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Murphy and Steinfels

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from: Margaret Steinfels

Dark Thoughts After the Evening News

Posted Wednesday, Feb. 17, 1999, at 11:35 AM ET

Received Tuesday evening:

An attack of news-junkieism: I watched the Newshour (or part of it). There he was again, Saddam Hussein. Without la scandale would we have figured this out? Found every weapon? Every paper trail we were looking for? Saddam deposed? Sancations lifed? Isn't this the real tragedy of a distracted president?

Second dark thought: If "we," the world, the Europeans, had done to Hitler, say after the rearmament of the Rhineland, what is being done now to Saddam, would Hitler have been contained, disarmed, deposed? Today, as the Germans and the Swiss, the Vatican, the French, the American, the Poles, and the Czechs struggle over questions of responsibility and reparations for WWII, the Holocaust, and slave labor, what is being done to Saddam seems prudent, not mad. Even so, today in the mail--from good people, a petition to get out of Iraq and off Saddam's back. This is what makes me mad about Clinton and about the U.S. Congress, they haven't been paying attention to what is really important.

I am sounding like those media gas bags. I sign off.

the breakfast table
entries
1234567891011121314151617
from: Margaret Steinfels

Dark Thoughts After the Evening News

Posted Wednesday, Feb. 17, 1999, at 11:35 AM ET
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Cullen Murphy is the managing editor of the Atlantic Monthly and the author of the comic strip Prince Valiant. His book The Word According to Eve: Women and the Bible in Ancient Times and Our Own was published last fall. Margaret O'Brien Steinfels is the editor of Commonweal, an independent biweekly journal of political, religious, and literary opinion.
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