Jill Carroll Is a Cowardly Whore and Other Things the Rude Pundit Learned From the Conservative Punditry:
You know what's fuckin' funny? Thinking about what, say, Jonah Goldberg would have done with a gun in his face after being kidnapped from the streets of Baghdad after he just saw his translator shot dead. That pissant little bitch would have shit himself and begged to be filmed blowing the lead kidnapper, pausing only to shout into the camera, "I loves me some mujahideen cock; now please rape my Jew ass, Osama." For, indeed, it seems that for Goldberg, John Podhoretz, and other scumsucking reactionaries, Carroll would not be a traitor to America only if she had ripped off her veil and yelled, "Lick my clit, you stinky Allah-fuckers" before she was wasted. Then she'd've been a hero and we could make up wonderful, splendiferous lies about her.

Yeah, that bald piece of shit, Bernard McGuirk, who spends his life making sure Don Imus's colostomy bag is licked clean, called Carroll "Taliban Jill" for giving an interview to secure her freedom and for wearing a veil while in captivity, saying Carroll put on weight while in captivity because she's "carrying Habib's baby." 'Cause you know that if McGuirk had been kidnapped, sure, he might've tried to be the tough guy for just a second or two until he tasted the oil and metal of a locked and loaded Kalashnikov shoved into his yappin' mouth. Then, after yowling like gang-raped street cat, McGuirk would have been writin' his own script praisin' al-Zarqawi, the insurgents, Mullah Omar, who-the-fuck-ever, lookin' to "Habib" for the approval he only gets when the I-man rubs his scalp to tell him, "Good job on wipin' my ass."

Because many of us in the home of the brave are brave only from distances. Like Hugh Hewitt, who was interviewing Time magazine's Michael Ware, a reporter who has spent time behind enemy lines interviewing insurgents in Iraq. "Spent time" here means the better part of the last three years. Hewitt attempted to explain to Ware why the reporter may be aiding the enemy: "I'm really fascinated by the question of whether or not it's ever good journalism to consort with the enemy in search of interesting stories...I'm just wondering whether or not there's a line that you have in your mind reconciled yourself to crossing not once, but scores and scores of times, to report on the enemy, and whether or not that's a good thing."

Ware pointed out that Hewitt was in a comfy studio while he was shitting in sand pits in Iraq, but Hewitt interrupted Ware to correct the reporter: "I'm sitting in the Empire State Building. Michael, I'm sitting in the Empire State Building, which has been in the past, and could be again, a target. Because in downtown Manhattan, it's not comfortable, although it's a lot safer than where you are, people always are three miles away from where the jihadis last spoke in America. So that's...civilians have a stake in this. Although you are on the front line, this was the front line four and a half years ago."

At this point, Ware may have wanted to say, "You know what, you cunt? I wanna see you walkin' around armed Islamic militants wearin' nothin' but a diaper on your ass with a picture of Muhammed on it. I'll try to talk 'em into givin' you a five-minute head start to see if you can make it to good ol' loyal Pakistan before you're gunned down like so many captured quail."

But instead, later in the interview, Ware offered this polite bitch-slapping, "[I]n the course of this war, we've had a translator assassinated four blocks from our house. Our house has been hit by, or subject to car bombs twice. I've had two of my stringers who deal with the insurgency kidnapped, one of whom was rescued by the Marines when they overran Fallujah in November, 2004. The other one was tortured for five days as al Qaeda tried to get information on me before he was finally released, when they became convinced that he was innocent of any kind of crime. I had another translator of mine, who when al Qaeda targeted him to get information on me and our operation and he refused, they blew up his car. We had to fly him to Jordan, get last ditch surgery to save his arm, and he's now been granted refugee status in Australia. My staff have been in firefights. Their lives have been threatened. I'm not sure that that's been an easy ride."

Hewitt, of course, was undeterred from trying to paint Ware as somehow a willing accomplice of the insurgency. Much like others on the right attempted to do with Carroll. Because courage is a cheap commodity in these nasty times, and the arbiters of bravery and cowardice buy and sell it like tons of shifting sand and blowing wind.

(Note: the Hewitt story's been everywhere in Left Blogsylvania. The Rude Pundit first read about it at Kevin Drum's Political Animal.)