Long on Opinion - Short on facts

Apparently, InterMountain Jewish News columnist, Jay Bushinsky (Shrinking Planet 2/9/07), is clairvoyant. Without the benefit of actually speaking to any members of the Bush Administration or the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mr. Bushinsky has divined what people, like the President, were thinking prior to undertaking the liberation of Iraq. Bushinsky is so much smarter than our elected officials, that he knows what they didn’t even know themselves and he knew it before they even began that task, Hallelujah, it’s a miracle!
Furthermore, the ‘Great Jay’ proclaims, that two cities which he’s never even gazed upon – Gaza and Baghdad, are “mirror-like” and reminiscent of another town he’s never been in – Beirut. How does he do it? How fortunate are we to have the profound insights of an armchair, second-guessing MENSA from planet Bushinsky to enlighten us with his truths.
Unlike himself, Bushinsky chides the Foreign Press for relying on local Palestinian and Iraqi translators to get their stories, fearing that such ‘go-betweens’ may be influencing the Press accounts from those areas. Fortunately, Jay Bushinsky has a better, smarter, more nuanced way to gather his news – he makes it up. Why waste time actually traveling to these distant lands? Why risk actually learning something by interviewing those elected to make the hard decisions? And how stupid it would be to rely on locals as guides in places where you don’t know your way around or speak the language.
Bushinsky complains that there is an excess of weapons of “individual destruction” in the Middle East. I would contend that relying on individuals, such as Jay Bushinsky, for information about the Middle East is indeed a formula for America’s defeat and Israel’s destruction.