Enough With the Responsible Journalism!

by Ted Rall

According to an Italian missionary news agency, the soldiers murdered the victims over the course of a three-day killing frenzy in Makobola, a village just south of the Lake Tanganyika port of Uvira. The Rev. Giulio Albanese, head of the Rome-based news service, said: "They killed many, many children, many women, many elders. Many innocent people."

Some members of the House Foreign Relations Committee have called for an investigation of the situation in the Congo, but according to the latest polls, 98 percent of Americans say that they'll vote against any congressman who pursues the matter, 0 percent favor intervention and 2 percent have no opinion.

"I am, like, so tired of this whole thing," spat Rhonda Bertelson, 37, of White Plains, N.Y., who was cruising a local mall parking lot in search of the car that scratched the door of her SUV. "The economy's good for well-educated white men, the country's at peace in the suburbs. Why do the media have to keep harping on all this ugliness?"

Meanwhile, the president of Honduras says that international aid is falling far short of what his country needs to repair damage from Hurricane Mitch. The storm, which struck Central America in late October and early November, cost $5 billion and 5,600 deaths (8,000 more are missing), not necessarily in that order.

"To push ahead the national reconstruction," Carlos Flores Facusse said, "there are only offers and international commitments that require cumbersome steps to convert into money in the future." Honduras is also struggling under the burden of $4.3 billion in foreign loans -- which equal 40 percent of the nation's budget.

Despite the desire of political partisans to do something about the Honduran situation, ordinary Americans say they just want it to go away.

"We've been hearing about that damn hurricane for months," said Robert "Robbie" Florez, a 48-year-old bank vice president in Fort Wayne, Ind. "When are those idiots in Washington going to realize that we just don't care? It's time to move on!"

In other news, a young girl was caught in the crossfire between two rival factions of the Islamic United Tajik Opposition party fighting in central Dushanbe, the Tajik capital. She was the latest casualty in a civil war that has raged for five years and claimed tens of thousands of lives.

Some State Department diplomats have urged a Washington-brokered peace deal in the war-torn Central Asian republic, but the majority are stymied by the polls. Recent surveys indicate that while 100 percent of Americans "sympathize with being the victim of genocide," only 0 percent want anything done about it.

"It all goes to show how totally out of touch both the Democrats and Republicans are with their constituents," says Olivia della Smith, 21, a student at Southwestern Kansas Community College. "I'm disgusted -- there's nothing new about war. It's always the same every night -- war, war, war -- for years! Americans are bored with war. Why don't the media cover something besides war, like movie stars?"

Also in the news this week, Colombia's infamous rag-pickers have discovered small treasures of cash in Bogota's sprawling open-air dumps.

The 250 "recyclers," as the scavengers are known, work the vulture- and rat-infested municipal dumps outside the slums of Bucaramanga. On Wednesday the El Tiempo newspaper reported that four rag-pickers found a package containing the equivalent of $3,280. And Monday, two other men found nearly $4,000 in a white apron wrapped around a black shirt.

"That's it!" shouted Sam Simms, a 34-year-old data entry clerk from Passaic, NJ who flew into a violent rage upon being told of the news. "The media are always wallowing in the dual ogres of greed and human misery to sell their papers and get hits on their Web sites. If I never read another article about Colombian rag-pickers striking it rich again, it won't be a second too soon." Phone calls at the Omaha World-Herald are running 16-to-1 against coverage of Colombian rag-pickers.