I don’t know how the media can obtain their vaunted moral high ground with such philosophies, but I’m sure they found a way, one way or another.

Bush should really infiltrate the media and provide them with disinformation. Meaning information that is designed to be wrong. After awhile, nobody will know whether a leak is true or not because.

Technically, that is a dirty trick you use against enemies, but then again Bush’s humanitarian gentleman treatment of the press and of information, doesn’t net him any real friends in the Leftist media, now does it.

Trying to convince people to stop using a tactic, when that tactic benefits them, is like asking someone not to cheat in a life and death situation. It is kind of hard unless you make it so that their tactics, harm them more than it helps them.

For example, Dan Schorr commenting on the NIE. He first says that media cited “parts” of the report to criticize Bush. Fine. Then he states that the White House released “other parts” of the report to rebut them.

What Schorr is obscuring with this apparently even-handed wordplay is the fact that there was no equivalence between the behavior of the two sides here at all. Whereas the media selected individual statements to show Bush’s policies in a negative light, Bush in response released the ENTIRE “Key Findings” section from which those statements were cherry-picked.

The contrast could not be greater between one side that seeks to control what information reaches the public as a way of shaping attitudes, and the other side that believes that if people are fully informed, they will reach sensible conclusions.

But of course, Dan Schorr is firmly in the first camp, so he plays a little word game to hide that much different behavior of the two sides in this debate, trying to evolve the potentially embarrasing situation of the media being shown to be quite selective about its “leaks”, to a simple situation of “he said - he said”… or “everybody does it”.

I suspect most NPR listeners just dismissed the whole thing as more gotcha politics by both parties, just as Schorr intended them to - after all it was a leak that didn’t work out, so best stuff it down the memory hole.

This is SOP at NPR, and in the lefty media in general, and it is contemptible.

The soldiers involved are certainly not blameless, but they aren’t brutal torturers and only they know what kind of child murderers and worse were incarcerated there. They were indulging in a little frat boy payback and who can blame them considering how they had to mollycoddle these poor excuses for human beings.

When the story of the media is finally revealed, it will turn everything we think we know about the last 50 or so years around by 180 degrees.

We’ve been enjoying Mystery! on PBS shown here on Sundays at 9 PM. Their latest offerings have been the “Inspector Lynley Series” — not our favorite, but entertaining nevertheless. Last night was a repeat of an episode entitled, “The Word Of God.”

In it we were treated to a moral equivalence between Islamic fundamentalists and American mid-western Evangelicals. The gist was that people should no more expect that Moslems to be terrorists than American Evangelicals. There was a bit more, but I don’t remember what it was because I was seeing red.

The bad guy was, what to me was an obviously Jewish scholar at the British museum who went on a killing spree in his avarice for obtaining an ancient Koran which he planned to defile and sell page by page to willing collectors.

The Moslems were victims of the corrupt British system. The immigration officials were comic book caricatures who wanted to grab any Moslem for deportation, a female doctor who harvested organs for profit and a healthcare system that forced a desperately sick Moslem man to sell his good kidney to pay for his dialysis and future transplant. The fact that many people live long productive lives with only one good kidney escaped the attention of the writers of this vile trash.

Perhaps Mr. BW would like to explain why a BBC offering would inject such a hateful message in a show that tossed one softball after the other to the British Moslem community . . . and offer an opinion on why American Evangelicals didn’t riot, loot and burn to protest this ridiculous depiction of the faith.

“The Word of God” ? I sincerely hope not.

I was so angry

The horrors under Hussein were unimaginable. He relocated Ethnic Kurds to their eventual demise in mass graves. The relocation was a ruse where he reportedly rounded people up and gave them time to get their belongings. Knowing that their fate was not a simple relocation many people sewed their ID’s into their clothing because they were not allowed to keep identification. Many of the bodies in Iraq’s mass graves are identified by these ids. (LA Times – Iraq - Victims in Mass Graves Hid Clues in Clothing).

It is a nice opportunity to see what kind of decisions people make and how people should act in war. It is much better if you understand why people do the things they do, because it aids you in understanding other people and situations. Band of Brothers, therefore, is nice in that it deals with situations very much alike what we see in iraq.

The list of people grateful for Saddam’s downfall, and willing to put up with almost any hardship as long as he was gone, was phenomenal.

hardship breeds endurance and will, after all. The best fighters come not from decadent civilizations, but the boondocks of nowhere.

Endure, in enduring, grow strong.

I was watching that vid clip about Kurdistan, funded by the Kurdistan government that O’Reilly mentioned, awhile ago. It was very interesting to see how well done and positive it was. It was almost glowing, in fact I’m pretty sure it was glowing.

Humans do not seem to become stronger without facing harsh challenges, life and death encounters, and so forth. It is that which tempers the steel of the human soul and character. There is really no substitute for that tempering. It is sad, in a way, that for humanity to achieve greatness, there must be suffering to be overcome. Would it not be better for suffering to cease to exist? But if that was the case, wouldn’t we get a bunch of Hollywood decadent freaks? Either way, it is not a Paradise in Eden.

When humans have seen real reality, everything else of a lesser caliber seems like a dream. Vice a versa, it works the opposite for Berkley clones. Those who have not seen the real reality, everything seems real to them, including illusions.

The polls in Iraq don’t make sense unless you know the individual dividends. 90% of Kurdistan wants America to stay. Kurds are 20% of total pop. Sunnis other 20%. Shia 60%. Sunnis have 70% wanting America to GO. Shia? Shia are divided. Sometimes 50% sometimes 60% want us to go. Probably so that the Shia can purge the Sunnis, a good reason they would not want us here to interfere, not because they don’t like us, but because we aren’t “Shia”.

So when they say the majority of Iraqis want us to leave, that doesn’t even tell part of the story. I don’t care what the Shia-Iran buddy lovers want. I don’t care what the Sunni resurgent Baathists want. That removes so much of the percentage from the polls that it isn’t even a majority for either side.

The people who matter, are the silent voices. The ones without powerful representatives in Al Sadr or Sunni Baathist old school style thugs. They are the ones living in slums on the outskirts of Baghdad, pathetically grateful that an American military unit brought them food.

The problem with democracy is that what the people want as a majority is not necessarily the best thing for the majority or the minorities. We have solved it. Iraq has not yet. Until Iraq either implements their own “federal system” or uses our own, people talking about making policies based upon what the majority of Iraqis want or do not want, are committing a pretty infamous mistake, the Athenian mistake with Socrates.