| I don’t think I’m the only one who is puzzled by the disparity between the reality and how it is being presented to us in the media. In today’s article in Washington Post, journalists Michael Abramowitz, Robin Wright and Thomas E. Ricks explain one of the reasons this President aims to increase the number of our troops in Iraq, this way: “…But over the past two months, as the security situation in Iraq has deteriorated…”. It would have been wonderful had it taken our President only 2 months to notice this problem. However, the situation in Iraq has been descending into a sectarian violence for over 3 years, spurred further by the turf war of the Iraqi politicians’ attempts to assert their own control in that country.
For over 2 years, the President has been reiterating his strategy of delegating the security of Iraq to the Iraqis, yet journalists had neglected to ask him about the sanity of such a plan: Our forces - of over 120,000 best-trained troops in the world - have battled the violence in Iraq for over 3 years with little success, and shoulder this chaos onto untrained, outnumbered, underpaid and weary Iraqis, should somehow save that country from an ongoing spiraling out of control violence? And the journalists do not see that our demands - to have this fledgling and profoundly corrupted Iraqi government to succeed where the U.S. with all its might had failed - are devoid of any common sense?
In the same article they point to Bush’s “disdain for micromanaging the war effort and for second-guessing his commanders”. This reminds me of his disdain for the people of New Orleans during and in the aftermath of the hurricane Katrina; then he also ignored the problems on the ground and “was waiting” for the requests for assistance from the local government.
I don’t care to waste my time on criticizing politicians; they rarely tell the truth, if ever. However, what is happening with our media is something astounding: Journalists and reporters had become the speakers for the establishment, and their reporting on various issues and events is slanted in the direction of the views that are shaped by the groups they are supporting.
Utter failure in our strategy in Iraq is called “mistakes were made”. When mistakes are made, they are corrected, and not shifted over to Iraqis for mending. One of the more infamous expressions of our President “to stay the course” was somehow described as being “flexible”, without a storm of criticism directed at such a sham!
We stopped using the right words to describe the real meaning of things; we stopped believing in ideals and no longer teach our children about the genuine substance of Right and Wrong: we’ll say “love”, when we are “attracted” or “infatuated” with someone; “stay the course” can mean “flexible” and “we are opened to suggestions”; we’ll say “it’s good for America”, while the action may have nothing to do with GOOD and Decency! Just because someone may be called “a good American”, “a good Christian”, “a good Muslim” or “a good Jew”, such a person may have nothing to do with being GOOD. But somehow the soft-toned portrayal of our actions or the actions of those whom we agree with, and twisted depiction of events that involve those whose views we oppose (irrespective of the true nature of their actions), no longer raise an outbreak of criticism at such disconnect from the reality.
We ignore the logic and bend the common sense to fit our views, not realizing that we created a world where anything can be justified with a ‘proper’ twist of a language. Deprived of our individual responsibilities to govern this country as its citizens and forced to hand over our votes to scheming politicians, who skillfully pretend to represent our needs, we call “the greatest democracy in the world”; and people believe such fable! Our system may be better than the governments in many other countries, but having the right to elect politicians, who follow their own interests and have their own ideas about how people should live in America and the direction that this country should follow - irrespective of the peoples views and needs - is not a democracy!
What legacy do we leave behind, when we forget the True meaning of words?
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