I told you you needed to be reading Flopping Aces about the exploding AP scandal!
Looks like Michelle Malkin is going to Baghdad to try to find the elusive Jamal Hussein. Curt from Flopping Aces may be going with her.
Hey Curt, I’ll pull your shifts for you, man!
[...] Would that the media were not waging it’s own PR campaign to redeem itself from it’s post-Vietnam nadir of popularity by repeating it’s distortions and ahistoricisms of that war. This report by a Washington Post doyenne contains a number of unsupported citations and reporting on the growing economy by citing solely to oil targets, not growth, not consumption, but targets for stockpiles (perhaps booming consumption and private stockpiling might make building up a government stockpile difficult?) and growth, and here where the slant is obvious (for that matter, one can see it in these search results, which I am confident will not get much better over time). Would the Iraqi government be having trouble spending all it’s oil revenues if the production side were as bad as the Washington Post story makes out? The Iraqi economy is going gangbusters, after all. Amazingly, there seems to be only the one report about that recently, though for years the evidence, in numbers of cars, satellite dishes, phone service, eating out, real estate prices and the return of gardens and such has been plain to anyone with an enquiring mind. People are noticing the media’s inferior accuracy compared even to the military, State Department and intelligence services, with all government’s operational imperatives of deception in war, but those noticing are rather a minority, if a highly enlightened one, with representatives thick on this page. That minority is like the people who know Peter Arnette made up reports of poison gas attacks in Indochina by our side, on our own defectors no less (the other side actually used them on civilians and Chinese Communist invaders in 1979, but that has gone rather unreported even in good sites like this one, though East Europeans of my acquaintance who were plugged into Warsaw Pact military apparaat speak of it matter-of-factly) or that no one but a reporter ever said we need to destroy a village to save it. The reflexive tick to play gotcha this way against the good guys was never absent in this war, even during major combat operations, but has been ramping up with a vengeance since we daftly stopped embedding reporters with units throughout the military. The reportariat relies on “stringers” instead, and ends up with reports like these, even when trying to be scrupulous. [Indochinese footnote, nota bene for some context in what I’m talking about, that is, not Agent Orange.]Still, stories like this, and even stories about breakneck economic growth, if not stories of heroism, do get out. The excerpt I find most revealing is the following: There, they said, their sons were treated as liberators and the parents welcomed as heroes. [...]
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