Good knights and good luck

Ted Koppel's comment Will Fight for Oil offers mild rebuke to the Bush administration:

If [oil] did not enter into the Bush administration's calculations when the president ordered the invasion of Iraq in 2003, it would have been the first time in more than 50 years that the uninterrupted flow of Persian Gulf oil was not a central element of American foreign policy.

...H. L. Mencken is said to have noted that "when someone says it's not about the money — it's about the money." Arguing in support of his fellow Arkansan during Bill Clinton's impeachment trial, former Senator Dale Bumpers offered a variation on that theme: "When someone says it's not about the sex — it's about the sex."

The point is fairly well taken; but Koppel - now retired from ABC and comfortable - is hardly the battler that Neal Ascherson calls for in his comment on Good Night and Good Luck (a homage to George Clooney's own father as well as Murrow).

Mark Lawson attacks the film as unfair and unbalanced but Peter Bradshaw is closer to the point when he says that criticism of abandoning impartiality in the face of Joe McCarthy's bullying reminds him of Churchill's line: he did not care to be impartial between the fireman and the fire.