By Debbie Schlussel
****UPDATE: We encourage DebbieSchlussel.com readers to join the Al-Jazeera International English language net Audience Panel. Tell them to do stories on why jihad and Islamofascism suck and how Israel is the greatest, most successful country in the Middle East. ****
We thought we’d be able to breathe a few days news without being infected by the virus of Al-Jazeera puffery stories. But we were wrong. The gushing over the Terrorist News Network continues.
Yesterday, there were more Happy 10th B-Day, Al-Jazeera stories (the network turned 10 on November 1st, but apparently the party is still going on in the heads of the Mainstream Media).
And now there are more puff pieces on the new English language Al-Jazeera International about which we’ve already written a great deal (here, here, here, and here). Yesterday, it was a puff piece in the print edition of the New York Times. And, today, there are TWO articles (here and here) puffing up Jazeera in USA Today, written by media columnist Peter Johnson. Wish Peter had contacted us, as he sometimes does, because we just had to laugh at the quotes from new Jazeera talk show host and eternal buffoon, former Marine Josh Rushing (about whom we’ve written here and here):

AJI talk show host Josh Rushing, a former U.S. Marine captain who served as a spokesman during the invasion of Iraq, says that “senior military officers” are glad they will now be able to watch AJI coverage in English and will have the chance to appear on the channel. Rushing says AJI will appeal to Americans who “are craving alternative sources of information and are comfortable with it.”

Uh, which “senior military officers” are still talking to Rushing? Doubtful that any are, since they canned his ass from the military press liaison position at CentCom, once they saw his absurd, buffoonish pandering and airheaded comments in the pro-Jazeera movie “Control Room,” which included these gems:
* When bloated Al-Jazeera “journalist” Hassan Ibrahim complains about “Palestine” and compares it to Iraq and the Israelis to Americans, Rushing responds,

I absolutely agree with you. If I get out of the Marine Corps and do anything, I wanna do something with the Palestinian issue. I don’t think Americans are getting good information about it. I really don’t.

* Rushing tells Al-Jazeera how its footage of Iraqi bombing victims “didn’t affect me as much” as footage of dead American soldiers and hostages and that he just forgot about it and went to dinner

It upset me on a profound level that I wasn’t as bothered as much.

As my friend, Detroit Free Press film critic Terry Lawson–a liberal–wrote of Rushing,

[H]e often seems to be auditioning for a best friend role.

For the record, I have appeared on Al-Jazeera because, after all, someone has to represent the Infidels.
But I hope Al-Jazeera International’s (AJI) gazillionth launch, Wednesday, will be a failure (it still doesn’t have a cable system in America that will carry it, thankfully). And I predict that it will be, too, Alhamdillullah (praise Allah).