For so many of you in the traditional media, we know you are mourning. Tim Russert, a man who touched millions of lives was more to you than a news anchor, he was your coworker, mentor, and dear friend. The heartbreak you are feeling is shared here. For political junkies like ourselves, Russert was as familiar a face as the next door neighbor or a childhood buddy. Whether we were screaming at him on TV or applauding his tenacity in the face of a reluctant interviewee, the fact that we won't be able to see him any longer on Meet the Press and other iconic political news shows leaves a big, empty hole. I can't really believe he's gone, not yet. I understand it on a rational level, but when I do try and confront it emotionally, it's like a punch to the stomach.
It would be presumptuous to assume that anything can make a loss of this magnitude 'better,' or even 'worse' for that matter. But at least Tim Russert died doing something he loved after a long life of doing it well, a passion in which he -- and many of you -- enjoyed enormous success and the accompanying wealth and privilege that only a tiny handful of people will ever know. I hope your suffering is tempered, just a little bit, by the knowledge that he did not linger on in great agony.
But this diary isn't about Tim Russert, it's not about you; it's about some other people who you occasionally cover and for whom you may now feel an unwanted and yet inseparabale kinship. It's probably too early to say this, and yes, I apologize if anyone feels this is crass or inapproriate, but I'm going to say it anyway: The same intractable pain that has reached out cruelly and gripped you with despair is felt by every mother and father, brother and sister, and friend and spouse of every single soldier killed in Iraq ([Update 12:45 PM EDT] And Afghanistan where four soldiers were killed in the last 24 hours). Those men and women died doing a job that paid peanuts, most of them at a young age. Despite whatever loyalty they may feel to their comrades in arms, odds are good that quite a few of them would have rather been somewhere else right up until the moment their bodies were ravaged by fire and red-hot lead. The gut punch, horrific beyond comprehension, is their departed died for a mistake or a campaign of intentional deception, take your pick.
They will bear that pain for the rest of their lives without the benefit of round the clock coverage, or scores of media superstars lining up to console them with anecdotes about what terrific human beings their loved ones were. Their fallen will get a few words on the local news, maybe a brief mention on CNN or ABC if they're lucky. If they 'make too big a deal about it' or 'ask the wrong questions,' or grieve in anything but the proper, GOP approved, Bush cheering way, behind closed doors out of sight and out of the media limelight, God help them. They will be roundly, loudly, shamed as traitors and terrorist sympathizers and cowardly surrender monkeys by right-wing operatives and juvenile chicken-hawks appearing, in too many cases, on your own news programs.
For those tens of thousands wounded in Iraq, many of whom will never be whole again, they will not return to a luxury hospital for millionaire celebrities. For many, their miserable pain wracked days will be spent in an overcrowded, underfunded, forgotten ward in the local VA barely able to offer them decent care, while politicians and pundits debate if they deserve better treatment or a modest increase in benefits. (And as long as we're on that topic, I should point out that for many ordinary civilian families, if the breadwinner comes down with even a semi-serious medical condition, and so much as misses a few days of work, that person risks losing their job and thus their over-priced, junk healthcare insurance right at the time they desperately need it.)
Anyway, take that bottomless grief you feel and multiply it by over four-thousand human beings, and throw in that their death was, as we now know, unnecessary to preserve our national security. Do all that and you might have some understanding for why so many of us are angry as hell about it, experiencing what right-wingers cleverly and callously call "Bush Derangement Syndrome." And you might finally get on a visceral level, deep down in your twisting, knotted gut, why some of us are more than a little pissed off, indeed downright sickened, by some of you in the media for enabling it then and, even more baffling and unforgivable, enabling it now that you know better.
If and when the worst of your debilitating anguish begins to mercifully fade -- and anyone with a heart surely hopes for your peace of mind it will -- we know you'll never forget what it felt like the moment you were told that you would never see your beloved friend again. And maybe, just for a critical second, a ghost of that shock will stick just enough for you to stop and think.
Maybe, just maybe, you'll stop avoiding the military analyst scandal; stop making excuses for neocon clowns and liars or going along sheepishly with those that do; stop giving chicken-hawks your megaphone and standing by idly, feigning helplessness and hiding behind faux balance, while they use it to perpetuate the carnage indefinitely with poll tested soundbites like 'cut and run'; stop telling us what a bang-up job you did asking the tough questions, and start asking the tough questions of the right people; stop letting them slide when they don't answer the tough questions: please, just stop all of that bullshit and stop it now.
[Update from comments 7:15 AM EDT] Septima ... Little coverage of anything like concern for our Constitution, corporate infiltration of our government, and ownership of the media by a small incestuous group of corporations who benefit most from the erosion of our nations laws and principles, is a chilling reminder that the fourth estate is all but dead and so enmeshed with the very illness that plagues us it cannot question itself, or doesn't care to.