The Hostage Crisis

As you may have read, four Western peace workers (two Canadians, a Briton and an American) were kidnapped in Iraq and are being held hostage. They were taken by a group known as Swords of Truth, which said it would kill them today if its demand for the release of thousands of prisoners from Iraqi jails is not met. The Iraqi government and the U.S. military have released some prisoners, but they say this was part of normal release operations and not in response to the hostage situation.

Here's what I noticed about this as I watched a report on it on MSNBC this morning... I have not heard President Bush mention these hostages. Ohh sure, four hostages is probably not a big enough deal amidst all the progress victory democracy violence occurring there, but surely it is worthy of acknowledgement by the Commander-in-Chief.

After all, was not Jimmy Carter's reelection campaign thwarted because of his inability to properly respond to the Iran hostage situation? I know about this matter very well, for you cannot mention Mr. Carter's presidency to a conservative without them ranting about it. Certainly, that was a much higher-profile situation, but at least President Carter tried to resolve it. Is it too much to expect at this point that the President even acknowledge this current hostage situation?

This is just one piece of a large picture. The main problem is that the President refuses to acknowledge the violence and chaos that rules Iraq. For how can he lash out at war critics like Howard Dean if he admits the country is a disaster area? Ohh sure, in every speech or two, the President will make some vague reference to "hardships" or "setbacks" or something like that, but he never states specifics, rather leaving the listener to imagine all that is going wrong in Iraq is the Baghdad Kinkos using the wrong font when printing up copies of their Constitution.

Last week, the President gave an upbeat speech on the U.S. economy. The day before the speech, 10 Marines were killed in a violent attack. The President was aware of this (as confirmed later by Scott McClellan), yet the President did not see fit to acknowledge this loss in his speech that morning. After all, those pesky dead Marines might ruin his super-happy speech. It's the same type of apathetic attitude that caused him to ignore all the parents of dead soldiers outside his ranch this summer, because he needed to "get on with his life". And it's why the media is not allowed to show flag-draped coffins. And why the President has yet to attend the funeral of even one fallen soldier. Because the deaths of brave men and women are upsetting and inconvenient to his upbeat appraisal of the situation in Iraq.

Rest assured, whether these four hostages are killed or not, I would not expect to hear much about it from the President.