Category: General

Media Lens :: View topic – ALL SMOKE, NO FIRE – THE NATIONAL JOURNAL SMEARS THE LANCET:
Have you heard about the “discrediting” of the Iraq mortality reports published in the Lancet? I heard about it on NPR. One of the “discreditors” was interviewed and his conclusions were not questioned.

You see, the conservative National Journal published an article showing that the study was largely funded by a group sponsored by George Soros, who has been a vocal critic of George Bush.

They conclude that therefore the study must have been a made-up anti-Bush hit piece.

However, the NJ reporters were informed, before they went to press, of the fact that the Lancet studies were not commissioned by the Soros group. Their financial support was indirect (through MIT), started late in the project, and the researchers themselves were never informed of it. Indeed, Soros is not likely to have

So the reporters from the National Journal must have concluded that the mortality researchers used precognition, clairvoyance, and telepathy to find out that there would, in the future, be money which indirectly originated with a vocal supporter of George Bush, used to publicize their research reports.

Those psychic premonitions must have influenced them to fake their results, so as to make them something that the Soros-sponsored organization wanted to publicize.

I understand Tarot cards have not been ruled out either. Those Lancet researchers are a wily bunch.

Good thing we have conservative journals to ferret this psychic foolery out, and the mainstream media to widely, and uncritically, publicize the conservative journal’s conclusions.

Jonathan Coulton’s code monkey:

Code Monkey like Fritos
Code Monkey like Tab and Mountain Dew
Code Monkey very simple man
With big warm fuzzy secret heart:
Code Monkey like you

Great article from 1995, even more relevant today than it was then:

The Martin Luther King You Don’t See on TV:

It’s become a TV ritual: Every year in mid-January, around the time of Martin Luther King’s birthday, we get perfunctory network news reports about “the slain civil rights leader.”

The remarkable thing about this annual review of King’s life is that several years — his last years — are totally missing, as if flushed down a memory hole.

What TV viewers see is a closed loop of familiar file footage: King battling desegregation in Birmingham (1963); reciting his dream of racial harmony at the rally in Washington (1963); marching for voting rights in Selma, Alabama (1965); and finally, lying dead on the motel balcony in Memphis (1968).

An alert viewer might notice that the chronology jumps from 1965 to 1968. Yet King didn’t take a sabbatical near the end of his life. In fact, he was speaking and organizing as diligently as ever.

Almost all of those speeches were filmed or taped. But they’re not shown today on TV.

Why?

It’s because national news media have never come to terms with what Martin Luther King Jr. stood for during his final years.

Highway crash spills 20 tons of meat – Latest News – The Grand Rapids Press – MLive.com:

HOLLAND — Police shut down eastbound Int. 196 south of town after three semi-trucks collided, spilling 40,000 pounds of meat on the road. The crash occurred around 6:40 a.m. near 60th Street. The highway is closed indefinitely, according to Allegan County Central Dispatch.

I have read recently — I don’t remember where — that a key element in the thinking of an American hawk is that intention is more important than effect — that doing hurtful things with a good intention is virtuous. This is what differentiates us from “terrorists,” the thinking goes — we may kill many more innocent people than they did, but we don’t want to kill any innocent people. It’s all incidental, collateral damage; not our purpose. And that means what we are doing is good. It’s better, the thinking goes, to be killed or maimed by an American with virtuous intent than a Bad Guy with evil intent.

I was reminded of that reading the following story:

President Bush had tears in his eyes during an hour-long tour of Israel‘s Holocaust memorial Friday and told Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice that the U.S. should have bombed Auschwitz to halt the killing, the memorial’s chairman said…

Bush was visibly moved as he toured the site, said Yad Vashem’s chairman, Avner Shalev.

“Twice, I saw tears well up in his eyes,” Shalev said.

At one point, Bush viewed aerial photos of the Auschwitz camp taken during the war by U.S. forces and called Rice over to discuss why the American government had decided against bombing the site, Shalev said.

The Allies had detailed reports about Auschwitz during the war from Polish partisans and escaped prisoners. But they chose not to bomb the camp, the rail lines leading to it, or any of the other Nazi death camps, preferring instead to focus all resources on the broader military effort, a decision that became the subject of intense controversy years later.

Between 1.1 million and 1.5 million people were killed at the camp.

“We should have bombed it,” Bush said, according to Shalev.

Bombing makes everything all better, if you do it because you’re a good person fighting evil.

I mean, seriously, it’s conceivable that bombing a camp could have resulted, in the end, in less suffering in total, assuming the Germans didn’t just build new camps or take to shooting Jews instead of working them to death or gassing them. It’s not utterly irrational. It was considered at the time as a possible strategy.

But I do find it scary that the President’s response to a one of the world’s great horrors is to think “we should have bombed it.”

When all the President’s got is a hammer… he can even look at Auschwitz and see a nail.