October 29, 2005

The editors and reporters of the NY Times never fail to distort truth to serve their Agenda.

In this particular instance the paper ran a story on the 2,000th member of the U.S. armed forces to be killed in Iraq. The story described a letter written by one of those men to his girlfriend, but not mailed. Instead it was found on his laptop computer and intended to be read by his girlfriend if he was killed.

Here's what the paper published about this letter:
Sifting through Corporal Starr’s laptop computer after his death, his father found a letter to be delivered to the marine’s girlfriend. ‘I kind of predicted this,’ Corporal Starr wrote of his own death. ‘A third time just seemed like I’m pushing my chances.’
A picture in the article (on-line version) showed the soldier's father looking at his grave, with a caption telling readers that the corporal had said he was "tired of the harsh life...so he enrolled in community college, planning to attend after his enlistment ended in August."

So the impression is of just one more sad, deluded victim of the Bush war machine, eh? A kid who had no idea what he was doing or why he was over there, just another mindless facist tool.

Yeah.

Fortunately the corporal’s family forwarded the entire letter to Michelle Malkin, so we can read what Corporal Starr really thought, not what the Times' selective editing would portray. Here’s what Corporal Starr actually wrote, in the letter he intended for reading in the event of his death:
Obviously if you are reading this then I have died in Iraq. I kind of predicted this, that is why I’m writing this in November. A third time just seemed like I’m pushing my chances. I don’t regret going, everybody dies but few get to do it for something as important as freedom. It may seem confusing why we are in Iraq, it’s not to me. I’m here helping these people, so that they can live the way we live. Not have to worry about tyrants or vicious dictators. To do what they want with their lives. To me that is why I died. Others have died for my freedom, now this is my mark."
The bold type is what the Times reporter intentionally ignored. Perhaps the Times could try claiming this was due to space constraints, but clearly this would be a lie. The reporter ignored the rest because it didn't fit the fiction the Times has been pushing about the war and the U.S. armed forces.

Novelist Lisa Huang Fleischman wrote New York Times public editor Byron Calame to point this out, and just blows the Times away:
I know it comforts all the Timesmen and women to think that soldiers are just sad, pathetic, barely literate dupes (when they aren’t being babykillers and Koran flushers), but in fact the soldiers view their lives as imbued with transcendent meaning, apparently something no Times reporter can claim. Maybe it’s just envy on the part of all your reporters that these American teenagers in uniform make history every day of their lives, while you all just continue to transparently twist the news...
Seems to me that observation is right on the money: Reporters seem to have a hard time believing there can be something that gives life "transcendant meaning." Wonder why?

Tim Blair has the whole story. Congrats to Tim and Lisa for some great work.

October 14, 2005

Failure of an idea - and a people

Below is an extensively edited version of an article someone emailed to me. I don't know the author or source, only that it was "published Sep 14, 05." If you were the author I'll be glad to credit you.
In his 1935 State of the Union Address, President Franklin Roosevelt spoke to a nation entering the fifth year of the Great Depression, but still steeped in conservative values. Continued dependence on welfare, said Roosevelt, "induces a spiritual disintegration fundamentally destructive to the national fiber." To let people stay dependent on welfare "is to administer a narcotic, a subtle destroyer of the human spirit."

Behind FDR's statement was the conviction that while it's proper for the government to provide aid in an extraodinary emergency, in normal times people should provide for the needs of their own families.

And until around 1960 or so, Americans did just that. But with LBJ's landslide election in 1964 unchecked liberalism triumphed--and began a huge experiment.

Behind LBJ's "Great Society" was a novel (and to many, very attractive) idea: the federal government should use tax dollars to provide 'economically disadvantaged' people with all their basic needs. Liberals believed that by using tax dollars to give the poor money, subsidized food, free (or nearly free) housing and free medical care, the poor would not only be happier but would also be "lifted out of poverty."

When Katrina hit New Orleans, Americans saw the results of 40 years of these programs: Hundreds of young men who in earlier disasters would have put their unique skills and muscle into helping the elderly, the sick, women and children to safety instead took to the streets to loot and rape.

The real disaster of Katrina was how quickly society in that city broke down. The idea that long-term government handouts would build a Great Society was exposed as woefully, laughably wrong. After trillions of tax dollars spent for welfare, food stamps, public housing, job training and education since 1965, not only is poverty still pandemic, but when the police vanished, the beneficiaries of these government programs quickly started preying on women and those who lacked weapons.

Sri Lankans and Indonesians--who live far more austerely than black Americans in New Orleans--did not behave like this in a tsunami that took 200 times as many lives as Katrina.

Stranded for days by the floodwaters, almost everyone waited for the government to come save them. They screamed into the cameras for help, and the reporters screamed into the cameras for help, and the "civil rights leaders" screamed into the cameras that Bush was not only responsible for the disaster (global warming, "dynamited levees") but was also a racist who was deliberately letting blacks suffer.

Americans were once famous for their initiative, for young leaders who would stand up and perform heroic deeds in a crisis. We saw none of that at the Superdome. Watching the performance in New Orleans, it's clear that our society has changed vastly from our parents' day.

FDR was right: a "spiritual disintegration" has overtaken us. The idea that government should give people their daily needs--one of the pillars of modern liberalism--has proven to be "a narcotic, a subtle destroyer of the human spirit."

Either we get off this narcotic, or it kills us.