Syndicated columnist Richard Cohen declared in the Washington Post on Tuesday that an-eye-for-an-eye would be a hopelessly wimpy policy for the Israeli government.

“Anyone who knows anything about the Middle East knows that proportionality is madness,” he wrote. “For Israel, a small country within reach, as we are finding out, of a missile launched from any enemy’s back yard, proportionality is not only inapplicable, it is suicide. The last thing it needs is a war of attrition. It is not good enough to take out this or that missile battery. It is necessary to reestablish deterrence: You slap me, I will punch out your lights.”

Cohen likes to sit in front of a computer and use flip phrases like “punch out your lights” as euphemisms for burning human flesh and bones with high-tech weapons, courtesy of American taxpayers.

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After getting out of Lebanon, writer June Rugh told Reuters on Tuesday: "As an American, I’m embarrassed and ashamed. My administration is letting it happen [by giving] tacit permission for Israel to destroy a country." The news service quoted another American evacuee, Andrew Muha, who had been in southern Lebanon. He said: "It’s a travesty. There’s a million homeless in Lebanon and the intense amount of bombing has brought an entire country to its knees."

Embarrassing. Shameful. A travesty. Those kinds of words begin to describe the alliance between the United States and Israel. Here are a few more: Government criminality. High-tech terror. Mass murder from the skies. The kind of premeditated action that the U.S. representative in Nuremberg at the International Conference on Military Trials — Supreme Court Justice Robert L. Jackson — was talking about on August 12, 1945, when he declared that "no grievances or policies will justify resort to aggressive war. It is utterly renounced and condemned as an instrument of policy."

The United States and Israel. Right now, it’s the most dangerous alliance in the world.

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The Baghdad bureau chief of the New York Times could not have been any clearer.

“The story really takes us back into the 8th century, a truly barbaric world,” John Burns said. He was speaking Tuesday night on the PBS “NewsHour With Jim Lehrer,” describing what happened to two U.S. soldiers whose bodies had just been found. Evidently they were victims of atrocities, and no one should doubt in the slightest that the words of horror used by Burns to describe the “barbaric murders” were totally appropriate.

The problem is that Burns and his mass-media colleagues don’t talk that way when the cruelties are inflicted by the U.S. military — as if dropping bombs on civilians from thousands of feet in the air is a civilized way to terrorize and kill.

When journalists maintain a flagrant double standard in their language — allowing themselves appropriate moral outrage when Americans suffer but tiptoeing around what is suffered by victims of the U.S. military — the media window on the world is tinted a dark red-white-and-blue, and the overall result is more flackery than journalism.

Based on the available evidence from Abu Ghraib to Afghanistan to Guantanamo, anyone who claims that U.S. foreign policy does not include torture is disingenuous or deluded…

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Two years from now, Hillary Clinton might be pleased to hear the kind of boos and antiwar chants that greeted her days ago when she spoke at the annual Take Back America conference of Democratic activists and argued against a timetable for withdrawal from Iraq. But so much of politics is about timing. And right now, Clinton is facing a serious problem of premature triangulation.
As long as she needs support from Democratic primary voters, Hillary Clinton will want to defer the media rewards of an all-out “Sister Souljah moment.” Let’s recall that in 1992, when Bill Clinton went out of his way to denounce the then-little-known rap singer Sister Souljah at a Rainbow Coalition conference, he’d already clinched the Democratic presidential nomination and was looking toward the general election.

Bill Clinton’s triangulation gambit, using Sister Souljah as a prop for his calculated move to ingratiate himself with establishment pundits, had been foreshadowed by a Washington Post article that reported the day before: “Some top advisers to Clinton argue that … he must become involved in highly publicized confrontations with one or more Democratic constituencies.” The constituency Clinton chose to polarize with was African-American activists.

These days, and from here to the horizon, there’s no larger or more adamant Democratic constituency than the antiwar voters who want the U.S. military out of Iraq pronto. At this point, Hillary Clinton’s pro-war position is far afield from the views of most grassroots Democrats.

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The scheduled speech by Sen. Hillary Clinton at the “Take Back America 2006” conference in Washington on June 13 is likely to intensify discussion about her relationship with the progressive grassroots of the Democratic Party.

Many weeks ago the conference sponsor, the Campaign for America’s Future, sent out an email telling prospective attendees: “As in years past, we expect America’s most prominent progressive leaders to attend and address the conference. Invited speakers include…” On the list was Hillary Clinton…

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I’ve been thinking about Tariq Aziz a lot since the New York Times printed a front-page story on the former Iraqi deputy prime minister in late May. A color photograph showed him decked out in what the article described as “an open-necked hospital gown, with a patient’s plastic identification tag on his wrist.” He looked gaunt.

The last time I saw Aziz, at a Baghdad meeting two months before the U.S.-led invasion began, he was still portly in one of his well-tailored business suits. If Aziz was worried, he didn’t show it.

Now, he’s playing a part that U.S. media seem to relish. The Times headline said “Hussein’s Former Envoy Gushes With Adulation on Witness Stand,” but to sum up the coverage it might have just as aptly declared: “How the Mighty Have Fallen.”

The Times reported that Aziz defended Saddam Hussein in his May 24 testimony — after he was not able to cut a deal with Baghdad’s current legal powers-that-be…

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People who are concerned about the state of the U.S. news media in 2006 might pause on Memorial Day to consider those who have lost their lives in the midst of journalistic neglect, avoidance and bias.

We remember that while TV and radio news reports tell the latest about corporate fortunes, vast numbers of real people are struggling to make ends meet — and many are in a position of choosing between such necessities as medicine, adequate food and paying the rent.

We remember that many Americans have lost their limbs or their lives in on-the-job accidents that might have been prevented if overall media coverage had been anywhere near as transfixed with job safety as with, say, marital splits among Hollywood celebrities.

We remember that the national and deadly problem of widespread obesity is in part attributable to constant advertising for products with empty calories and plenty of fat.

We remember that despite public claims by tobacco companies, the ads that keep trying to glamorize smoking continue to lure millions of young people onto a long journey of addiction to cancer-causing cigarettes.

We remember that superficial news reports and commentaries, routinely describing war in flat phony antiseptic terms, are helpful to the U.S. war efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq — where the deaths of American troops, while horrific, are small in number compared to the civilian deaths as a result of daily slaughter catalyzed by U.S. military activities.

We remember that each war death takes a precious life, and media outlets rarely convey more than surface accounts of the actual grief of loved ones left behind…

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We see this kind of news story now and again. Sometimes we try to imagine the people behind the numbers, the human realities underneath the surface abstractions. But overall, the responses testify to journalism’s failings — and our own.

“Poor nutrition contributes to the deaths of some 5.6 million children every year,” an Associated Press dispatch said early this month, citing new data from the U.N. Children’s Fund. And: “In its report, UNICEF said one of every four children under age 5, including 146 million children in the developing world, is underweight.”

The future is bleak for many children who will be born in the next decade. As AP noted, “the world has fallen far short in efforts to reduce hunger by half before 2015.”

Reading this news over a more-than-ample breakfast, I thought about the limitations of journalistic work that is often done with the best of intentions. Try as they might, reporters and editors don’t often go beyond the professional groove of the media workplace. Journalists routinely function as cogs in media machinery that processes tragedy as just another news commodity…

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