THE OLD NEWS NETWORK

by Kevin Wohlmut

Reading the news lately, I get this strange feeling like I've fallen behind the times somehow.

• This week the Terry Schiavo autopsy came out and revealed that not only (a) was Schiavo essentially blind and brain dead long before the controversy; but also (b) her husband apparently didn't strangle, beat, or mistreat her, as was insinuated roughly every ten minutes by his legal opponents.

  But these revelations aren't news. Nobody bothered to make a fuss about it. Nobody bothered to change their positions or retract the things they said before. Because this isn't "NEW NEWS," it's "OLD NEWS." You see, everyone, on both sides of the issue, knew from the beginning of course that Schiavo was brain dead; we were simply arguing over the legal principles.

• The Downing Street memo is "OLD NEWS"; everyone on both sides of the issue knew that George Bush had already made up his mind to invade -- long before he went to the U.N. in a sham attempt to pretend he'd tried to go through diplomatic channels first. The problem is, it was unpatriotic, at that time, to say so. Because, you see, we were really, secretly, at war by that time -- in fact we were at war with Iraq within hours of 9/11... even though the President publicly claimed to be using diplomacy. And you have to stand behind the President during a war.

  Therefore the only patriotic thing to say to those pinko hippie anti-war protesters, back in late 2002, was to insist that the President hadn't made up his mind to go to war... because he had, and since he had, that means true Americans needed to stand behind their President during a war.

  Otherwise, you're endangering our troops... the troops which he had decided secretly, but not publicly, to commit to the war, eight months in advance. None of that means the President lied or deceived or anything remotely like that. And it's all "OLD NEWS" anyway, and has no bearing on when we should bring our troops home. We're there now, and everything else is "Water Under The Bridge," "Old Hat".

Lately I've found it very strange that my rhetorical opponents -- and indeed much of the nation -- dismissed these facts and arguments during the actual relevant time that I made them; and then, suddenly, the moment those arguments can no longer be disputed by anyone with the barest grip upon reality... they instantly transform into "OLD NEWS".

What period of time was it, exactly -- what days can you point me towards on the calendar -- where these stories were "NEW NEWS"? Is it possible for news just to sublimate magically from "FRINGE CRACKPOT THEORY" into "OLD HAT" without passing through a period when it's a legitimate news story? Because that's what seems to be happening, more and more lately.

And howcome I only seem to get my news from the OLD NEWS NETWORK (ONN) anyway? Where do I sign up to receive these stories when they're still "NEW NEWS"? Is there a NEW NEWS NETWORK (NNN) somewhere, that I simply don't know about? How do I subscribe?

Other examples of "OLD NEWS" that have induced yawns from the chattering pundit classes over the past few years, when they suddenly and unexpectedly broke the light of day, have included:

• There was no energy shortage in California in 2000-2001; everyone always knew from the beginning that Enron and other power companies swindled California for billions of dollars using chicanery to create the appearance of shortage. You were just imagining all those experts talking about how the free market is self-regulating and enviornmentalists had strangled the development of new generators.

  Instead, California should have known from the beginning the obvious fact that multinational energy companies had the means, motive, and desire to swindle the State. It's California's fault for allowing energy companies to write the legislation, (which is what all the experts urged at the time, and also continued to urge as a solution to the crisis, right up until Enron declared bankruptcy). What kind of suckers are you, California, to follow the advice of Wall Street? If anyone deserves to be punished or fined here, it's California, for being stupid -- not Enron or Ken Lay. They were just honest businessmen employing the time-honored principle of "Caveat Emptor".

• The most famous "OLD NEWS" of all, naturally, is that there were no WMD in Iraq, and there hadn't been any in ten years; we never had all those discussions about mushroom clouds and 45-minute launch orders. We knew all along that Iraq essentially had no defense against a modern superpower, let alone posed any actual offensive threat.

  All those breathless suggestions that Saddam was on the verge of giving WMD to Al-Qaida... well, they were a little over-emphasized, their urgency was exaggerated... since we always knew that Saddam couldn't transfer WMD to Al-Qaida unless he went to some other country and bought them there first.

  Contrary to what you think you remember, the Bush Administration had actually made its goals very clear from the beginning. America soberly made the decision to throw 1,700 of its best and brightest young soldiers into a wood chipper, knowing full well that Freedom -- for a bunch of hostile foreigners, six thousand miles away --was the goal.

  We knew all along that we were going to invade Iraq in order to extract Freedom from its geological sources under Iraqi soil, particularly in the Kurdish areas near Kirkuk and the rich Freedom-bearing fields in the South near Kuwait.

• Speaking of wasted soldiers, George Bush's record of shirked military service was "OLD NEWS" during the 2004 election; the White House never bothered even denying it. The only real news in 2004 was that CBS screwed up their investigation of that ancient historical news story.

The media didn't cover Bush's military record during the 2000 election either, of course, because it was "OLD NEWS" from the two times he ran for governor in the 1990's. Not that anyone paid attention to the story back then, either. In fact, it is possible to establish an unbroken chain of "OLD NEWS" all the way back to 1972, when he originally abandoned his duties; these items were "NEW NEWS," and extensively covered by the media, for about fifteen minutes after each particular incident in 1972 where George W. Bush, an obscure but politically-connected young National Guard volunteer at the time, failed to show up for duty.

 

• By contrast, when John Kerry refused to release the final five or six documents in his war record, during the 2004 election -- the Swift Boat Veterans, along with everyone else, "knew" there was something bad in there. Now, that was an example of "NEW NEWS".

Today, when Kerry has, inexplicably, decided to release those final pages (six months after the election), and there's nothing bad in there... that's "OLD NEWS". Of course his war record looks spotless on paper. The Swifties knew that all along. The real news is that he must, therefore, have forged his entire dossier: using hypnosis and sophisticated MK-ULTRA Mind Control techniques in order to brainwash his fellow soldiers and obtain the numerous commendations which he got from several of the Swift Boat Veterans, commendations which they had forgotten about during the election. Proof for this hypnotic hypothesis will of course be forthcoming, the minute everyone stops paying attention to this story.

 

* * * * *

Ah! As I was writing this essay, a friend of mine helpfully signed me up to the NEW NEWS NETWORK and their e-mail feed. So here are some of the stories which will be "NEW NEWS" for about 15 minutes in the upcoming year, and then subsequently be ignored as "Old Hat":

• AMERICA BOGGED DOWN IN AFGHANISTAN: With the Afghan War heating up, U.S. troops still firmly tied to Iraq, and Prime Minister Karzai still unable to physically leave Kabul, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld sounded somewhat testy at a news conference last Wednesday. "Yes, we knew that Afghanistan would be a multi-decadal conflict that we were abandoning when we moved U.S. forces from Tora Bora to Iraq," he responded with some vehemence to a reporter's question. "To all those anti-war protesters who yapped about how the Soviet superpower couldn't break Afghanistan, I have one thing to say: If you're so damn smart, why don't you help us think up some way out of this mess?" The Secretary then suggested that interested parties should send an e-mail to rummy@pentagon.gov

• SCOOTER LIBBY FINGERS DICK CHENEY AS THE VALERIE PLAME LEAK: In early summer 2006, the Justice Department abandoned its investigation into the breach of national security which resulted when Valerie Plame, a CIA agent working to stop WMD proliferation, had her top-secret cover blown by a leaker from the White House who shopped her name around to the press.

"It's long been known that Dick Cheney has Tourette's Syndrome," explained a sheepish White House aide, Scooter Libby. "He cannot control his language, he simply has to blurt out whatever's on his mind. On that basis, the investigation absolved him of all responsibility for his violation of Federal law and National Security -- due to Mr. Cheney's medical incapacity. It's not his fault. Everyone has known that for years, but we were all too embarassed to discuss it until time had a chance to dull the sting of this tiny little faux-pas on Dick's part."

The reporter who published the leak, Robert Novak, confirmed the explanation. "I guess I should have known better than to publish anything Mr. Cheney says when he then follows it up with 'Did I say that out loud?' ...But Dick promises he will never engage in illegal vindictive retaliatory career assassination again, so everything's OK now."

 

• HOUSING BUBBLE BURSTS: Now that housing prices have fallen by 75% and many people are paying more in mortgage costs every six months than the revised appraisal of their entire house -- it turns out that you were just imagining all those financial experts urging you to invest in real estate and repeatedly re-finance your home over the past twenty years.

  "Responsible" financial advisors have long been warning people not to speculate, nor get in over their heads with too big a mortgage. It's just that these responsible advisors have been saying that, only while facing the wall and locked inside a soundproofed closet with a gag over their mouths; then they'd remove the gag, exit the closet, and say the opposite on TV. Because, as we all know, don't believe everything you hear on TV. Research carefully before investing; your results may vary.

• GLOBAL WARMING WRECKS ECOSYSTEM, SEA LEVELS RISE: A significant factor in the devaluation of property values in trendy areas such as California and Florida was the fact that the polar ice caps melted in the Spring of 2006 and inundated entire coastal states under 25 feet of water. But, contrary to what you remember, nobody has seriously disputed Global Warming since the theory was first developed in the 1970s. That's all "OLD NEWS".

  Oil companies and conservative pundits had actually been warning us for almost a century about the side effects of over-reliance on fossil fuels. But consumers freely chose in the free market to use their freedom to burn those products freely anyway, because this is a FREE country, dammit!

  Consumers always knew they were destroying the planet with every tank they filled. Instead, over the past decades, the nation was merely having a 30-year-long, theoretical discussion about the standard of proof for scientific hypotheses. This mess is actually the environmentalists' fault, of course; for not articulating their information compellingly.