No, Virginia, Sometimes There Really are Not Two (Reasonable) Sides to a Story, Unless You are a GOP Warmonger
(posted by Mona)
My co-blogger at Unqualified Offerings, Thoreau, is past fed up with the establishment media’s treating war hawks, torture apologists and defenders of unchecked Executive lawlessness — and who see “victory” in Iraq — as honored pundits to be thanked for their graciously giving an appearance/words/time:
I realize that this [intolerance for their views] can go in a dangerous direction. I don’t want to close all minds on all things and say that everything is black and white. But, you know, some shades of gray do in fact come awfully close to one or the other end of the spectrum.
It can go in a dangerous direction. But this notion that a minority of extremists who have captured a large part of an increasingly unpopular party, and that their “positions” deserve respect as being “Serious,” WTF is that all about?
And contrast, John McCain can repeatedly demonstrate he knows nothing about the difference between Shia and Sunni, (brief ad click-through) and the fact that the Shia-dominated Iran despises Sunni al Qaeda and thus initially assisted the United States in our war against Afghanistan — and yet McCain remains Serious on foreign policy. While I respect the courage of McCain the man vis-a-vis what he endured in a North Vietnamese prison for over five years, pace Neanderthals on the right (and this representative blogger is frequently as illiterate as his post on this subject post illustrates), that does not transform McCain’s manifest ignorance — or, in the alternative, willingness to lie — about Iran, Iraq and Al Qaeda into a qualification to be President of these United States.
Will McCain’s idiocy receive the same attention Barack Obama’s former pastor has among the Serious? Uh, I’d bet my next paycheck not. A presidential candidate’s having no clue which Muslim enclaves do and do not support the particular Islamist faction that attacked us on 9/11 is nothing — de rien — compared to a an angry, elderly black pastor who served his country as a Marine, and then returned to live under Jim Crow. To delve into the sociology there and really understand it would result in a nuanced, multi-sided story; but not if one is Very, Very Serious.
March 19th, 2008 at 9:11 pm
The whole Iran vs. Al Qaeda thing that McCain’s so mixed up on illustrates exactly why the “success” of the surge is meaningless.
Right now the Sunni “dead enders” are behaving themselves because their tribal leaders have been paid off in Al Anbar, and their militias in Baghdad have been put in Iraqi military uniform. And the Shia militias are playing nice because they’re more than willing to wait as long as it takes for America to pull out, and let the Americans kill Sunnis for them in the meantime.
But the whole Sunni-Shia sectarian rivalry is largely a sideline. The elephant in the living room is the Shia political parties and militias. They are the political center of gravity in Iraq. And regardless of what the U.S. does, and how long it stays in there, the day after it pulls out the Shia militas will *be* the government of Iraq–either by supplanting the formal government or amalgamating with it.
Bush Sr. was smart enough to understand the only way to keep Iraq from turning into a Shia theocracy with close ties to Iran was to keep a murderous Sunni dictator in power. When his worthless son decided to invade Saddam, he decided at the very same time to have a Shia theocracy strategically dominated by Iran. It’s pretty much that simple.
March 19th, 2008 at 10:03 pm
Thanks for the link, Mona.
March 24th, 2008 at 4:05 pm
It’s the totally insane “he said, she said” stuff again. Where on earth did journalists get this idea that their job is just to report what people say? What ever happened to the journalists using their own brains and reporting on things as they see them? Modern reporters could be entirely replaced by computers. And I hate to say it, because I am not anti-accademic, but it seems journalists turning their brains off coincides pretty closely with the first wave of people with degrees in journalism.
March 26th, 2008 at 7:22 am
Martin,
I think the race to be “objective” in journalism is directly responsible for the lack of context in mainstream journalism. If you’re being “objective” (or at least trying, because in reality it isn’t possible to be objective), you can’t use your own brain to supply context to the facts you report.
Far better to have a range of highly partisan media reporting the facts, each openly admitting of their bias and perspective in providing context to the facts they report.