How to acquiesce in a national catastrophe: a case study featuring the St. Louis Post-Dispatch

Take a look at the front page of today’s St. Louis Post-Dispatch. 

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You can see the photo of an Iraqi man grieving over the body of his three-year-old daughter outside of the Baghdad hospital.  According to the paper, “the girl was killed and three other family members injured when they were caught in crossfire as clashes erupted between gunmen and US forces.”

The lead story starts with this assertion:

The situation in Iraq is grave and deteriorating.  The current approach is not working, and the ability of the United States to influence events is diminishing.

This story line and this photograph clearly impugn the integrity of the United States.  Publishing such information is unpatriotic.  Or, at least, those are the sorts of things we’ve been told, until recently. 

It was always OK to publish pictures of our proud soldiers and our high-tech missiles taking off, of course.   It was up to Al Jazeera and the Europeans to publish pictures of what happened when those missiles exploded on the ground, however.  And when those non-American media sources published those photos of Iraqi civilian carnage, it infuriated “America.”  It’s not that American soldiers weren’t also credible witnesses to the civilian killings on the ground.   The evidence was there to be published, if anyone cared to know. 

For most of the past 3 1/2 years, the Post-Dispatch (along with most mainstream newspapers across the United States) did not publish pictures like this, certainly not in prominent places.  It simply wasn’t deemed news …

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Conspiring To Theorize

I've seen a couple of those independantly produced DVD "exposes" about the 9/11 disaster--you know, the ones attributing sinsister intent to the United States government, that, in fact, we "knew" and did nothing in order to promote subsequent insanity.  I've been taking these things with large grains of salt for…

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Scorched-Earth Politics

Greetings to the readers of Dangerous Intersection! My name is Adam Lee, though on the internet I usually go by Ebonmuse, and I’m the owner and proprietor of the weblog Daylight Atheism. Erich Vieth has given me the opportunity to write a guest post here, and I couldn’t turn down his generous offer.

As it happens, there is a topic I’ve been wanting to write about for a while. In particular, I was inspired by Michael Moore’s wonderful op-ed, A Liberal’s Pledge to Disheartened Conservatives, which I came across from a recent post on this very site. Say what you will about Michael Moore – many people have – but his essay, to me, stands out for its compassionate and gracious tone. It contains no gloating over the Republicans’ defeat, no mocking them for their loss. On the contrary, it empathizes with them and assures them that they have nothing to fear.

Especially noteworthy, I thought, was this point:

We will always respect you. We will never, ever, call you “unpatriotic” simply because you disagree with us. In fact, we encourage you to dissent and disagree with us.

Now, the question: Does anyone believe for even a moment that, if the Republican party had won these elections, we would be hearing the same tune from their pundits and spokespeople? The answer, which I hope should be obvious to everyone, is: Of course not.

Had the Republicans won, they would be gloating to high heaven, mocking and ridiculing their …

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semantics, schemantics

I have a friend that is sometimes frustrating to converse with, because he always wants me to define the terms I use.  Our conversation is filled with his requests to explain just what I mean.  He says, with justification, that people may use the same word but often have different…

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