Blogging on Meds

It’s been said time and time again that the majority of Americans care more about Britney’s nasty poon, steroids in baseball and Hillary’s “bitchiness” than they do about the Iraq War. Basically, it’s true. But the ones you would expect to care, the flag pin-wearing war’s cheerleaders, don’t care either and want to keep the public in the dark about US troop deaths overseas, even when they are decorated officers whose families want America to know about their loved ones.

It’s a shame that the “love it or leave it” types in Washington and elsewhere can’t even pay respect to the men and women they ship off to get killed and maimed. Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank tells of the Pentagon’s refusal to allow media to cover the funeral of one of the most senior officers to be killed in Iraq so far at Arlington National Cemetery, even though the family wanted the media there. Lt. Col. William G. Hall was killed by an IED near Fallujah.

Journalists were held 50 yards from the service, separated from the mourning party by six or seven rows of graves, and staring into the sun and penned in by a yellow rope. Photographers and reporters pleaded with Arlington officials.

“There will be a yellow rope in the face of the next of kin,” protested one photographer with a large telephoto lens.

“This is the best shot you’re going to get,” a man from the cemetery replied.

“We’re not going to be able to hear a thing,” a reporter argued.

“Mm-hmm,” an Arlington official answered.

Media whining? Perhaps. But the de facto ban on media at Arlington funerals fits neatly with an effort by the administration to sanitize the war in Iraq. That, in turn, has contributed to a public boredom with the war. A Pew Research Center poll earlier this month found that 14 percent of Americans considered Iraq the news story of most interest — less than half the 32 percent hooked on the presidential campaign and barely more than the 11 percent hooked on the raid of a polygamist compound in Texas.

It’s a disgrace that this can’t get more coverage than a column in the Post.