“I want to bite the hand that feeds me. I want to bite that hand so badly. I want to make them wish they’d never seen me!”–Elvis Costello, “Radio, Radio”
Maybe there’s something in the Christmas eggnog they’re drinking, because two media-worshiped mavens both lashed out at their power base this week.
First-up, Roger L. Simon links to this AP report, which catches Kofi Annan attempting to evade questions about the UN’s Oil-For-Food debacle by dressing down the reporter from The Times of London who dared question the Might Wizard:
At Wednesday’s press conference, one of the most persistent questioners, James Bone of The Times of London, mentioned a Mercedes-Benz that Kojo Annan imported into Ghana using his father’s diplomatic immunity to avoid taxes and customs duty, and said some of the secretary-general’s accounts of oil-for-food related events, “don’t really make sense.”
“I think you’re being very cheeky,” Annan interrupted. “Listen James Bone, you’ve been behaving like an overgrown schoolboy in this room for many, many months and years. You are an embarrassment to your colleagues and to your profession. Please stop misbehaving and please let’s move on to a serious journalist.”
The president of the U.N. Correspondents Association told Annan that Bone had a right to ask a question and was not an embarrassment.
Bone walked out and said later: “The Volcker report raises many serious questions about the integrity of the U.N., and it’s important that public officials paid with taxpayer money answer these questions fully and without accusing the press.”
Roger described Kofi as “Resembling no one more than Richard Nixon at the height of the Watergate Scandal”.
If Kofi Annan gives Roger a flashback to 1972, then this person’s worldview is perpetually trapped in that year. But of course, so are the folks who launched her celebrityhood–and it’s astonishing to see someone not recognizing that she’s biting the hand that not only feeds her, but created her:
What do you think you achieved in Crawford?
We brought the war into the forefront of American consciousness and started the discussion that should have started before the war. The mood in our country is turning around.
But the peace movement in the U.S. remains small. Why?
One thing that has prevented the peace movement in America is the media. I spoke with 5,000 people in North Carolina on March 19, 2005, and the press called the protest “insignificant.” They covered the Terri Schiavo case instead.
You feel like you were mistreated by the press?
They got hold of everything I’ve ever said and scrutinized it so carefully. They never scrutinized what Bush said. No one said, “Why did you lie to the American people and say there was WMD?” The press found an easy target in Iraq, and they found an easy target in me.
(Emphasis Michelle Malkin.)
Chutzpah, thy name is Cindy.
Update: In an article with the Antonioni-esque title of “The Blow-Up“, Claudia Rosett has much more on Kofi’s meltdown on the podium.
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