IF YOU DON'T HAVE A DISH: We're in the same boat then, li'l fella. Luckily Tim Cavanaugh is watching for you, though from reading the article it seems he missed the extensive live coverage at Umm Qasr on MSNBC over the weekend, with whoever the embedded guy was crawling up to interview a Marine and drawing little maps of their position in the dirt. Sgt. Stryker is watching television too and mentions one of my favorite anchors, MSNBC's Dan Abrams, who is perpetually heading over the top. The Sarge says:

Dan Abrams of MSNBC is pissed. It's kind of wierd to see a television anchorman displaying frustration and disbelief at certain things going on. The whole thing about the Iraqis dressing in civilian clothes and shooting from protected sites has really stuck in his craw. First he hammered Gen. Trainer about it, and the General explained LOAC and all that good stuf, but Abrams just wasn't buying it. I tlooked to me that he just wanted to blurt out, "Why can't we blow up that mosque, if they're killing Marines?"

Then he had a retired JAG on and hammered him about the same thing. And then I heard something I thought I'd never hear an "objective" journalist say, and I paraphrase, "So our guys have to check with lawyers before they fire back? So we have these self-imposed rules that lawyers impose on our troops and the government imposes on itself and now Marines are dead because of it." That last line was a statement, not a question. The JAG guy's trying to explain about PR and the rest of it, but Abrams was on a roll. "Those Arab TV networks are going to show us supposedly targeting and killing civilians no matter what we do while we follow the Rules of War." It was nothing short of astonishing to hear that. I don't know what prompted all this. Perhaps he saw the tape of the Americans executed and exploited on TV. Who knows? But man, it was something to see.

This is exactly the kind of thing Abrams would do when he had his early evening show, if I remember right. Which was weirdly entertaining; he would get enraged, in a really direct, non-rhetorical way--not the shouting-down-your-opponent Bill O'Reilly way, more like genuine moments of annoyance at the sheer stupidity he face in his guests. I don't know why MSNBC is failing, they have weirdo anchors, hot chicks and the best embedded reporters I've seen.