1 2 3 4, let's start a spam war!
Oct. 11th, 2004 07:07 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
annissamazingThis is the second time I've gotten this in my inbox:
No matter what your political convictions, you need to read this. Interesting... Geraldo's War Comments!
Former Liberal Democrat Geraldo's perspective on Iraq : The buildings that AREN'T burning in Iraq. . . . . . . . "They have a saying in the news business," Geraldo Rivera related this week. "Reporters don't report buildings that don't burn." And with that introduction, he told a TV audience about the story that is being systematically denied to our entire nation: the success story of post-Saddam Iraq. Are we losing some soldiers each week? Yes. Is there some frustration in the public about electricity and water service? Yes. Are some Saddam Hussein loyalists throughout the land, making trouble? Yes. Has this opened a window for some terrorist mischief? Yes. But that's ALL we hear. No wonder the country is in a mixed mood about Iraq. If you hear about the buildings that are not burning, though, it is a different story indeed. Rivera is no shill for George W. Bush. But Bush, Condi Rice, and Colin Powell together could not have been as effective as Geraldo was Thursday night on the Fox News Channel's Hannity and Colmes program. "When I got to Baghdad, I barely recognized it," he began, comparing his just completed trip to two others he made during and just after the battle to topple Saddam. "You have over 30,000 Iraqi cops and militiamen already on the job. This is four months after major fighting stopped. Can you imagine that kind of gearing up in this country? Law and order is better; archaeological sites are being preserved; factories, schools are being guarded." But what about the secondhand griping that the media have been so efficiently relating about power, water and other infrastructure? "To say that Iraq is being REBUILT is not true," answered Rivera. "IRAQ IS BEING BUILT". There was no infrastructure before; we are doing it. I just think the good news is being underestimated and underreported." At this juncture, one must evaluate how to feel about the voices telling us only about the bad news in Iraq, whether from the mouths of news anchors or Democratic presidential hopefuls. At best, they are under-informed. At worst, their one-sided assessments of post-Saddam Iraq are intentional falsehoods for obvious reasons. If I hear one more person mock that "Mission Accomplished" banner beneath which President Bush thanked a shipload of sailors and Marines a few months back, I'm going to spit. That was a reference to the ouster of Saddam's regime, and that mission was indeed accomplished, apparently to the great chagrin of the American left. No one said what followed would be easy or cheap, and that's why the dripping-water torture of the cost and casualty stories is so infuriating. Remember we pay our soldiers whether they are in Iraq or in Ft Bragg, North Carolina. We should all mourn the loss of every fallen soldier. But context cr ies out to be heard. Our present news media is not performing this task. As some dare to wonder if this might become a Vietnam-like quagmire, I'll remind whoever needs it that most of our 58,000 Vietnam war toll died between 1966 and 1972, during which we lost an average of about 8,000 per year. That's about 22 per day, every day, for thousands of days on end. Let us hear NO MORE Vietnam comparisons. They do not equate! What I hope to hear is more truth, even if we have to wrench it from the mouths of the media and political hacks predisposed to bash the remarkable job we are doing every day in what was not so long ago a totalitarian wasteland. Local elections are under way across Iraq, Rivera reported. "Where Kurds and Arabs have been battling for decades, things have been settling down. Administrator Paul Bremer is doing a great job." So does Geraldo think his media colleagues are intentionally painting with the side of the brush? "I'm not into conspiracy theories,..but there's just more bang for your buck when you report the GI who got killed rather than the 99 who didn't get killed, who make friends, who helped schedule elections, who helped shops get open for business, who helped traffic flow again. "The vast majority of Iraqis are very happy to have us there. I would like to see a bit more balance." This needs to be reported to the American Public who are presently being duped. I expect the dominant media culture to nitpick and attack Bush, and Democrats to blast him with reckless abandon. But when that leads to the willful exclusion of facts that would shine truthful light on the great work of the American armed forces, that level of malice plumbs new depths. Please pass this along. The media won't tell this story!
If they want Geraldo, they can have him.
I keep asking them to stop sending me this stuff. I don't like it, it clogs in my inbox, and it's not going to change who I vote for next month. I'm thinking of starting my own spam mailings from sources like moveon.org and see how my right-leaning family members like it.
No matter what your political convictions, you need to read this. Interesting... Geraldo's War Comments!
Former Liberal Democrat Geraldo's perspective on Iraq : The buildings that AREN'T burning in Iraq. . . . . . . . "They have a saying in the news business," Geraldo Rivera related this week. "Reporters don't report buildings that don't burn." And with that introduction, he told a TV audience about the story that is being systematically denied to our entire nation: the success story of post-Saddam Iraq. Are we losing some soldiers each week? Yes. Is there some frustration in the public about electricity and water service? Yes. Are some Saddam Hussein loyalists throughout the land, making trouble? Yes. Has this opened a window for some terrorist mischief? Yes. But that's ALL we hear. No wonder the country is in a mixed mood about Iraq. If you hear about the buildings that are not burning, though, it is a different story indeed. Rivera is no shill for George W. Bush. But Bush, Condi Rice, and Colin Powell together could not have been as effective as Geraldo was Thursday night on the Fox News Channel's Hannity and Colmes program. "When I got to Baghdad, I barely recognized it," he began, comparing his just completed trip to two others he made during and just after the battle to topple Saddam. "You have over 30,000 Iraqi cops and militiamen already on the job. This is four months after major fighting stopped. Can you imagine that kind of gearing up in this country? Law and order is better; archaeological sites are being preserved; factories, schools are being guarded." But what about the secondhand griping that the media have been so efficiently relating about power, water and other infrastructure? "To say that Iraq is being REBUILT is not true," answered Rivera. "IRAQ IS BEING BUILT". There was no infrastructure before; we are doing it. I just think the good news is being underestimated and underreported." At this juncture, one must evaluate how to feel about the voices telling us only about the bad news in Iraq, whether from the mouths of news anchors or Democratic presidential hopefuls. At best, they are under-informed. At worst, their one-sided assessments of post-Saddam Iraq are intentional falsehoods for obvious reasons. If I hear one more person mock that "Mission Accomplished" banner beneath which President Bush thanked a shipload of sailors and Marines a few months back, I'm going to spit. That was a reference to the ouster of Saddam's regime, and that mission was indeed accomplished, apparently to the great chagrin of the American left. No one said what followed would be easy or cheap, and that's why the dripping-water torture of the cost and casualty stories is so infuriating. Remember we pay our soldiers whether they are in Iraq or in Ft Bragg, North Carolina. We should all mourn the loss of every fallen soldier. But context cr ies out to be heard. Our present news media is not performing this task. As some dare to wonder if this might become a Vietnam-like quagmire, I'll remind whoever needs it that most of our 58,000 Vietnam war toll died between 1966 and 1972, during which we lost an average of about 8,000 per year. That's about 22 per day, every day, for thousands of days on end. Let us hear NO MORE Vietnam comparisons. They do not equate! What I hope to hear is more truth, even if we have to wrench it from the mouths of the media and political hacks predisposed to bash the remarkable job we are doing every day in what was not so long ago a totalitarian wasteland. Local elections are under way across Iraq, Rivera reported. "Where Kurds and Arabs have been battling for decades, things have been settling down. Administrator Paul Bremer is doing a great job." So does Geraldo think his media colleagues are intentionally painting with the side of the brush? "I'm not into conspiracy theories,..but there's just more bang for your buck when you report the GI who got killed rather than the 99 who didn't get killed, who make friends, who helped schedule elections, who helped shops get open for business, who helped traffic flow again. "The vast majority of Iraqis are very happy to have us there. I would like to see a bit more balance." This needs to be reported to the American Public who are presently being duped. I expect the dominant media culture to nitpick and attack Bush, and Democrats to blast him with reckless abandon. But when that leads to the willful exclusion of facts that would shine truthful light on the great work of the American armed forces, that level of malice plumbs new depths. Please pass this along. The media won't tell this story!
If they want Geraldo, they can have him.
I keep asking them to stop sending me this stuff. I don't like it, it clogs in my inbox, and it's not going to change who I vote for next month. I'm thinking of starting my own spam mailings from sources like moveon.org and see how my right-leaning family members like it.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
rant part 1
Date: 2004-10-11 10:11 pm (UTC)Twisted has those posted back in prior posts.
So do I.
I also suggest forwarding such right-wing spams as above to MoveOn.org with a note that maybe they should track down the source of this argument and counter this not just with counter-spam but with an investigation of Geraldo's *facts*. There's been precious few actual facts coming out of that side of the argument, if you notice.
Items such as that little word "wasteland".
It is now, because *we* did it.
Also, please don't think I wanted Saddam left there, or that I tolerated what was going on there before we went in--I hated Saddam's genocidal behavior years before anybody else did anything about it, Amnesty International told about the massacres of the Kurds during Clinton's administration. I wanted something done about it then.
The same as I wanted something done about Darfur months before they reluctantly dragged their feet to let the UN do *anything*.
I did not want a US-only two-front war where we randomly imprison women and beat their ten-year-olds in front of them. Where we turn away not just Amnesty but our own Red Cross from our own facilities, in fear of the truth coming out.
These are facts.
This spam says:
"There was no infrastructure before; we are doing it."
This is not true. But then I've read other reporters--including such non-conspiracy print sources as articles in GQ, of all things. Before we went in, Iraq had water and power as regularly as any country in the Middle East in its big cities, because Saddam knew he had to keep his urban power base functional and quiet. And I can tell you, hey, don't take my word for it, there's sources all over about that.
It's a wasteland now.
We've been bombing random civilian hell out of everything over there.
That's news footage. It doesn't jibe.
Geraldo has to know that as well as anybody in the media who's traveled around that much. I don't know when he sold his soul to the devil, but I doubt he got paid enough for it, the Bushes are cheap as well as shoddy. (Per Kitty Kelly's bio of them, they weren't always, but she describes this latest pup as an efficient devolution of the general type.)
The general backstabbing chaos of this Administration does not generate orderly behavior. Evidence--how about Bush impulsively countermanding Colin Powell's diplomatic efforts every other week? How about Rumsfeld's performances, reversing his own statements every other week?
rant part 2
Date: 2004-10-11 10:21 pm (UTC)It just *gets* to me when it's so baldfaced.
If you read any of the blogs from people who speak English and live in Iraq, you don't get Geraldo's picture at all. You get the picture of an occupied people who have been moved, against their will, to recognize that they are being ruled by an exploitative puppet government which is handing over all the oil wealth their GNP depends on to *somebody*, goodness knows who--and on the smaller scale they have been shifted by personal assaults and insults and the threat of local blackmailers turning them in to *our* MPs, to hate our guts intensely. We are making our own terrorists over there, and they aren't all peasants. They never were, but try telling that to an Administration that wants to roam along to attack Iran next, while ignoring North Korea.
You could ignore all those Iraqi blog postings as being partisan, or isolated personal experiences--and hey, they're alive, they have electricity enough to *be* on the net at all, right?
But I'm having trouble believing that the kind of reconstruction that Geraldo describes could exist in the same neighborhoods as the ones where our soldiers are randomly arresting crippled mayors off the street and putting them in Abu Ghraib to have our seargents step on that crippled hand, every morning, just because.
That's reported on 60 Minutes. Funny that there's been such a huge effort to destroy their credibility over Bush's Guard records, but not over something as shocking as those reports.
Let's not dismiss all those prison video and audiotapes and cds and screensavers as the work of a few isolated nuts, shall we? Seymour Hersch isn't the only one who saw those horrific facts; the entire Senate knows the truth about that.
I'm having trouble believing that the undermanned and undersupplied occupation I hear about *in person, myself*, from Reservists returned from Iraq, could have time to pretty up the place with water pumps and schools while they're in firefights with too little ammunition. Oh yes, and where their families have to buy them flak jackets, because those are no longer standard issue.
All this, in a world where Bush has never gone to one funeral of a veteran of *past* wars, let alone this one. Not one.
Where he has cut back veteran's benefits and current service pay.
That's fact.
It doesn't jibe with Geraldo's pictures. I agree there's a serious media credibility gap. People know they're being lied to. They're having trouble believing it could be that nice solid Republican structure could get away with lying to them so thoroughly for three years. It's hard to believe Tom deLay would be so baldfaced corrupt, though everybody in Texas knew it and told the rest of us about it. Much easier to think it's corrupt liberal anchormen who maybe have incentive to get a good story--but have for years been running much more scared of the corporate powers that pay Bush's campaign bills and their own advertising support. News has to pay its own way these days. They have NO incentive to enrage their viewership by challenging conventional views.
It says to *me* that the conventional view is trying to ignore reality so
badly that the news guys are squeaking warnings belatedly, and desperately.
There's a real serious disconnect between what I believe and what my right-wing NRA-card-carrrying friend at work believes--but he was never told by *his* sources some of the facts I'll mention here.
That changed.
It truly bothered him when he found it out from other sources besides me.
rant part 3
Date: 2004-10-11 10:24 pm (UTC)But I'm having trouble believing that the sort of folks who get generators going and repair plumbing and rebuild windows would put up with the other facts I hear about.
The kind of things that require a gangster-like lack of accountability to thrive, and try to hide things under ongoing chaos.
I'm having trouble believing that Geraldo's pretty view also exists in a civil situation as chaotic as the one where, the instant we retreat in northern Iraq (and we are, constantly) then Afghan fighters come down and take over *in Iraq*. With Egyptian tanks, and lots of money for ammunition from renewed opium farming.
Th Reservist I talked to a month ago was talking about the solid capabilities of those tanks for a solid eight minutes. I already knew that the Afghans know exactly how to fight us. We trained them. Short version: We do not want to pay enough blood to take back turf from Afghan opium-gang veterans armed with Egyptian tanks, okay?
What about other areas? THere's the kind of flimflam nonsense where ghost prisoners were never accounted for, either in Abu Ghraib or in Afghan prison camps. The one where Iraqi and American MPs have both beaten prisoners until they died but nobody has any official records, in spite of all those cds and still shots and so on.
The one where our own Attorney General is riling up librarians and covering the breasts of statues and turning around to find that "vital articles of the Patriot Act" are getting slapped down as unconstitutional, while people who think he focuses on the trivial instea of the real have been joining the ACLU by the hundred thousand.
No orderly occupying force would tolerate any of this stuff.