| | Frank Rich is one of my heroes. I'm ok admitting that. Sometimes I want to be a journalist.
"The ultimate chutzpah is that Mr. Bush, the man who sold us Saddam's imminent mushroom clouds and "Mission Accomplished," is trivializing the chaos in Iraq as propaganda. The enemy's "sophisticated" strategy, he said in last weekend's radio address, is to distribute "images of violence" to television networks, Web sites and journalists to "demoralize our country."
This is a morally repugnant argument. The "images of violence" from Iraq are not fake - like, say, the fiction our government manufactured about the friendly-fire death of Pat Tillman or the upbeat news stories the Pentagon spends millions of dollars planting in Iraqi newspapers today. These images of violence are real. Americans really are dying at the fastest pace in at least a year, and Iraqis in the greatest numbers to date. To imply that this carnage is magnified by the news media, whether the American press or Al Jazeera, is to belittle the gravity of the escalated bloodshed and to duck accountability for the mismanagement of the war. "
The war is not over, and what's more, we are losing it. 100 U.S. soldiers died THIS MONTH. Heavy-handed tactics are alienating what scant support we ever had with the Iraqi populace as a whole. Britain's top general stated on record that he believed we're making things worse by being there. The Lancet, perhaps the top-ranked public health journal in the world, estimated that the war has caused an additional 665,000 deaths (the study is based on pre-war death rates and post-war death rates, and despite President Bush's assertions to the otherwise, is pretty damn sound statistics). Anyway, i get upset that some people have this notion that the war ended when President Bush pulled his photo-op "Mission Accomplished" stunt.
In other news, Vote No on Prop 2. For real, i'm serious. If you need convincing, please give me a call.
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| | Posted 10/31/2006 2:23 PM - 49 Views - 4 eProps - 3 comments
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