Monday, March 23, 2009

Conservative Censorship still "alive and well"

Conservative media outlets are still practicing censorship, to stay "on message" and attempt to promulgate their propaganda, despite reality and the Facts that reality presents. Lemme explain.

I heard, on the radio last week, that "the rate of military suicides has now out stripped the number of combat deaths" and at first, I didn't believe it. I got busy working on other things, and today again, long term memory kicked in, and I started digging. I did the simplest of Google searches: "military suicide rate 2009"
OK, lots of moderate, neutral, or liberal sources here, here, and here, including the radio show where I heard the initial report, here. But what about conservative news sources? So I expanded the search to
"+"washington times" military suicide rate 2009" and "+"fox" military suicide rate 2009"" and ""wsj" military suicide rate 2009", as well as poking around the American Enterprise Institutes's website. Sun Myung Moon's Washington Times recently actually ran Op Ed pieces deriding the findings, and referenced an old 2006 statistic, but they did mention that Military Divorces were up in 2008 - if only they had been married in Rev Moon's church instead! The WSJ HAD the story, but pulled it off their website (Google cached here) - sends the wrong message to the conservative subscriber base, after all. Fox had NOTHING on the subject, showing Roger Ailes knows where his bread and butter come from. AEI had nothing as well, but that is not news.

Conservative Censorship is alive and well. Very Sadly, 100s of US Service Men and Women no longer are. This is in large part, to the un-necessary & un-justified pre-emptive war launched by W and Cheney, wherein the neocon leadership ignored all information that was not "on message". These negligent plutocrats refused to plan for a prolonged and bloody insurgency, and actually kept telling the Pentagon that it was not fighting a war and things were constantly getting better, despite increasingly bloody and sophisticated insurgent attacks that have now claimed more American lives than have been lost in 9-11 - not to mention the nearly 100,000 Iraqi lives that have been extinguished as well (about the same ratio of US to Vietnamese casualties experienced prior to 1975, US and Vietnamese).

It sickens me, how Republican ideologues continue to try and re-write history. You can't resurrect dead people. The military deaths are facts. Yes, there's always been a suicide rate in the armed services (FMJ par example) but driving it to new heights, that's on W's and Cheney's shoulders.

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