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During the years that I've had this website, I've probably posted two or
three times as many words on other sites than I have here... discussion
groups, forums, and now, blog comments.
I recently suggested to myself that perhaps I should, from time to time,
post here some of the comments I've made other places. That, I replied
to myself, sounded like a good idea. So here's a sampling...
John Scalzi used to maintain an
online journal on his site but recently has turned
The Whatever into a blog, complete with blog-type comments from readers. On April 17th he cited a Boston Globe article ("Trading Truth for Access")
about the recent revelations by Eason Jordan (of CNN) about how for the
past decade CNN had not broadcast information that would have revealed
the truth about Saddam's rule in Iraq in order to protect the safety of
its employees and to avoid being kicked out of the country. I commented
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The failure of journalist ethics (and yes, that probably is to ethics
as mililtary music is to music, etc.) here is that they covered up for Saddam
and that they presented Iraqi propaganda and lies to us as if they were facts
while knowing full well just how false these things were and yet agressively
impugning every statement made by the U.S. to flaunt their journalistic independence
and integrity.
They lied to us. They flat out lied and distorted.
There is always this great debate about the media -- liberal whine and
wail about conservative talk radio while conservatives carry on about liberal
bias in newspapers and television -- but CNN has flat out lied to us for
the past decade!
And yes, I think other news organizations may be equally guilty -- certainly
others presented stories out of Iraq that were similar to the b.s. that CNN
was serving up.
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Earlier this week Michael Jennings had a posting that discussed the museum looting in Bagdad -- Michael made reference to comments by Jay Manifold (who was, in turn, commenting on an apparent lack of distress displayed by Glenn Reynolds) and I posted the following (it was long enough that I had to post it
as two comments, but I've pasted it together here)
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Regarding the museum looting and your note to Jay Manifold:
I think Jay is quite right regarding the anti-war movement (which really
seemed to divide into the anti-everything-American movement and the anti-Bush
movement -- i.e., many domestic critics would have favored the war if it
had happened under Clinton or Gore) -- These people were so blantantly biased,
so noisily wrong in their predictions of bloodshed and quagmire, and continue
to be ceaselessly negative, that much of the population has just tuned out
everything they say. I must confess that I have become so tired of their
knee-jerk anti-U.S. diatribes that I would not credit anything that they
might say.
Thus, my immediate reaction to cries about the museum looting was "so
what" -- I think that this psychological hearing loss caused by the endless
bleating of the anti-war sheep may explain some of Glenn Reynolds' reaction
-- but, attempting to set that reaction aside, I have to agree with you that
it is, indeed, a terrible loss to humanity's heritage. (And I must confess
to having always had a fascination with the history of ancient Ur and Sumer,
etc.)
Maybe it would have been more politically correct for Rumsfeld to have
feigned concern over this; however, he is Sec. of Defense, not Sec. of Cultural
Artifacts, sensitivity to such things is not in his job description.
Reynolds is correct in his comment that "There's just no pleasing some
people." If we had put troops around the museums, the usual suspects would
have been whining that that just proved the U.S. cares more about elitist
cultural toys than about starving Iraqi babies, etc. And just imagine if
they actually had to fight off looters -- as Jay Manifold noted "Shooting
civilians in the street would have produced just as much criticism as this
event will."
You suggested non-lethal weapons -- see the headlines about how Americans
were shooting peaceful demonstrators with harmful rubber bullets just like
those Israelis mistreated those poor sweet Palestinian mobs. So maybe they
could use teargas or one of the newer crowd control gasses -- Oops, violation
of Geneva convention -- bad, bad, nasty American gangsters. And what about
when those Americans defending the museum with non-lethal weapons are gunned
down by an Iraqi with an AK47?
The looting of the museum was terrible -- although I find the torture
and killing under Saddam that the anti-war crowd wants to ignore to be far
more terrible.
Yeah, I guess it might have been a good thing if the U.S. military,
in the midst of figuring out how to take control of a city of five million
people filled with some unknown number of enemy combatants with a minimum
of harm to civilians and attempting to avoid damage to mosques and museums
and civic infrastructure.
Even if some unknown amount of the contents had already been looted
by elements of the ruling regime, there apparently are eyewitness descripions
of mobs of Iraqis looting the museum. Note, however, that the looters were
Iraqis, not Americans. As far as I'm concerned, although I deplore the looting
and wish we had been able to prevent it, the fault lies with the Iraqis who
did the looting.
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Hmmm, I had planned on putting several such comments here but this is becoming
a long entry, so I think I'll stop right here.
By the way, my default font size is just that, the default size, but I
notice more and more sites seem to be using smaller fonts -- some of them
getting (to my eyes) ridiculously small. In this entry I made my copied
comments one size smaller than I usually use. How does that work with your
eyes? I don't think I would make a habit of it -- I prefer the default
size -- but I was looking for a visual way of setting off comments I'd
made elsewhere. By the way (in case you hadn't guessed), these are unedited
comments, cut and pasted just the way they were made, spelling errors,
typographical errors, poor phrasings, missing words, etc.
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The failure of journalist ethics (and yes, that probably is to ethics as mililtary music is to music, etc.) here is that they covered up for Saddam and that they presented Iraqi propaganda and lies to us as if they were facts while knowing full well just how false these things were and yet agressively impugning every statement made by the U.S. to flaunt their journalistic independence and integrity.
They lied to us. They flat out lied and distorted.
There is always this great debate about the media -- liberal whine and wail about conservative talk radio while conservatives carry on about liberal bias in newspapers and television -- but CNN has flat out lied to us for the past decade!
And yes, I think other news organizations may be equally guilty -- certainly others presented stories out of Iraq that were similar to the b.s. that CNN was serving up.