SHOOT THE MESSENGERS

BUCK SARGEANT
30 March 2006
http://americancitizensoldier.blogspot.com


Live from Iraq: it’s the Memo of the Month.
Didn’t you hear? The country is in the midst
of a calamitous downward spiral into Civil War.
But Al Jazeera said so. Or was that CNN? Is there
really even a difference anymore?

Journalists in theater must come to acknowledge
that they are participants in this conflict whether
they choose to believe so or not.

The lack of security is the story, they say. Frankly,
I'd be feeling pretty insecure too if I were so lousy
at my job. Do these Green Zone FOBgoblins ever emerge
from their Baghdad belfries long or often enough to
properly collate the Big Picture they lay such
exclusive claim to? Or are they merely hunkering down
and ordering in, passively relying on the local Iraqi
stringers who are bylining around the block to feed
them information and in the process dispensing
freelancing blows to the other half of the truth
that rarely bleeds but certainly never leads.

Okay, so perhaps not all of them are glory seeking
war whores or care bearers of bad tidings who pretend
to fret over the fate of average Iraqis while all but
ensuring their quality of life will never improve.

Make no mistake -- Al Qaeda’s PR machine stands head
and shoulders above our own precisely because they
are so adept at using our own satellite feed bloodlust
against us; our BOOM mikes recording every second of it
in Dolby Surround. Terrorists target journalists because
it is a sure-fire page one headline with a ripple effect
guaranteed to reverberate throughout every newsroom in America.

Back at the Gotham City (NY) Times, the race to the
bottom to release the home team play book continues
unimpeded by guilt and unburdened by conscience.
Apparently, it wasn’t enough to merely undermine the war
effort at every opportunity and underplay the elections
at every turn.

Compounding their treachery, the NYTimes shamelessly
highlighted the results of a "secret" Pentagon investigation
identifying the vulnerable spots in individual body armor
worn by every soldier and Marine currently under fire.
[Note to the Gray Lady’s foreign correspondents: Your body
armor likely exhibits the very same weak points].

The casualty predictions made for the taking of Baghdad
were breathlessly predicted by every last retired general
and armchair admiral on record as being in the tens of
thousands. Three years later, to still have endured less
than were lost in the span of an hour in lower Manhattan
is anything if not encouraging. Yet the news coverage
countdown to catastrophe continues unabated, the
ME-ME-MEdia quagmired in misery.

Maybe the real security issue the hired media jackals
for jihad should be fretting over is their own job security.
Because an increasing number of us are mad as hell, and
we’re not gonna take it anymore. The most profitable route
between two viewpoints is the straight line, not the slanted
one. Clearly you can fool some of the people all of the
time, but you're not fooling those of us in uniform with
that looped stock footage backdrop of chaos and carnage
circa 2004 while your talking heads talk out of their rears
about unremitting violence circa 2006. A good many of us
are on our second and third tours -- we were there, okay?