- An unfortunate byproduct of George W. Bush's political
strategy is that his success has depended on moving the base of the
Republican
Party down into a demographic that should by all rights be
Democratic.
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- That's right, I'm talking about the moron vote.
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- This was best illustrated by that recent incident in
Fallujah in which a cameraman caught on tape the shooting of an Iraqi
prisoner
by a U.S. Marine. The Marine apparently presumed the Iraqi was pretending
to be dead for the purpose of preparing a later ambush. Now the Marine
has been removed from duty and may be court-martialed.
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- Who do you blame for that sort of thing? If you're
intelligent,
you blame the commander in chief -- you know, that slick politician who
when he first ran for the presidency promised he would never get U.S.
soldiers
into the type of nation- building boondoggle in which such incidents become
inevitable.
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- But if you're a moron, you blame the cameraman. That's
been the response among many Bush supporters on talk radio and in chat
rooms all over the Internet. One such site was the Free Republic, which
used to be a bastion of intelligent conservative comment until Bush dumbed
down conservatism.
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- "He should be charged as a traitor -- the government
should make an example of him. This has GOT to STOP," wrote one such
blogger, with his thumb on the shift key in classic moron fashion.
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- And it wasn't just the bloggers propounding this
nonsense.
A report on another Web site, World Net Daily, was headlined "NBC
Cameraman an Antiwar Activist." The "proof" of this claim
was that an anti-war Web site had linked to some photos on the cameraman's
Web site. Of course, on the Internet anybody can link to anything. The
rest of the article consisted mainly of quotes from bloggers denouncing
the cameraman, creating a sort of moron echo-chamber effect.
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- None of the dimwits in question seems to have considered
the facts of the case. And the fact is that the journalist in question,
Kevin Sites, was working with the full approval of the U.S. military, which
originated the concept of embedding reporters among troops and still
supports
it. Another fact is that Sites was a so-called "pool reporter."
As any intelligent person should know or be able to figure out, a
"pool
reporter" gathers information for a pool of other journalists. In
return for the privilege of being at a certain spot, that reporter is
obligated
to pass on the information to other journalists equally. He cannot keep
such information to himself even if wants to.
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- And if you go to Sites' Web site
(<http://www.kevinsites.netwww.kevinsites.net),
you will find that he has been enduring a lot of risk in a land where the
saying "heads will roll" is no figure of speech. His writing
shows that he understands and sympathizes with the predicament in which
American troops find themselves in places like Fallujah.
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- "They are extremely likeable -- these young Marines
-- full of bravado and easygoing about the danger that surrounds
them,"
Sites writes of the Marines he accompanied into Fallujah, where many were
picked off by snipers.
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- "Their superior firepower is checked by the
insurgent's
knowledge of the city -- their cunning in using blind alleyways and the
crooks and crannies of buildings to pick off the Marines," Sites
wrote.
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- The myth among the morons is that the liberal media are
somehow biased in their coverage of Iraq. Nonsense. Actually the liberals
in the media have been extraordinarily sympathetic to the Bush view of
the war. Why not? It's a liberal war -- or a neoconservative war if you
want to use that term. When it comes to foreign policy, there's not much
difference between the two philosophies. Nation-building. Spreading
democracy
to people who can't handle it. Spending billions to win "hearts and
minds." That sort of thing.
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- Has anyone in the media pointed out how much it's going
to cost in American tax dollars to put Fallujah back together again now
that we've used American tax dollars to disassemble it? If so, I bet that
writer was a conservative, not a liberal. The true conservatives, as
opposed
to the "neo" variety, were skeptical about this war from the
beginning.
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- Well, the election's over now. It's time to stop blaming
the messenger and start looking at the message. And the message out of
the Bush White House a year-and- a-half after the Iraq invasion continues
to be "the dog ate my postwar plan." The only way these big-
spending Beltway bozos won re- election was to reiterate endlessly the
message that the other side was even worse. That happened to be true, but
as of Nov. 3 it stopped working as an excuse.
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- As for Kevin Sites, he was doing an incredibly dangerous
job that at one point saw him detained at gunpoint by Iraqi insurgents.
He was lucky enough to escape with his head -- a circumstance that would
no doubt disqualify him from future employment in the Bush
administration.
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- http://www.nj.com/printer/printer.ssf
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