When I heard last week about Dick Cheney’s hunting accident, I think I’m safe in saying that I had the same reaction as most people: “The guy who got shot is okay? Kind of funny, then.” And that was about it. When the press coverage jumped the rails over the next couple of days, I asked a few decidedly-not-pro-Bush friends whether they thought the story was a big deal. None of them said yes. All of them forwarded me jokes, most of which were pretty good.
That reaction, more than everything else, was all the confirmation I needed that the media has lost its collective mind. I see at Drudge that they’re intent on stretching the non-story of why they didn’t get a press release as soon as they would have liked into a second week.
Now, if you MSM folks out there have any interest in convincing the rest of us that you haven’t lost all sense of proportion (or sense, period), I have a suggestion: quit talking to each other about how ill-used you’ve been, and start doing some actual reporting. Just to show that I’m a nice guy, I’ll even point you towards a big story that isn’t getting any coverage to speak of:
A home invasion and attack near Duluth [GA] a week ago has set off a political firestorm that may reach all the way to China.
Peter Yuan Li said he was tied up and beaten in his Chatburn Way home by several men on Feb. 8. The men spoke Korean and Mandarin and left behind certain valuables, including a camcorder and television, but took his computers, a phone and his wallet, according to Li. They also demanded unspecified documents and pried open two file cabinets, he said.
But Li claims it was no ordinary robbery. The culprits, he said, were Chinese agents who targeted him because of his work with The Epoch Times international newspaper and its Internet site, which is affiliated with the Falun Gong spiritual movement.
The Chinese government has brutally clamped down on Falun Gong practices and branded it a cult. Li, a practitioner of Falun Gong, said the newspaper is highly critical of China’s communist government and its dismal human rights record.
“It was a warning,” said the China-born Li, 41, who moved to the United States in 1987 and is a naturalized U.S. citizen. “They did this because of the work I do promoting human rights.”
The FBI is looking into the incident for possible civil rights violations, but a spokesman declined to say whether the Chinese government might be involved. The attack is still under investigation by the Fulton County Police Department.
A man, who declined to give his name, who answered the telephone at the Chinese Embassy in Washington called The Epoch Times the “propaganda machine of the evil cult” and said he didn’t know anything about the attack on Li.
Li, though, has no doubt who is behind the attack.
Li’s ordeal began a week ago, while he was at the home he shares with his wife and two children. Between 11 a.m. and noon, he said, someone knocked on his door and a man said it was a water delivery. Li said he hadn’t ordered water but when he opened the door another man, who was hidden, jumped out and the two pushed him back into his house. His attackers had a knife and a gun.
He was knocked to the floor, blindfolded and covered with a quilt. “I was scared,” Li said as he recalled the terrifying morning. “They were strong. I couldn’t breathe. I became weak and they started to beat me.”
They used duct tape to cover his mouth and tied him up. At one point, he said, one or two other men came in the house. One, Li said, spoke Chinese and asked him about the location of a safe. Li said he doesn’t have a safe, but could hear them searching through his file cabinets.
He said relatives who still live in China also have been harassed. Li doesn’t ask them about details for fear it might make their situation worse, but his family has told him they think he’s “taking the right course and they support me.”
That article appeared in the Metro section of Thursday’s Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and other than one Washington Post story and couple of online mentions by Forbes, it hasn’t received any other notable coverage. The name “Peter Yuan Li” gets no hits from a search of the New York Times, no hits at CNN.com, and no hits at MSNBC.com (David Gregory, call your office).
I find this a bit odd. Here we have a pretty credible allegation that a United States citizen was attacked, beaten, and robbed in his own home by agents of a hostile foreign power because of his political views and activities.
As George Carlin used to say, I’m going to repeat that, because it sounds kind of important:
Here we have a credible allegation that an American citizen was attacked, beated and robbed in his own home by agents of a hostile foreign power because of his political views and activities.
Call me a press-hating fascist wingnut, but I think that’s a big story. That’s a page one, lead for a week, cover-of-Time-and-Newsweek story. Why the hell are you whining yourselves hoarse about how long it took the White House press corps to learn about a minor hunting accident?
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