Dartblog

Seymour Hersh, the investigative “reporter” of The New Yorker, appeared yesterday at McGill University in Montreal. Like John Kerry’s recent comments disparaging the military, Hersh’s remarks to a ‘safe’ audience were a little too honest.“There has never been an American army as violent and murderous as the one in Iraq,” The New Yorker’s reporter said to a crowd of students. If Americans knew the full extent of U.S. criminal conduct, he continued, they would receive returning Iraqi veterans as they did Vietnam veterans. The McGill student newspaper reported that “[t]hroughout his talk Hersh remained pessimistic,” but there was one note of glorious cheer:

“The bad news,” investigative reporter Seymour Hersh told a Montreal audience last Wednesday, “is that there are 816 days left in the reign of King George II of America.”
The good news? “When we wake up tomorrow morning, there will be one less day.”

It is difficult to believe that The New Yorker still allows this man a single drought of ink.

It is also difficult to believe that men like Hersh are able to last into old age. If the man really believes in the flash-fried tripe he serves up to unsuspecting college students, he would walk around with his head hung low, popping aspirin on the half-hour to deal with his unceasing mental malaise. He’d have attempted suicide multiple times—one was bound to have been successful, yes? He’d have lumped himself in with the most radical generalissimos overseas, because they are the only ones who share his views. And he’d have died in their care, fighting for some frightful cause. He’d be sick, constantly. Unable to cure himself of anything through the medical beneficence of our modern market economy. He’d be down. Mowed-over. Sunk. Dark. Dead.

But, no! Seymour Hersh lives a comfortable Washingtonian life, faxing his spitballs of genius to The New Yorker’s tony midtown office in Manhattan once a fortnight.

He lives in style. In life, he loves everything he, in writing, purports to hate. He adores the result of all this misguided foreign policy. He invests. He has money. He’s not being shot at by Islamists. He buys gasoline. He drinks lattes. So, golly, Sermour. Things can’t be all that bad, can they?