And so it begins. Check out the conservative blog Little Green Footballs on Jill Carroll’s interview with her kidnappers shortly before her release, in which she makes some remarks critical of the United States’ decision to go to war in Iraq. LGF adds portentously: “Note that even after her release, Carroll maintained that she had been treated well by her captors — so it would appear that this journalist for the Christian Science Monitor made these anti-American comments voluntarily.”
Regardless of whether the remarks she made in her forced interview were anti-American, does it therefore follow that it was anti-American for her voluntarily to say merely that she’d been treated well? I don’t get the logic. Then again, footballs aren’t green, are they?
On WRKO Radio (AM 680) this morning, Scott Allen Miller responded to an unhinged caller by asking whether Carroll was “Patty Hearst” or a “co-conspirator.” I’m not sure whether Miller was actually taking that point of view or simply trying to summarize what the caller had said — although this, on the WRKO Web site, may answer my question: “Scott wondered if there is anything fishy, Ollie North style, about the release, and why is she still wearing a burka.” I don’t get the Ollie North reference; I do get “fishy.”
In any case, get ready. This is going to become very ugly very quickly.
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Mitch
Why won’t the liberal media report upon all the journalists who haven’t been taken hostage?
Anonymous
and it begins yo get ugly — or mindless — rather quickly
Anonymous
that should read “to”
Paddy
Dan,LGF acidly wrote “She says the terrorists treated her well. Her interpreter, murdered during the kidnapping, was not available for comment.”Perhaps Ms. Carroll and all of us ought to take a few breaths before reacting.
Anonymous
Not just conservatives are rumbling.Last night on WBZ Paul Sullivan, who isn’t all that conservative and at times pretty liberal, made similar comments about Carrol’s disappearance.Although it was more in the context of the media not treating Carrol’s story with the same skeptical eye since she was a member of “the 4th Estate.” Last night it sounded reasonable, but reading these other comments, this morning not so much.
mike_b1
Sure she was in on it. After all, who wouldn’t put their family and coworkers through hell for … what, exactly?
Neil
Well these days with everybody plugged in it’s easy enough to find some schoolyard bully-type willing to make vicious remarks, for the sake of a little attention. That’s what shockjocks and their ilk do and should come as no surprise. But do these little voices matter? Nothing Jill said during her captivity, or says for a while, should matter, either, till she has time to get some distance from the experience. This brings to mind another case of a hostage, the filmmaker Micah Garen, taken in Aug 2004. He was freed after ten days and managed to get a book, “American Hostage”, out of the ordeal, co-written with his attractive girlfriend. She wrote the part of the book involving the at-home dealing and handwringing. Naturally she’s on the cover draped on his handsome shoulder. Not the actual kidnapping, but everything post-release had a whiff of calculation to it. Like as soon as he got out they set to work productizing the experience. Emily Rooney interviewed them and I swear she picked up the same vibe. I see some cigar-chomping Perry White publisher–“Put the dame on the cover and you’ll sell another 10,000 copies!” Publisher’s Weekly even said, “this story is made for the silver screen”. Ugh.Best wishes to Jill from a fellow UMie…
o-fish-l
I don’t recall you demanding the public allow a certain Vice President time to “decompress” after the real trauma of accidentally shooting his best friend.That said, your labeling of “Little Green Footballs” as “conservative” and your juvenile comment that “after all footballs aren’t green, are they?” seem to overlook that it was the venerable LGF that brought down C-BS anchor Dan Rather and his deranged producer Mary Mapes just moments after the infamous “Memogate” report aired.To quote John Podhoretz of the NY Post, “Charles Johnson, who runs the wonderfullittlegreenfootballs.com, simply typed one of the memos over using Microsoft Word’s New Times Roman font and, lo and behold, the document came out exactly identical to the one on the CBS site, down to the letter spacing.”If LGF can bring down Rather, I think it’s rather presumptuous to suggest that the same blog won’t expose the truth (sinister or otherwise) behind the equally suspicious Jill Carroll story.
neil
So shooting your buddy is a “real trauma” on a par with seeing your translator being murdered, then being kidnapped and held hostage in Baghdad for 82 days. Yes this incident certainly highlights how tough Dick Cheney has had it these last few months.I’m sure Johnson will get to the bottom of this “sinister or otherwise” story by flying to Iraq and tracking down the Revenge Brigades to learn the truth. All he’ll have to to do is tell them how he helped to make their common enemy Dan Rather look stupid and they should welcome him as their liberator, and be eager to explain their true motivations.And Iraq is not in civil war–it’s just an elaborate ruse constructed by the collaborationist liberal media who won’t report good news such as that beheadings have for the most part been replaced by bullets to the head. Why do we not hear more about this kind of progress!
Dan Kennedy
Fish Boy –If you knew anything about me and what I’ve written over the years, which you obviously don’t, you’d know I gave full credit to Johnson at the time of the National Guard memo imbroglio. That was then. This is now. Do you understand that?I agree with you about Cheney. It’s always very stressful to shoot your buddy in the face and the chest and nearly kill him. I’d still like to know what his interview with police might have been like had it been conducted right after the incident instead of the next morning. I could speculate, but as Richard Nixon would say, that would be wrong!