Gold Stars for Scottie and Guy

The disgusting exploitation of Pat Tillman's death -- orchestrated by the US Army (like the dishonest exploitation the Jessica Lynch "rescue") -- gets soft peddled and papered over by Scott Simon and Guy Raz on Saturday Weekend Edition.

These two accept the latest Pentagon versions of events without question. Here's Raz: "...but I should say at the outset Scott, the report found no criminal intent at all among anybody involved. What it did find was a series of mishaps, bad decisions, that led to circumstances where Pat Tillman’s family and essentially the country wasn’t notified about the circumstances of his death..." The report comes from the Pentagon's own inspector general.

What is interesting is that there is no intelligent coverage (such as can be found here) given to the actual facts or context of the Tillman story (and nothing about Pat's antiwar views or his brother Kevin's passionate critique of the current US war policies - in fact there has never been any coverage of this dimension of the story on NPR [see this search and this one]). Still Raz can say, with no embarrassment, "Well, we all know the story about Pat Tillman of course..."

Given that the original story of Tillman's death was a shameless propaganda ploy, what is the main journalistic concern of Simon? He asks Raz, "Does this in any way endanger the Silver Star that he received?" Now there is the question that gets to the moral heart of this sad tale.

Raz assures Simon that Tillman's Silver Star will not be revoked. Whew...I know I was worried. What Scottie and Guy don't tell us is that they have earned their gold star stickers for being loyal apologists for the Pentagon propaganda machine...good work boys.