jrtom: (Default)
jrtom ([personal profile] jrtom) wrote2005-01-12 11:16 am

not with a bang, but a whimper

BBC News: US gives up search for Iraq WMD

You know, I'd really like more coverage of this. Folks like Dean (and Byrd) should be jumping up and down and yelling "SEE? SEE?!?" But the NY Times today doesn't even mention it.

On a related note:

news.com.au: World 'safer' with bin Laden on the loose

Might explain a few things about Bush's priorities, huh?

[identity profile] red-frog.livejournal.com 2005-01-12 11:27 am (UTC)(link)
The story just got posted to Reuters an hour ago, but it's in the NYT now (http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/news/news-iraq-weapons.html).

[identity profile] jrtom.livejournal.com 2005-01-12 11:36 am (UTC)(link)
Hmm. Good to know that the NYT doesn't immediately put everything on their RSS feed. Thanks.

Liberal Bastion?

[identity profile] fdmts.livejournal.com 2005-01-13 07:46 am (UTC)(link)

Funny, my father and brother in law have been giving me crap about how the NYT is this near socialist daily screed of biased hate for the Republicans. I wish there was some way I could send a negative clipping. "See, they failed to cover this..."

Re: Liberal Bastion?

[identity profile] jrtom.livejournal.com 2005-01-13 08:10 am (UTC)(link)
Well, except the obvious response is "they would have covered it if they'd known about it". The only way that I can think of that might be able to convince them otherwise about the NYT is to find a bunch of slantable stories that are covered in basically the same way by the NYT and some other paper that they consider to be a conservative bastion.

(Anonymous) 2005-01-28 05:42 pm (UTC)(link)
Related book plug: War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning.

Written by a war reporter who basically goes on at length about how people really behave in war as he has learned by many years of standing in the mud watching people get blown up.

One of the points the author makes is that pretty much every war has these big myths about why The Cause is so important which in retrospect look totally false. Frequently it is amazing how quickly the myth just disappears from the culture after we're all done leaning on it. Anyone who objected to the myth while it was in use was a traitor, but anyone who gloats about how they told-you-so after the myth is discarded is ignored or considered a self-serving whiner.

Cross ref also Harlan Elison's rant in _The Glass Teat_ after somebody high up in the (maybe Nixon?) administration basically said that the Vietnam War was a disaster and bombing S.E. Asia maybe wasn't such a good idea. H. goes heavily sarcastic and asks in essence whether the people who were harassed and ridiculed for saying exactly that a couple of years before were going to get an apology.

And of course not. 30 years on the Vietnam War is largly acknowledged to be a total con job, but those who objected to it are paradoxically still presented in the culture as Bad Guys (or at least clueless and self-indulgent).

It's a sick, sick, sick world we live in.

-JKL