Africa who gets to go to school, thanks to you. One percent is the AIDS patient who gets her medicine, thanks to you. One percent is the African entrepreneur who can start a small family business thanks to you. One percent is not redecorating presidential palaces or money flowing down a rat hole. This one percent is digging waterholes to provide clean water.

One percent is a new partnership with Africa, not paternalism towards Africa, where increased assistance flows toward improved governance and initiatives with proven track records and away from boondoggles and white elephants of every description.

America gives less than one percent now. Were asking for an extra one percent to change the world. to transform millions of lives—but not just that and I say this to the military men now – to transform the way that they see us.

One percent is national security, enlightened economic self interest, and a better safer world rolled into one. Sounds to me that in this town of deals and compromises, one percent is the best bargain around.

These goals—clean water for all; school for every child; medicine for the afflicted, an end to extreme and senseless poverty—these are not just any goals; they are the Millennium Development goals, which this country supports. And they are more than that. They are the Beatitudes for a Globalised World.

Now, I'm very lucky. I don't have to sit on any budget committees. And I certainly don't have to sit where you do, Mr. President. I don't have to make the tough choices.

But I can tell you this:

To give one percent more is right. It's smart. And it's blessed.

There is a continent—Africa—being consumed by flames.

I truly believe that when the history books are written, our age will be remembered for three things: the war on terror, the digital revolution, and what we did—or did not to—to put the fire out in Africa.

History, like God, is watching what we do.

Thank you. Thank you, America, and God bless you all.

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Cindy & Christiane

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by Dan McLaughlin

Some U.S. Troops Question Woodruff Coverage
"The point that is currently being made (is that) that press folks are more important than mere military folks," a senior military officer told UPI Tuesday.

Why Abby Won't Talk


déjà vu

2003:

Tonight I have a message for the brave and oppressed people of Iraq: Your enemy is not surrounding your country — your enemy is ruling your country. And the day he and his regime are removed from power will be the day of your liberation.

2006:

Iran [is] a nation now held hostage by a small clerical elite that is isolating and repressing its people. ... Tonight, let me speak directly to the citizens of Iran: America respects you, and we respect your country. We respect your right to choose your own future and win your own freedom. And our nation hopes one day to be the closest of friends with a free and democratic Iran.

2003:

The United States will ask the U.N. Security Council to convene on February the 5th to consider the facts of Iraq's ongoing defiance of the world. ... If Saddam Hussein does not fully disarm, for the safety of our people and for the peace of the world, we will lead a coalition to disarm him.

2006:

The Iranian government is defying the world with its nuclear ambitions, and the nations of the world must not permit the Iranian regime to gain nuclear weapons. (Applause.) America will continue to rally the world to confront these threats.

How Come You Morons Can't Crack Al Qaeda's Communications?
This is from the WPost's report this morning about yesterday's release of a tape Qaeda No. 2, Ayman al-Zawahiri, "taunting" President Bush over our recent failure to vaporize him:

M.J. Gohel, a terrorism analyst and chief executive of the Asia-Pacific Foundation in London, said it appeared that Zawahiri and bin Laden had coordinated their recent messages. He said it was noteworthy that al Qaeda's leaders had fashioned an effective system of communication that Western intelligence agencies have been unable to penetrate.

Meanwhile, here in Oz, the U.S. Senate has decided to conduct a hearing Monday to grill high government officials about whether they have violated the law by trying to penetrate al Qaeda's communications. During wartime. While al Qaeda is trying to blow up American cities and kill American civilians.

How hard must Zawahiri be laughing?

Bad News Bearers
The media won't defeat America by fighting the last war.
BY JAMES TARANTO
Wednesday, February 1, 2006 12:01 a.m. EST

In October the U.S. government released a letter found in Iraq and purportedly written by Ayman al-Zawahiri, al Qaeda's No. 2 man, and addressed to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the terror group's leader in Iraq. "More than half of the battle is taking place on the battlefield of the media," Zawahiri wrote. "We are in a media race for . . . hearts and minds." He added, "The aftermath of the collapse of American power in Vietnam--and how they ran and left their agents--is noteworthy."

They say that generals always fight the last war, and the same seems to be true of terrorists--and journalists. But the media today do not have the power they had during the Vietnam era--the power to lose a war.

Here's an example that illustrates both the media's antiwar attitude and their powerlessness: In October the Baltimore Sun ran a story under the headline, "Little Outcry Raised on Iraq." The subhead read: "Md. deaths push toll near 2,000, but public is distracted, experts say."

Consider what this headline tells you about the assumptions that prevail in the newsroom. "Little Outcry Raised on Iraq." Why is the absence of an outcry a story? News consists of the unexpected--man bites dog, not dog bites man. "Little Outcry Raised on Iraq" means that, in the view of the Baltimore Sun, an outcry is to be expected when the country is at war. If there isn't much of one, it means something is wrong: "Public is distracted, experts say." The so-called mainstream media are following the Vietnam script, according to which a war is supposed to become a quagmire, which provokes opposition and leads to American withdrawal.

If there is in fact "little outcry," as the Baltimore Sun acknowledges, the media will do their part to help generate such an outcry. So, last summer, we met Cindy Sheehan, whose protest outside President Bush's ranch made her a cause célèbre. Her son, Army Spc. Casey Sheehan, had died in the liberation of Iraq. She opposed the war and believed he had died in vain. The media portrayed her as a grieving everymom; Maureen Dowd wrote in the New York Times that "the moral authority of parents who bury children killed in Iraq is absolute."

Ms. Dowd didn't really believe this, of course. The parents of fallen servicemen are a diverse group, but it seems safe to surmise that on average they are more pro-war than the public as a whole. In fact, if the Sheehan protest was news, it was because of the man-bites-dog aspect of it: Her position was at variance with what you would expect from someone who had lost a son in the war.

The problem, though, is that her views were at variance with those of any sane person. Not to put too fine a point on it, but Cindy Sheehan is an anti-American crackpot--and "anti-American crackpot opposes Iraq war" is a dog-bites-man story if ever there was one.

In April, Mrs. Sheehan had appeared at a San Francisco State University rally in support of Lynne Stewart, a radical lawyer who is awaiting sentencing after conviction on charges of giving material aid to terrorists. There Mrs. Sheehan opined that "we might not even have been attacked by Osama bin Laden," referred to America as a "morally repugnant system," and said: "This country is not worth dying for."

During her August protest, she gave a speech to an outfit called Veterans for Peace. According to a transcript on the group's Web site, she said that if the President agreed to meet with her:

I'm gonna say, "And you tell me, what the noble cause is that my son died for." And if he even starts to say freedom and democracy I'm gonna say, bullshit. You tell me the truth. You tell me that my son died for oil. You tell me that my son died to make your friends rich. You tell me my son died to spread the cancer of Pax Americana, imperialism in the Middle East. You tell me that, you don't tell me my son died for freedom and democracy.

Cuz, we're not freer. You're taking away our freedoms. The Iraqi people aren't freer, they're much worse off than before you meddled in their country.

You get America out of Iraq, you get Israel out of Palestine.

In September, after Hurricane Katrina had brought her 15 minutes of fame to an end, Sheehan wrote on the Huffington Post website: "George Bush needs to . . . pull our troops out of occupied New Orleans and Iraq."

All these comments were easily available on the Internet, yet they were seldom mentioned in the news coverage of Mrs. Sheehan's protest. They didn't fit the script--a script in which Mrs. Sheehan was playing the role of an ordinary American whose personal tragedy had turned her against the war.

Where did this script come from? Howard Fineman of Newsweek got at it in a provocative essay he wrote in January 2005, after CBS News released the findings of its independent investigation of the phony "60 Minutes" story about President Bush's National Guard service. Mr. Fineman argued that the journalistic establishment had, in effect, transformed itself into a political party; he called it the American Mainstream Media Party, or AMMP. "The notion of a neutral, non-partisan mainstream press," Mr. Fineman wrote, was "pretty much dead":

The seeds of its demise were sown with the best of intentions in the late 1960s, when the AMMP was founded . . . (ironically enough) by CBS. Old folks may remember the moment: Walter Cronkite stepped from behind the podium of presumed objectivity to become an outright foe of the war in Vietnam. Later, he and CBS's star White House reporter, Dan Rather, went to painstaking lengths to make Watergate understandable to viewers, which helped seal Richard Nixon's fate as the first president to resign.

The crusades of Vietnam and Watergate seemed like a good idea at the time, even a noble one, not only to the press but perhaps to a majority of Americans. The problem was that, once the AMMP declared its existence by taking sides, there was no going back. A party was born.

This is not just a matter of "liberal bias." When it comes to matters of war and scandal, journalists see themselves playing a role that is not impartial but adversarial vis-à-vis the government. But the media's adversarial culture asserts itself far more strongly when a Republican is in the White House.

Yet the ability of the partisan media to shape events is self-limiting. In the 1960s and '70s, journalists had a reputation, built up over decades, for objectivity and fairness--a reputation they have, to a significant degree, squandered. When Walter Cronkite turned against the Vietnam War, it had an impact because he was known as "the most trusted man in America." Is there any journalist today who comes anywhere close to wearing that mantle?

Beyond the media's credibility and public esteem, however, this partisanship today threatens the ability of journalists to do their job. To understand why, consider the Valerie Plame kerfuffle.

To the Democratic left, and to some journalists, this was a combination of Vietnam and Watergate: a scandal that discredited a war and, they imagined, threatened to bring down an administration. The basic story is by now familiar: In 2002 Joe Wilson, a former diplomat, was sent to Niger by the CIA to investigate whether Saddam Hussein had sought to buy yellowcake uranium there. Mr. Wilson wrote a July 2003 op-ed piece for the New York Times in which he claimed that his findings discredited the administration's case for war. Later that month columnist Robert Novak reported--accurately--that Mr. Wilson had been recommended for the trip by his wife, Valerie Plame, who worked for the CIA.

Mr. Wilson denied that Ms. Plame had recommended him, a denial that turned out to be false. He also alleged that the administration officials who identified her to Mr. Novak had violated the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, a 1982 law designed to protect covert CIA operatives. This charge also was false. To be protected by the act, an operative has to have been stationed overseas within the preceding five years. In his 2004 book, "The Politics of Truth," Mr. Wilson wrote that Ms. Plame's last overseas assignment was in 1997--six years before Mr. Novak's column appeared.

But the Angry Left, led by several bloggers and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, seized upon Mr. Wilson's charge. Meanwhile, the CIA made a routine request to the Justice Department to investigate the "leaking" of classified information. In September 2003, when that request was leaked to news organizations, a drumbeat began for a special prosecutor. A New York Times editorial in October called the revelation of Ms. Plame's identity "an egregious abuse of power" tantamount to "the disclosure of troop movements in wartime." On New Year's Eve 2003, another Times editorial cheered the Justice Department's decision to appoint Patrick Fitzgerald as special prosecutor: "The Right Thing, at Last," read the headline.

Here we had journalists applauding the investigation of government officials whose supposed crime consisted of providing accurate information to reporters. This seems a self-defeating position for the press--which depends on officials to leak information for stories--to take. In a February 2004 Times op-ed piece, Geneva Overholser, a journalism professor and former Times editorialist, gave away the game, explaining her colleagues' sudden hostility to "the public's right to know":

As a piece of journalism, the Novak column raises disturbing ethical questions. He apparently turned a time-honored use of confidentiality--protecting a whistleblower from government retribution--on its head, delivering government retribution to the whistleblower instead.

To Ms. Overholser, then, journalistic ethics apply differently depending on which side the journalist is on. Reporters are entitled to protect their sources, but only if they are against the government. At any rate, Joe Wilson is hardly a friend of freedom of the press. At an event outside the 2004 Democratic Convention, Mr. Wilson suggested that his critics in the press--he singled out Times columnist William Safire and The Wall Street Journal's editorial page--were part of a criminal conspiracy against him.

We live in a nation of laws, and legal principles must be neutral. Either journalists are privileged to protect their sources or they are not. Unleashing a special prosecutor to investigate a "leak" amounts to an endorsement of the idea that they are not, and it's hardly surprising that Mr. Fitzgerald sought to compel testimony from several reporters, including the Times' own Judith Miller.

With Mr. Fitzgerald threatening to throw Ms. Miller in jail, the Times did an astonishing turnabout. In February 2005 it published an editorial noting the "real possibility that the disclosure of Ms. Plame's identity . . . may not have violated any law." The paper had finally realized that the Fitzgerald investigation posed a threat to the practice of journalism. But it was too late. In July, Judy Miller went to jail.

From a journalistic standpoint, the result was about as damaging an outcome as was possible. The Times portrayed itself and Ms. Miller as making a brave stand for principle. It repeatedly editorialized that there was no point in keeping her behind bars, for she would never crack. Then, after almost three months, she cracked. As the influential blogger Mickey Kaus noted:

The message sent to every prosecutor in the country is "Don't believe journalists who say they will never testify. A bit of hard time and they just might find a reason to change their minds. Judy Miller did."

In the Plame kerfuffle, then, the mainstream media, and especially the Times, got so carried away with crusading against the Bush administration that they lost sight even of the institutional imperative to protect the ability of reporters to gather the news. The Justice Department has announced that it is investigating who leaked information to the Washington Post about alleged secret detention facilities in Eastern Europe and to the New York Times about telephone surveillance of Americans linked to al Qaeda leaders--matters that, unlike the Plame disclosure, do have serious national-security implications. Will prosecutors follow the Plame precedent and demand testimony from reporters on penalty of incarceration? If so, adversarial journalists will turn out to have been their own worst enemy.

It's easy to list examples of media bias against the war effort. Just from last autumn: The battle of Tal Afar got far less coverage than the artificial "milestone" of 2,000 Americans dead (which includes suicides and accidents as well as combat fatalities). In November, Rep. John Murtha, a longtime war critic, received endless attention for his proposal of immediate withdrawal; Sen. Joe Lieberman's declaration that he believed America was winning was largely ignored.

The Sunday after Thanksgiving, NBC's Tim Russert hosted a "Meet the Press" roundtable with four Washington journalists: the Washington Post's David Broder and Eugene Robinson, NBC's David Gregory, and Judy Woodruff, formerly of CNN. Mr. Robinson captured the tenor of the discussion when he said "there's general agreement" in Washington "that there will be a mess in Iraq when U.S. troops finally withdraw." Mr. Russert suggested that the President should be "backing off his stated goal of democracy in Iraq," and none of the panelists disagreed. None of them acknowledged that elections in Iraq were 2 1/2 weeks away. It was as if that news had not penetrated the Beltway media bubble.

It would be fatuous to deny that this dour drumbeat of defeatism has some effect on public opinion, which after all is driven by the most fickle members of the public. By last fall, polls consistently showed that a majority of Americans thought it had been a mistake to liberate Iraq, though some 70% had favored the war when the shooting began in March 2003. But a majority continue to oppose a precipitous withdrawal. Most Americans, it seems, do not want another Vietnam, which they understand to mean a self-inflicted American defeat.

The media's one-sided coverage may actually undermine the antiwar cause. It does a disservice to antiwar politicians by giving them the impression that the public is fully behind them--an echo-chamber effect similar to that which helped John Kerry lose the election of 2004 (see "Kerry's Quagmire," July 20, 2005). Thus in December, when Democratic National Committee chairman Howard Dean responded to the media panic by declaring that "the idea that we're going to win this war is an idea that, unfortunately, it's just plain wrong," fellow Democrats scrambled to distance themselves from him.

And the media's adversarial approach has proved costly in public trust. In a Pew Center survey conducted in early November, just after the indictment of Scooter Libby, only half of those polled said the press was fair to the Bush administration. The president's approval rating in the same poll was just 36%, so this was far from a pro-Bush poll.

Little wonder traditional media are losing audience share to such opinionated "new media" as talk radio, Fox News Channel and blogs. New forms of media would pose a challenge to old ones anyway, but the mainstream media are now getting competition on content as well. As a Wall Street Journal editorial put it in 2004:

For decades liberal media elites were able to define current debates by all kicking in the same direction, like the Rockettes. . . . But the last month [this was during the imbroglio over CBS's faked National Guard memos] has widened cracks in that media monopoly that have been developing for some time.

With the mainstream media facing a skeptical public and competition from those with other viewpoints, it seems unlikely that Iraq will turn out to be another Vietnam--a war lost in large part because of the media's opposition. Certainly President Bush is determined to stay the course. And it's quite possible that if U.S. troops are still in Iraq in large numbers by 2008, the presidential nominees for both major parties will promise to bring them home--and the winner, once in office, will find he cannot do so.

There's one wild card in all this: the possibility of another large-scale terrorist attack on America. It's natural to assume that the public would respond to such an attack the way it responded to 9/11: by rallying around the President with a renewed sense of militancy.

But would it? The difference between today and Sept. 10, 2001, is that back then terrorism was not uppermost in most Americans' minds. We have now been having a debate for more than four years about how best to combat terrorism. President Bush's opponents have argued that his offensive strategy--fighting terrorists overseas, both directly and by attempting to reform the political culture of the Middle East--has actually encouraged terrorism. They would likely respond to another attack by claiming it had proved the failure of that strategy. This argument would be wrongheaded, but another terrorist attack would make it seem plausible.

Yet there is no going back to the status quo ante September 11. Another terrorist attack would create an irresistible public demand for a new strategy, especially if the Bush strategy is rejected wholesale. An offensive strategy having been found wanting, the likely response would be a defensive strategy--a retreat into isolationism and an emphasis on homeland security. Its elements could include genuine curtailments of civil liberties, an end to the taboo against ethnic and religious profiling, restrictions on immigration, and heightened security that introduces enormous inconveniences into everyday life while constraining the flow of people and goods into America.

This would be a nightmare for liberals, and for all of us who care about freedom, prosperity and American engagement in the world. Those who are troubled by the Bush administration's aggressive approach to terrorism and tyranny in the Middle East should be careful what they wish for.

Mr. Taranto is editor of OpinionJournal.com. This article appears in the February issue of The American Spectator and is adapted from a speech he delivered to the Hudson Institute in November.

The focus of "Chinese paparazzi"

A new phenomenon has started as we venture out to places throughout Shanghai this week. When the we go out with the children, we are now the center of attention. We are approached and asked in amazement if all three children are ours. When we answer yes, the women all make a big deal about it and sometimes let out little squeals of delight. The men give a thumbs up and all just stare. Everywhere we go, we are watched and talked about.

At lunch yesterday with an Aussie couple living in Beijing, we were told stories of how they are regularly approached by the Chinese to have their picture taken. Many give them their children to hold for the photos or whole families squeeze tight next to them for a photo. We had not noticed this until we all went for a walk on the Bund yesterday. The Bund is a famous area on the river that runs straight through Shanghai and attracts visitors from around the world. President Nixon stayed at the Peace Hotel on the Bund in the 1970s when he visited China and started "ping-pong" diplomacy.

As we walked, cameras came out and our picture was taken numerous times. Couples posing to have their pictures taken suddenly had the cameraman change the angle to fit us in the background of their photos as we walked by. Some just shot us alone. Many were fascinated when I carried one of the kids on my shoulders, which meant his head was eight feet in the air, 3+ feet higher than any of the Chinese around.

Today at the Super Brand Mall (a seven-story department store on the river opposite the Bund with two Starbucks, McDonald's, cinema showing King Kong, and a Kenny Rogers Roasters made famous in a Seinfeld episode) the cameras really came out. As the children waited outside with their mother, hip Chinese teens (with yellow dyed hair) and other people came up to take their pictures. The teens sat down right next to them and smiled for pictures. Others just photographed them alone. We're told that many take pictures of Westerners to show their relatives in more rural parts of China.

It's very weird to suddenly find out you're a "celebrity." People want to touch you or the children and even hold them. It makes you want to not make eye contact in public because it's less "inviting." You also quickly understand how frustrating being a Hollywood celeb would be, especially if people chase you in cars, etc. to get your photo.

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The women that clean the apartment each day are desparate to hold the childen and communicate with them. Every morning they get down on their level and try and play with them or hold them. Yesterday, they tried to play cards with the boys. It was funny because they couldn't say much but they did know the word "ace." They watched us play go-fish on the floor while they cleaned. Today, they watched them play golf on the computer.

They are also insistent that the children wear slippers in the house. It's a custom and they desperately try to explain the need to us. The kids don't like them because their feet get hot. When we communicate this, the women tell us to keep the apartment colder.

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Observation -- Taxi drivers are not afraid to pull their cabs over in traffic beside a row of bushes. They will immediately hop out of the car, walk to the pushes and relieve themselves in the middle of town. It's discreet but still odd to a Westerner who is only used to doing this if a child can't make it to the next highway exit.