Mugger: Fancy Turns to War: Pass the bong, comrade.

Early last Saturday morning, before most businesses opened, I walked along Duane St. in Tribeca to the City Hall Kinko’s. Except for a panhandler or two, no one else was in view, but while hoofing the five blocks east, there was an uplifting sight. Every third storefront, it seemed, featured an American flag in its window. Several months after 9/11, the dizzying array of patriotic displays downtown gradually faded, save in the immediate vicinity of ground zero. It was a welcome reminder that not everyone in New York—whose City Council shamefully passed an anti-war resolution—was in lockstep with the academic and arts communities, not to mention most of the media.

Just three hours later, outside a nearby deli I saw five tourists, one of whom was taking a photo of her companions, including two children. Apparently they were in town for the afternoon march that wound up at Washington Square Park, and were filling backpacks with provisions. I nearly choked on my coffee when the woman directed the four subjects to look straight ahead and say, "I hate Bush" instead of "cheese." It didn’t surprise me one bit when one of the chubby adults muttered, "I think I overdid it on the foie gras and wine last night. Anyway, we’d better get on the subway if we don’t want to be late."

There’s a spooky feeling in Manhattan this spring, an irreconcilable riot of opinions about war, Saddam Hussein, President Bush, television’s hyperactive coverage of the "shock and awe" offensive in Iraq and the presence of cops and national guardsmen at potential terrorist sites. On the one hand, I don’t need to hear the word "embedded" ever again; on the other, it’s about time Manhattan has visible protection at the tunnels, bridges and train stations.

Along with my three brothers, sons, a nephew, niece and sister-in-law, I was at Madison Square Garden on Friday night, watching the Knicks come from behind to defeat the Detroit Pistons 97-93. A military band played the national anthem before the game, and at least half the spectators put hand to heart as "The Star-Spangled Banner" was mournfully performed. Across the court, I could see Spike Lee seated with Alec Baldwin in the first row, and Mayor Mike about 50 feet away from that unholy pair.

It’s not hard to imagine what the trio was thinking. Lee was probably pissed that the few moments of overt patriotism was delaying the game; Baldwin was no doubt daydreaming about the Oscars and whether he’ll ever be up for an award at that annual orgy of celebrity worship.

Bloomberg, on the other hand, who looked distracted even as Latrell Sprewell saved the Knicks from further disappointment, had to be going over reams of figures in his head. How many companies announced plans to leave New York today? What was the level of bankruptcies compared to a year ago? Could he get away with passing more penurious taxes on a citizenry already far too strapped by government confiscation of wealth? What kind of support could he expect in, say, Brooklyn, in the 2005 mayoral election? And was this job worth all the aggravation?

In Saturday’s Times, Jennifer Steinhauer wrote an article trying to explain how Bloomberg, "who generally prefers a low profile to omnipresence," was setting an example for New Yorkers who are understandably apprehensive about another terrorist attack. I don’t give any credence to the antiwar diplomats who insist that the U.S.-British assault on Baghdad has made such an occurrence far more likely; anyone with an ounce of intelligence has been on low-level alert since the Trade Center collapsed and crumbled. Although Mayor Mike ended his day at the Garden, earlier he rode the R and N trains, got his shoes shined, wandered around the theater district, Steinhauer didn’t note that he was sitting courtside at the Knicks game, which isn’t quite congruent with his pose as a straphanger.

We had a lunch date with my brother and his 11-year-old at Mickey Mantle’s sports bar—awful food, excellent memorabilia hanging on the walls—at one p.m. on Saturday. It was lucky we hailed a cab at noon to ride up to Central Park South, for the traffic was at a standstill because of the protest hoopla. Along the way, on 8th Ave., we saw hundreds of participants walking to Times Square, some dressed in silly costumes and carrying signs like "Impeach Bush," "Regime change in Washington" and the ubiquitous "No blood for oil." Not a single banner questioned France’s Jacques Chirac’s oil deals with Iraq, not to mention Vladimir Putin’s, but thinking beyond getting revenge for Al Gore’s defeat is a tall order for irrational juveniles.

There were a few graybeards in the crowd, but most were youths taking advantage of an unseasonably warm afternoon and the opportunity to simultaneously shout trite slogans and participate in a moving block party.

But don’t take my word for it. Salon’s Michelle Goldberg, no protege of Paul Wolfowitz, wrote an account of the 150,000-people throng that was headlined, "Why are these people smiling?" Goldberg’s despondent dispatch began: "Saturday’s peace protest in Manhattan was so jubilant, you’d never know there was a war going on... [W]hile recent protests abroad have been marked by militancy—with people throwing stones, fake blood and, in Athens, Molotov cocktails at American embassies [neat!]—the march in New York was overwhelmingly peaceful and strangely cheery. For all the rhetoric of atrocity, it felt like a street party."

Goldberg must’ve left the hoedown before nearly 100 people were arrested and a dozen cops were injured, but why quibble when there’s a movement at stake, especially one that’s having zero effect on the administration’s policy?

She was contemplative in the article, far less hysterical than the usual pap that Salon, along with publications like the Nation, usually runs. Goldberg asked several people about the contradiction of Iraqis greeting soldiers with joy in Safwan, but most insisted it was the American media that staged such footage.

My favorite anecdote gathered came from Erika Bernabei, a 22-year-old nonprofit worker who chanted "We’re queer! We’re cute! We’re antiwar to boot!" Responding to the reports of Iraqi citizens rejoicing at the upcoming liberation from one of the world’s most vicious dictators, she just didn’t believe it. Bernabei said: "What I believe is that they’re being complacent because they’re so fucking afraid. I have no doubt they’ll smile at soldiers with huge guns. I really truly doubt the people are cheering bloodshed."

I really truly doubt Bernabei has an original thought in her queer, cute head.

Most stable men and women do not like bloodshed. But has it crossed Bernabei’s noggin (and the thousands of political novices like her) that perhaps, after years of torture, starvation and humiliation on the orders of Saddam, that most Iraqis might not equate Bush with Hitler?

The National Review’s website on Saturday featured an article from a Harvard senior who wasn’t impressed by the March 20 walk-out of 1000 students and faculty at the Cambridge, MA, bastion of objective scholarship. Jason Steorts, writing about the "intellectual bankruptcy of Harvard’s peaceniks," concluded his essay with two paragraphs that give one faint hope that not all of America’s well-nourished and affluent Ivy Leaguers have lost all their brain cells by attending classes run by nostalgic Baby Boomer professors.

He wrote: "Any serious criticism of the war must rely on one or both of two claims: First, that it is not in the security interests of the United States forcibly to remove Saddam from power; or, second, that a war to rid the Iraqi people of a psychopathic dictator is worse for that people, in humanitarian terms, than letting them continue to suffer under him.

"Rather than make these claims, Harvard’s high-minded intellectuals recite their usual litany of complaints about capitalism, about globalization, and above all, about George W. Bush. Yesterday’s protest was an exercise in many things: vanity, condescension, evasion, arrogance, and smug self-righteousness. But it failed miserably as an effort at persuasion. This should come as no surprise to those of us who recognize that war is tragic, but who also know that life under tyranny, or life overshadowed by the danger of apocalyptic slaughter, is more tragic still."

Newsday’s Jimmy Breslin, who didn’t graduate from Harvard, but is likely in the running for the school’s commencement speaker in May—if Gerhard Schroder or a Palestinian suicide bomber can’t make it—was magnificently incoherent last Friday. The Great Breslin, who’s made a pact with the devil, apparently gets a senior citizen pass from his editors that allows his copy to escape the delete button.

The following is a classic, worthy of Arthur Schlesinger Jr.—an ancient crank still living in Camelot who’s nonetheless pressed into duty by "corporate" media like the Los Angeles Times and Newsweek. (Reading Schlesinger, once a cold warrior, writing about foreign policy, you think of the Yankees dusting off Whitey Ford’s mothballs so he can pitch to Miguel Tejada.)

Breslin spouts off like a workaday drunk: "I wonder if anybody watching this Shock and Awe bombing Friday noted that Iraq didn’t have a plane. There is no joy to kill the bull unless he fights. You can’t call this a war. The television people [I’ll agree that they’ve generally been awful, especially CNN’s Aaron Brown and Fox’s Rita Cosby], and the politicians in Washington, said this was an extraordinary exhibition of bombing that never has been seen before. They used the right word, exhibition. An exhibition war, not a real war. You’ll take it right now, if it keeps these young men of ours alive. Take it and gag on it, for this is a total character collapse of a country that was supposed to be so far above this loathsome act. You become the thing you hate. And Friday, we did. We became the Germany of 1939."

And the Upper West Side’s "intelligentsia" is whining that dissent is no longer allowed in the United States.

Much has been written about Michael Moore’s outburst at the Oscars Sunday night, but no one summarized what makes this buffoon tick as well as the Weekly Standard’s Jonathan Last. Moore’s lost-in-the-funhouse rant against the "fictitious" president Bush is the headline, but Last goes deeper. He says: "So who was booing Michael Moore? The people in the balconies. At the Oscars, the orchestra level is reserved for the glitterati and the upper tiers for the riff-raff. So only ‘normal’ people were booing Moore. Which begs the question, why didn’t the stars boo him? Why simply sit there, the equivalent of voting ‘present’ on a resolution in Congress? Clearly, the answer is that they wanted to cheer. Just not as much as they want that seventh house in Maui."

This review first appeared in the March 21 edition of The New York Sun. The Manhattan daily’s website is [www.nysun.com](http://www.nysun.com).

Card-Carrying Man

What Liberal Media? The Truth About Bias and the News By Eric Alterman Basic Books 322 pages, $25

I am Eric Alterman: Unfortunately, you’re not.

Although an honorary gay person of color and progressive champion of the people, I’m an affluent white, heterosexual journalist with degrees from Cornell, Yale and Stanford. I write for The Nation, run a weblog ("Altercation") for MSNBC.com, and have contributed articles to Worth, Rolling Stone, the New York Times, Elle, Mother Jones, and the World Policy Journal.

In 1992 I wrote the book "Sound and Fury: The Making of the Punditocracy," and then became a pundit.

I’m friends with Bruce (Springsteen to you) and my book about him, "It Ain’t No Sin to Be Glad You’re Alive," won the 1999 Stephen Crane Literary Award. On my Web site I educate my followers with backstage tidbits of Bruce-lore and jot down the list of songs he performs at concerts.

But enough about me.

Wait! In my rage over the unelected president’s illegal invasion of Iraq, I momentarily forgot the purpose of this message. You probably already know about my new book, "What Liberal Media?" especially if you log onto "Altercation" daily, where I’m compelled to promote it and give the itinerary of my book tour. Still, just in case you’re a literary challenged person who watches Fox News, it’s my duty to enlighten you.

There’s a myth that the United States media is liberal. The standard litany goes like this: While conservatives dominate talk radio and take solace in The Wall Street Journal’s editorial pages, anything Rupert Murdoch owns, The Washington Times and a couple of small-circulation weeklies, the remainder of print and broadcast journalism embraces a left-wing view of the world. Propagandists cite the New York Times, the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, the Boston Globe, the Chicago Tribune, NBC, CBS, ABC, CNN, National Public Radio, Time, Newsweek, Harper’s, Rolling Stone and The New Republic as examples of this supposed bias.

It’s a lie.

Did you know that Tim Russert, who hosts the conservative "Meet the Press", wore a red, white and blue ribbon in the days following September 11, 2001? And that he invited, during the Monica Lewinsky non-scandal, cybergossip Matt Drudge on his show and actually took that creep seriously?

Oh, boy.

Then there’s the Washington Post’s David Broder, the "dean" of America’s press corps. He’s lauded by colleagues as a "centrist," a man of advancing years who still out-reports young men and women half his age. But as I prove in "What Liberal Media?" he’s an out-of-the-closet conservative. One example: "Broder’s coverage of the 2000 election reflected an establishment bias in favor of George W. Bush... Repeatedly during the campaign, Broder filed as if dictating from Bush/Cheney talking points."

Don’t pay attention to Mr. Broder’s op-ed columns this year that excoriate the cowboy unelected president for not convincing enough allies to join the Iraq invasion, profligate tax cuts for the wealthy or the deplorable state of public schools. It’s a tease: In 2004, as quick as you can say Bill Kristol ("the most influential Republican/neoconservative publicist in America"), Mr. Broder will rip apart Mr. Bush’s Democratic challenger.

Want to raise my blood pressure? Let’s talk Florida in 2000, when George Bush was handed the presidency by a reactionary Supreme Court. With a little help from that turncoat Ralph Nader. From "What Liberal Media? (available at discriminating bookstores and amazon.com): "How did it happen? How did one of the most experienced candidates in our history somehow ‘lose’ to one of the least qualified." One reason: The SCLM (so-called "liberal" media) hated Al Gore’s guts. If, by a remote chance you don’t believe me, just ask my friends Sidney Blumenthal, Joe Conason, Eric Boehlert, Todd Gitlin, or Orville Schell.

The latter, by the way, loved "What Liberal Media?" Mr. Schell, dean of Berkeley’s journalism school and a contributor to The Nation, The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker and Salon, wrote the following in yesterday’s New York Times. "While Mr. Alterman is a self-confessed liberal, he is only too eager to throw off the yoke of liberal wishy-washiness and fight fire with fire [kind of like Bruce], taking on neo-conservative writers like Andrew Sullivan, Michael Kelly and Charles Krauthammer, who he claims ‘have carried the talent for malevolent invective with them like a communicable disease.’"

I’m down with Orville. Because even though I believe in the promised land, I’m a streetfighter. Alexander Cockburn, who also writes for The Nation, is "longtime Stalinist communist" who hates "America and Israel." Can’t stand the guy. And then there’s Christopher Hitchens, who recently left the magazine because on so many issues he’s flipped to the right wing. If I weren’t a feminist I’d have to call Hitch the P-word.

Who else do I despise in the media? Besides Ann Coulter and Bernard Goldberg, who wrote inexplicably best-selling books about liberal bias (get it?) in the media, there’re a bunch of pundits on my enemies list. The Washington Post’s Howard Kurtz is one, a man who "in addition to flacking for Bush, also flacks for Bush’s flack, Ari Fleischer." Then there’s Paul Gigot, Rich Lowry, Tucker Carlson, Jonah Goldberg, Rush Limbaugh (natch), John Fund, Jeff Jacoby, George Will, and Fred Barnes.

Although I’m a New York chauvinist and love my lifestyle in Manhattan, sometimes the thought of settling in "Old Europe" enters my complicated mind. As I say in my book, in 2002 I traveled to five cities across the pond and observed the following. "Virtually no one in high European media and cultural circles appeared willing to support or even defend the manner in which the Bush administration chose, unilaterally and without any prior consultation, to withdrawal from the Kyoto Protocol on global warming."

I’d fit in just fine on the opinion pages of Le Monde or The Guardian.

But there’s work to be done at home. Recently, TomPaine.com challenged Coulter and Goldberg to debate me on the topic of media bias. As the Village Voice’s John Giuffo said last week in yet another rave review of "What Liberal Media?" I was the only one to lace up my gloves. TomPaine.com is funded by the Florence and John Schumann Foundation and one of my heroes (although not quite in the same league as I.F. Stone) Bill Moyers, serves as its president.

TomPaine’s one butt-kickin’ Web site. Did you see that cool ad they ran on the Times’ op-ed page on March 19? It showed a picture of Osama bin Laden atop the headline "I Want You to Invade Iraq."

I can’t figure out why Coulter and Goldberg chickened out. I guess they just weren’t born to run.

Send comments to [MUG1988@aol.com](mailto:MUG1988@aol.com).