Posted by
LouGanzo on Friday, April 24, 2009 12:00:00 AM
The answer? No. But the behavior of the get-Bush-at-all costs press over the last eight years begs the question, doesn't it. If this is confusing to you, then you haven't been paying attention to the U.S. press and their efforts to undermine U.S. policy and intelligence efforts over the last six years. We had the New York Times disclosing U.S. monitoring of financial surveillance of terrorist activities, making a civil rights fiasco over the use of monitoring of cell phone calls between the U.S. and terrorist nations, and their notorious inflation of the abuses at Abu Ghraib to roughly the equivalent of the Tienemen Square massacre.
I'm actually quite certain that Abu Ghraib got more media attention than anything the Chinese Communists have ever done. It would be interesting to see which got more media attention in the U.S. The slaughter of 40+ million people in China after the rise of Mao (a liberal sweetheart) or Abu Ghraib. Comparatively speaking I'm quite confident that Abu Ghraib was much more of an atrocity in the view of the American press than Mao's slaughters in China.
Now what happened at Abu Ghraib? How many people died there? How many had their heads cut off? How many were executed in a back room? This is the type of depiction you hear: "in scenes of horrifying humiliation and abuse". What about death? Granted, the U.S. soldiers there were unhooked from all sense. And why? Were their fellow soldiers being kidnapped and beheaded? Yes. Were they uncovering the real torture chambers where people were actually raped and dismembered? Yes. So in the face of the real torture and murder they were subject to, if captured, and with a need to collect information about soldiers who were under threat of being beheaded, these soldiers broke the rules and the U.S. press had one its most glowing experiences in memory. The press was like college kids on spring break on a Florida beach. Exultant. They were able to depict the U.S. soldiers as the true "evil doers" and make President Bush look bad in the process. Mission Accomplished U.S. Press. Well done. They weren't so worried about the U.S. image in the world back then as long as it made Bush look really naughty. The cries rose up. "Impeach Bush! Impeach Bush! Bush is Hitler!" Good times for the lefties in America.
But now that we have a new President that the left has adopted as their tribute to affirmative action, we'll see if the conservative press will actually try to undermine U.S. policy, security and intelligence, like their left-wing colleagues did. I doubt it. And no, saying you disagree with disastrous economic policy is not undermining U.S. security and intelligence. It's called being sensible.