Cowards, yes, but they have the courage to be honest about their cowardice. Jeff Jacoby writes:
THE PHOENIX is Boston's leading ''alternative" newspaper, the kind of brash, pull-no-punches weekly that might have been expected to print without hesitation the Mohammed cartoons that Islamists have been using to incite rage and riots across the Muslim world. Its willingness to push the envelope was memorably demonstrated in 2002, when it broke with most media to publish a grisly photograph of Daniel Pearl's severed head, and supplied a link on its website to the sickening video of the Wall Street Journal reporter's beheading.
But the Phoenix isn't publishing the Mohammed drawings, and in a brutally candid editorial it explained why.
''Our primary reason," the editors confessed, is ''fear of retaliation from . . . bloodthirsty Islamists who seek to impose their will on those who do not believe as they do . . . Simply stated, we are being terrorized, and . . . could not in good conscience place the men and women who work at the Phoenix and its related companies in physical jeopardy. As we feel forced, literally, to bend to maniacal pressure, this may be the darkest moment in our 40-year-publishing history."
The vast majority of US media outlets have shied away from reproducing the drawings, but to my knowledge only the Phoenix has been honest enough to admit that it is capitulating to fear.
What passes for courage among the Old Media/Left is not very inspiring, is it?
It's no coincidence that the second amendment follows the first in our constition. The MSM has found that a piece of paper doesn't defend liberty or freedom of speech. It's the willingness to 'go to the mattresses'. It is the things worth (dying) killing for that make life worth living. It's such a poverty of values that the MSM can only ridicule those it knows won't fight back.
Posted by: MIkey | February 21, 2006 at 01:20 PM
Yo Mikey, the expression is "take it to the mat" as in the wrestling mat. NOT the mattress. Saying you're willing to take it to the mattress = saying you'll have sex with it. Which is pretty damn funny when you think about it, but then if you think about it some more it just stops making any sense at all, so don't think about it too much, but just enough.
Posted by: pedro | February 22, 2006 at 07:16 AM
If I recall my Godfather, Part One correctly, the Corleone family "goes to the mattresses" in the war with the Tattalias.
It's a reference to buying a bunch of second hand mattresses for your soldiers to sleep on during a war.
Posted by: MIkey | February 22, 2006 at 10:07 PM
Never saw the Godfather, but I'll take your word for it. But it doesn't make sense to me 00 why not get new mattresses for your soldiers? And why focus on their sleeping, when they should be out there kicking ass? Italians.... sheesh!
Posted by: pedro | February 23, 2006 at 09:58 AM