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VOLDEMORT FOILED AGAIN BY G.I. HARRY
This entry was posted on 4/8/2008 11:36 AM and is filed under uncategorized.
It turns out "the troops" actually have minds of their own! NOW WHAT are the warmongers in Washington going to do?
Ever since 9/11, the Bush administration and it sycophants have used "the troops" as photo-op backdrops, well-trained and orderly speech audiences, and a universal, generalized propaganda device.
As I pointed out in my last post, if you disagreed with Bush's War, why, you hated "the troops."
So pervasive has been this mesmerizing mantra of mythology that the broadcast news media and many Americans have come through the years to accept it as fact. This is because they all spend too much time listening to high-ranking generals (who are themselves adroit and ambitious politicians), opportunistic politicians, spoon-fed pundits, and far too little time actually asking those troops what THEY think.
Print journalism has done a better job of this, by far. War correspondents such as Dexter Filkins and Damien Cave of the New York Times, Sudarsen Raghavan and Joshua Partlow of the Washington Post, among many more too numerous to mention, have walked and ridden patrol and lived with soldiers and Marines at war for months at a time, have survived getting "blown up," and have written faithfully about the exquisite frustration and fear felt by those fighting in Iraq, and those living outside the Green Zone, both American and Iraqi.
They quote privates and sergeants and beleaguered platoon leader lieutenants and company commander captains, who see a whole other war than what Green Zone generals with their slide shows and security details see. (Or senators, in carefully staged, pre-arranged two-day tours.)
Not many broadcast reporters do such a faithful job of reporting, although I've long been impressed with the indominable Lara Logan of CBS News and Richard Engall with NBC, both of whom have risked their own lives many times in order to get the story right.
I'll never forget once, watching Logan on a terrifying patrol with Marines in Ramadi, before we started paying off insurgents not to shoot at us. The patrol was so dangerous that she carried her own camera rather than risk a crew, and she and the men had to run everywhere--not walk--because of sniper fire. At one point, pinned down under a rain of bullets, surrounded by brave Marines who were shooting back, Logan actually had a live feed to Katy Couric in New York.
And Couric ACTUALLY ASKED Logan, "Lara, how is troop morale?"
THIS is who we trust to inform the American public on this war?
Now, nobody loves using and abusing American troops more than Voldemort himself--Dick Cheney. (If ever anybody lived up to his first name...)
And of course, he never misses a chance to give a good sound-bite speech to "the troops" when he makes one of his unannounced fly-by visits to Baghdad.
During his last such Iraq-propaganda patrol, he gave what ABC News national security reporter Martha Radditz described as "a rousing speech."
Radditz, needless to say, is no Lara Logan. Usually, in fact, she reports from the Pentagon. I doubt she's ever spent much time talking to soldiers in dusty fatigues as opposed to shiny uniforms.
So after Voldemort's Vanity, which no doubt was filled with all sorts of glory-words like "victory" and "success" and "noble sacrifice"--(I could look it up but don't really care; after all, he's been saying the same things for six years no matter what the reality outside the blast walls and security perimeters)--Radditz took a camera crew out into the audience of entrapped soldiers and asked them, point-blank, who they planned to vote for in the coming election.
I'm sure she thought it would be a "slam-dunk," to coin a phrase, for the war-hero McCain who is staking his entire "no surrender" campaign on continuing the war. We all know "the troops" want to "win," right? So there's no way they'd support those Defeatocrats.
And the very first soldier she asked did not hesitate to answer:
"Barack Obama. I think he has our best interests at heart."
Taken aback, she spouted that favorite media mythology: "B-but you know he intends to pull out of Iraq right away?"
Without blinking an eye, he replied, "Yes."
You can watch it yourself, here: http://abcnews.go.com/WN/story?id=4244798&page=1
Again and again, soldiers replied that they were supporting either Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton (which, even though I'm an Obama supporter, tickled the sh** out of me because I've been hearing from right-wingers for years how much "the troops" hate Hillary).
She did show one McCain supporter, but even when she took her question-and-answer session all the way to Afghanistan, she found, yet again, that most of the troops she questioned intended to vote Democratic.
One pointed out to her that, just because they're fighting in a war does not mean that they don't worry about things at home and how their families are being affected by, say, the high price of gasoline, or the economy. Again and again, they seemed to agree that the Democrats had a better grasp on those issues.
But I think what surprised her most, is that even when she fronted the usual myth that Obama was going to "pull out right away," she found that these soldiers WANTED us to pull out. "Well yeah," said one. "It would be nice to go home."
I've been shouting out here in the wilderness for years that "the troops" do not march in lock-step behind Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld/McCain, and to this day, people seem surprised.
Just yesterday, a conservative woman I know started a discussion on Iraq because, since my son was a Marine, she assumed I agreed with FOX news and Rush, and said, "I tell you one thing, though, when I see those war protesters, it just crawls all over me. I get so mad."
And I replied, "You know, many of those protesters are military families."
She stared at me and said, "I did not know that."
No, most people DON'T know that. And the woman was so surprised by my remark that she said nothing more, which I find to be a common response when fairy tales get refuted with truth.
They hear the news stories about the strain on the military, but they just don't GET what that means in concrete terms. As Norman Lear pointed out in a blogpost for Huffingtonpost.com, he had to watch a movie to really get any kind of an idea of the true cost of this war on military families.
The post, "Where Is My Troop Train?" is here: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/norman-lear/where-is-my-troop-train_b_95497.html
The movie is Stop-Loss, which deals with the horrendous fact that some 60,000 men and women are being forced to remain in the military and redeploy to Iraq even after they have fulfilled their contractual obligations. This is because of very fine print which states that the president can continue to insist on their service "in time of war."
And the "Global War on Terror" will, of course, go on forever.
A constant dribble of stories about the strain on troops and their families and on the military in general fades slowly into general background chatter. People tune it out. It's not THEIR family, not their problem. Even when movies get made about it, few people actually buy tickets. Too depressing, eh?
An Army Times story reveals that almost all officers polled think it was a mistake to go into Iraq and that the war has not been worth the cost, and that three-quarters of military families want to pull out--it barely ranks a mention on the Internet, much less the evening news.
And then, a presidential election rolls around.
Suddenly EVERYBODY'S interested.
"SURPRISING POLITICAL ENDORSEMENTS BY U.S. TROOPS" screams the online headline to the ABC news report.
Yeah...surprising to broadcast media, maybe, who have invested so much capital in backing Bush's War and Petraeus's Party and Voldemort's Vanity.
Remember how they fell all over themselves in an orgasmic frenzy over "shock and awe"?
Well, I really, really hope that, come the first week in November, they will be shocked and awed at how many people--in uniform and out--pour into voting booths to throw out the warmongers and restore some semblance of sanity to our foreign and domestic policies.
Then, the only people who will be surprised will be those who just didn't listen when G.I. Harry said he was no friend of Voldemort's.
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