Priorities and Perspective

On Thursday, February 8th, we received shocking news of the death of 39 year old Anna Nicole Smith. Over the course of the following 48 hours, I learned more about Anna Nicole than I could have ever imagined.

Let's see, off the top of my head, here's what I remember:

She was born Vicki Lynn Hogan in Texas, kept the name "Smith" from her first marriage and had a son by her first husband. Her second marriage was to a billionaire 63 years her senior, and after his death she was involved in court battles over the inheritance with the billionaire's son (who has since also died). She had a crazy TV reality show after she'd gained tons of weight, was mostly incoherent during that time, but lost it all again and was a TrimSpa spokesperson. Her son died at age 20 while visiting her three days after she gave birth to a girl in September of 2006. He died in her hospital room from a drug overdose. Her third marriage was to Howard K. Stern (not the shock jock). And of course, her tragic end, dying in a Hollywood Hard Rock hotel (that's Hollywood, Florida). I'm not sure if this is all correct, but it's just what I can remember and I'm not going to fact check for accuracy, because to tell you the truth, I don't really care all that much.

My point is this: I've learned all this through osmosis. I didn't actively seek out this information, but there it was, hour after hour on every TV channel, news or otherwise. Are they now going to lay her in state in the Capitol Building while her husband, her ex-boyfriend and Zsa-Zsa Gabor's husband wait for DNA results to find out who her daughter's biological father really is?

Don't get me wrong, I do feel badly for her. It was a "live-fast-die-young" tragic end to a beautiful woman who, by all accounts, was a very sweet, sensitive person. But the same day that Anna Nicole Smith died, something else happened. Anyone? C'mon, take a guess.

Congress received a report from the Pentagon on their investigation into prewar intelligence which criticized civilian Pentagon officials for "conducting their own intelligence analysis to find links between Saddam Hussein and Al-Qaeda".

"Working under Douglas J. Feith, who at the time was under secretary of defense for policy, the group 'developed, produced and then disseminated alternative intelligence assessments on the Iraq and Al Qaeda relationship, which included some conclusions that were inconsistent with the consensus of the Intelligence Community, to senior decision-makers'."

"Senator Levin, who is chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, called the report a 'very strong condemnation' of the Pentagon’s activities.
'I think they sought this kind of intelligence. They made it clear they wanted any kind of possible connections, no matter how skimpy, and they got it,' he said. "

The above italized paragraphs come straight from the New York Times online. I say this because I had to look it up. I didn't know this off the top of my head like the Anna Nicole story, even though I think I should have. It wasn't drummed into my head over and over again like Anna Nicole.

I even tried to actively seek this information out when I first heard about it that day. I flipped to MSNBC to see if Chris Matthews would cover it on Hardball, but when I got there do you know what I found? Matthews was pre-empted by, you guessed it, BREAKING NEWS of the death of Anna Nicole Smith. I sat there, dumbfounded. I get 125 channels on Time-Warner cable and I couldn't find one of them dealing with Douglas Feith, or Donald Rumsfeld, or the Pentagon report, or Senator Levin or anything to do with breaking news of what our government did to sell us an illegal war in Iraq.

What does this say about our country as a society? The apathy and indifference is startling. Do we really not care about criminality running rampant in the White House, or 3,100 dead American soldiers, or thousands upon thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians killed, or torture memos or Abu Ghraib or Guantanimo? What does it say about our society when 38 million people tune in to watch American Idol or the current water cooler talk is about the Prince halftime show at the Super Bowl, but no one knows that another helicopter went down in Iraq? No one knows that Fox CEO Rupert Murdoch admitted trying to shape the agenda for the war in Iraq.

Murdoch: "We tried. We basically supported the Bush policy in the Middle East."

Fair and balanced? We knew it wasn't and now Murdoch admits it. Did anyone hear about this? Is this not newsworthy? Perhaps, but what I'm really excited for are those DNA results so we can put this Anna Nicole thing on TV for another week... sigh.