Get Some Perspective!

Today’s recommended reading is Charley Reese’s latest on how to solve terrorism and the crisis in the Middle East: bitch slap Israel.

Now, let’s talk about the whole kafuffle about Newsweek‘s story about US troops desecrating a Qura’an. The story, since somewhat debunked, resulted in violent demonstrations across the Muslim world during which people were killed. Of course, conservative pundits are decrying Newsweek reporter Mike Isikoff as “anti-American” and other such predictable nonsense. Here are some points to keep in mind:

As Bill Press says: “Newsweek relied on faulty intelligence to write a magazine article. George W. Bush relied on faulty intelligence to start a war which has cost over $200 billion, and which has taken the lives of over 1600 Americans and tens of thousands of Iraqis… Here’s the difference. Newsweek didn’t know its intelligence was phony. And Newsweek apologized.”

And it’s not like the story wasn’t believable. US atrocities at Gitmo and Abu Ghraib are so well documented now that the flushing of a book is not unimaginable. More importantly, this is not even news, since such desecration has been reported before.

Moreover, whenever the jihadists riot over something Bush himself has “inadvertently” said or done, these same pundits never accuse the President of duplicity, anti-Americanism or unprofessionalism. No, in those cases it’s clearly the rioters’ fault. Please. Why is Newsweek such a target for their vitriol, then? Clearly because they have an unending hard-on for the “biased liberal media.”

Norman Mailer goes so far as to suggest that the misleading ofIsikoff was in fact an intentional counter-intelligence ploy by the US military to discredit a news source who was deemed overly liberal. Sounds a tad overly conspiratorial, but the fact that a prominent thinker like Mailer can publicly entertain such a theory is an indication of the current image of the US government among its own citizens: one of conniving brown-shirts seeking to undermine the pillars of its own society.

My memo to conservative pundits: shut the fuck up already. My memo to the rioting jihadists: they beat, humilated and sodomized your POWs, invaded your countries, humiliated your leaders and insulted your culture…. and you choose to riot over a book? Get some perspective!

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