Day 1,230

Today is Day 20 of the “Crisis in the Middle East”.

Do you know how many days it’s been since the U.S. invaded Iraq?

According to Frank Rich in yesterday’s New York Times, yesterday was Day 1,229, making today a nice even 1,230.

According to CNN, “there have been 2,802 coalition deaths, 2,576 Americans, two Australians, 114 Britons, 13 Bulgarians, three Danes, two Dutch, two Estonians, one Fijian, one Hungarian, 31 Italians, one Kazakh, one Latvian, 17 Poles, two Romanians, two Salvadoran, three Slovaks, 11 Spaniards, two Thai and 18 Ukrainians in the war in Iraq as of July 31, 2006.”  1,000 plus Iraqis per month have lost their lives in Baghdad alone the last few months.

However, according to Frank Rich:

On the Big Three networks’ evening newscasts, the time devoted to Iraq has fallen 60 percent between 2003 and this spring, as clocked by the television monitor, the Tyndall Report. On Thursday, Brian Williams of NBC read aloud a “shame on you” e-mail complaint from the parents of two military sons anguished that his broadcast had so little news about the war.

This is happening even as the casualties in Iraq, averaging more than 100 a day, easily surpass those in Israel and Lebanon combined. When Nouri al-Maliki, the latest Iraqi prime minister, visited Washington last week to address Congress, he too got short TV shrift — a mere five sentences about the speech on ABC’s “World News.” The networks know a rerun when they see it. Only 22 months earlier, one of Mr. Maliki’s short-lived predecessors, Ayad Allawi, had come to town during the 2004 campaign to give a similarly empty Congressional address laced with White House-scripted talking points about the war’s progress. Propaganda stunts, unlike “Law & Order” episodes, don’t hold up on a second viewing.

The steady falloff in Iraq coverage isn’t happenstance. It’s a barometer of the scope of the tragedy. For reporters, the already apocalyptic security situation in Baghdad keeps getting worse, simply making the war more difficult to cover than ever. The audience has its own phobia: Iraq is a bummer. “It is depressing to pay attention to this war on terror,” said Fox News’s Bill O’Reilly on July 18. “I mean, it’s summertime.” Americans don’t like to lose, whatever the season. They know defeat when they see it, no matter how many new plans for victory are trotted out to obscure that reality.

So much for supporting our troops, eh?  What happened to reporting all of that good news that was supposed to be happening in Iraq?

I’m upset about Israel and Lebanon too.  Heck, I’m outraged; however, remember, Iraq and Afghanistan are our wars and our messes and our soldiers are dying over there.  Shame on our media for a lack of patriotic priority.

Hat tip AmericaBlog.

Tags: Iraq, Israel, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Baghdad, American soldiers, New York Times, ABC, Fox News, NBC, Nouri al-Maliki, Frank Rich

Recommended Reading - In The News Edition

Here are a few posts written elsewhere that I thought worth passing on:

• Cat and Mouse with the VA (Score One for the Cat) — Dark Wraith is one of those Veterans who received a letter from the Veterans Administration about last month’s Fubar with the laptop and all of that personal data that might or might not have gotten hijacked. He’s not just upset about the Fubar; he’s upset that that they were able to find him at all after he spent ages carefully not alerting them to address changes…
  

  This is Exhibit Number One of what happens when the government turns into a nosy weirdo: its minions collect all kinds of personal data for whatever compelling reason they’ve concocted to make their jobs have meaning, and once they’ve got all that data, they place everyone in the database at risk, both from their own nefarious people and from those who would be able to compromise whatever security they have on the data. They take what isn’t theirs—our privacy—and they can’t have the decency to ensure even that they’re the only ones who can mess up our lives with what they’ve expropriated.

  To the Veterans Administration—and knowing full well that my rage will do no good whatsoever—I say this: Stay the Hell out of my life.

  To everyone else, I say this: if you’re not afraid of this government, you should be; and if you are afraid of this government, you should be more so.

  Not that it will do you any good to be afraid. As far as I can tell, they’ll find you when they want to, anyway. It’s all part of the price we now pay for the security our government provides as it diligently dismisses any regard whatsoever for the right we thought we had to be left alone.

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Tags: Veterans Administration, Identity Theft, Iraq, Nouri al-Maliki, insurgents, American soldiers, amnesty, Florida, voter fraud, Voting Irregularities, Greg Palast, sexual harrassment, inhumanity, humanity

2 comments See also in Politics & Causes, In the News, Geekery, Blogging & Other Blogs, The World, 9-11 & Terrorism, Iraq & Afghanistan, Conspiracy Theories, The Middle East