From The Washington Post, 11/14/03:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A38673-2003Nov13.html

A Hero for Telling the Truth

By Richard Cohen

Friday, November 14, 2003; Page A29

Against all expectations -- but not against my better judgment -- I've
taken a liking to Jessica Lynch.

Initially she brought such a rush of cynicism to my head I thought I
would swoon from vertigo.

But to the undoubted horror of the White House, the Pentagon and
everyone at Fox News, she has refused to play the propaganda puppet
and has, shockingly, told the truth.

She is a hero -- not for what she did in Iraq but for what she did on
the "Today" show.

There, as in other places, she denied that she emptied her rifle into
the enemy, as initial reports had it, and instead conceded that she
did not fire her rifle at all.

From The Washington Post, 11/14/03:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A38673-2003Nov13.html

A Hero for Telling the Truth

By Richard Cohen

Friday, November 14, 2003; Page A29

Against all expectations -- but not against my better judgment -- I've
taken a liking to Jessica Lynch.

Initially she brought such a rush of cynicism to my head I thought I
would swoon from vertigo.

But to the undoubted horror of the White House, the Pentagon and
everyone at Fox News, she has refused to play the propaganda puppet
and has, shockingly, told the truth.

She is a hero -- not for what she did in Iraq but for what she did on
the "Today" show.

There, as in other places, she denied that she emptied her rifle into
the enemy, as initial reports had it, and instead conceded that she
did not fire her rifle at all.

She rued that her rescue has been videotaped and used to suggest that
the operation matched the raising of the flag on Iwo Jima.

She thanked the troops who had snatched her back to safety -- her
heroes, she said -- but lamented the use to which the video was put.

I confess that I was totally unprepared for such refreshing candor --
and I bet the entire Military-Industrial-Television-Publishing Complex
was too.

Lynch became instantly famous when she was rescued from an Iraqi
hospital.

She was the perfect propaganda tool -- young, female, white and
blonde.

In a way, Lynch reminds me of Farragut Jones, a fictional character in
the book and the movie "Don't Go Near the Water."

The story concerned World War II Navy PR men in the Pacific and how
they discovered who they thought was the perfectly named seaman, a
combination of David Farragut and John Paul Jones.

He turned out, however, to be something of a mistake -- a sailor who
could barely complete a sentence without uttering an expletive.

In the movie, played by Mickey Shaughnessy, he was a stitch.

Lynch is no stitch.

She is merely beguilingly honest, the totally unexpected creation of
fast-typing journalists, the confusion of war -- or the fictional
concoction of some Pentagon fibber somewhere.

Either way, the story from the word go was false or embellished.

She was ambushed once in Iraq and yet again in the fertile minds of
marketing geniuses.

To her credit and to almost everyone's surprise, Lynch has emerged as
a generational prototype -- post-racial, post-feminist and
post-falsehood.

__________________________________________________________

Jessica Lynch: The hero the right wing loves to hate.

Harry