Thursday, October 27, 2005
DISINGENUOUS: Such an interesting thing I saw on Fox News the other day (well, actually, a clip of Fox News on the Colbert Report, because I have self-respect), where they were talking about the American death toll in Iraq reaching 2,000. Somehow, they got the idea to compare that number to the American dead in Vietnam, Korea, World War II, and Desert Storm. A really smug, condescending, patronizing idea, so in that respect it's par for the course from the Bill O'Reilly Channel. I can do math, you glib jerks. I can also realize that we're not fighting an opposing government like all those other wars; we're fighting loosely-organized hit-and-run maniacs, so the numbers, if anything, are actually more frightening. Not a country, just a collective of guys.
It makes no difference, because you're still dancing on graves, as if a death toll is a high score on a video game. As if a lost life doesn't really matter if it's not in bulk, like a huge box of Cheerios at Costco. Go on, you Fox twinkies, tell the kid who lost his father that it's not that bad. "Your dad died in a desert town halfway around the world, and his body was mutilated and dragged through the streets while thousands cheered, but HEY, it's no big deal. At least he wasn't 50 dead guys."
As long as that number keeps climbing, you can't say things are getting better over there (hell, over here) and not be a liar. We took away Saddam and the torture rooms, but in their place the Iraqis got daily car bombings, erratic or nonexistent essential services, As the cherry on the sundae, our very presence indirectly set up friendly conditions for the people we swore we were trying to stop. We didn't give the Iraqi people something "better", we just gave them a different kind of bad.
When George W. Bush took office, a lot of us started talking about how long it would take for him to find an excuse to invade Iraq. Once we adjusted to the new world after the 9/11 attacks, we knew he was going to find an excuse to attack Iraq. And dammit if he didn't. And now, there are over 2,000 Americans dead three years after Our Fearless Leader said the mission was accomplished. If we add civilian fatalities and the dead foreign contractors to those number (and let's face it, they never do), the human toll goes up quite a bit.
Dubya says "we fight them over there so we don't to fight them over here." Well, that's a moot point since tens of thousands of us are "over there", more of us are getting sent "over there" every day, and we're getting killed "over there". If we're still getting killed for being Americans, does it really matter where we get killed? The vapid jerks on Fox and Friends didn't even touch on that, they just blame the liberal media, but again, it's moot because the liberal media didn't kill those people.
Yes, I know, when it comes to people dying, I keep coming back to their deaths. What a concept. I refuse to play games with war dead, and I don't respect any "news organization" who does so as part of anything as utterly useless as political spin.
If the Iraqi military action is a mistake, and it seems that more people believe that now than ever, even one death for a mistaken cause is too many.
I'm sure I'll be coming back to this quite a lot, but first, I have to get my natural sense of irrelevancy back. The hit counter should be as good a way as any to do that.
It makes no difference, because you're still dancing on graves, as if a death toll is a high score on a video game. As if a lost life doesn't really matter if it's not in bulk, like a huge box of Cheerios at Costco. Go on, you Fox twinkies, tell the kid who lost his father that it's not that bad. "Your dad died in a desert town halfway around the world, and his body was mutilated and dragged through the streets while thousands cheered, but HEY, it's no big deal. At least he wasn't 50 dead guys."
As long as that number keeps climbing, you can't say things are getting better over there (hell, over here) and not be a liar. We took away Saddam and the torture rooms, but in their place the Iraqis got daily car bombings, erratic or nonexistent essential services, As the cherry on the sundae, our very presence indirectly set up friendly conditions for the people we swore we were trying to stop. We didn't give the Iraqi people something "better", we just gave them a different kind of bad.
When George W. Bush took office, a lot of us started talking about how long it would take for him to find an excuse to invade Iraq. Once we adjusted to the new world after the 9/11 attacks, we knew he was going to find an excuse to attack Iraq. And dammit if he didn't. And now, there are over 2,000 Americans dead three years after Our Fearless Leader said the mission was accomplished. If we add civilian fatalities and the dead foreign contractors to those number (and let's face it, they never do), the human toll goes up quite a bit.
Dubya says "we fight them over there so we don't to fight them over here." Well, that's a moot point since tens of thousands of us are "over there", more of us are getting sent "over there" every day, and we're getting killed "over there". If we're still getting killed for being Americans, does it really matter where we get killed? The vapid jerks on Fox and Friends didn't even touch on that, they just blame the liberal media, but again, it's moot because the liberal media didn't kill those people.
Yes, I know, when it comes to people dying, I keep coming back to their deaths. What a concept. I refuse to play games with war dead, and I don't respect any "news organization" who does so as part of anything as utterly useless as political spin.
If the Iraqi military action is a mistake, and it seems that more people believe that now than ever, even one death for a mistaken cause is too many.
I'm sure I'll be coming back to this quite a lot, but first, I have to get my natural sense of irrelevancy back. The hit counter should be as good a way as any to do that.
|| Eric 9:31 AM#
