Media?

In the spirit of my previous post, and the absolutely-free-no-cost-to-you Iraqi war, we have a complicit media, which really needs to have their testicles attached to electrodes, Gitmo style, and pump them full of juice until their hair stands on end.

A letter from Major Bob Bateman, currently stationed in Iraq:

From BOB BATEMAN: Just heard about this whole Natalie Holloway thing. Apparently there are some benefits to being deployed in a theater of war. I am disappointed. I thought I'd noticed all of you making solemn vows here, over the years, "No more." No more pre-teen beauty queens, no more missing white women, no more one-person crimes elevated to a national issue.

There is a Supreme Court seat in play, a UN nomination in stasis, death in the Sudan, death in London, and a few things occurring in Afghanistan and here, and our national news stations choose to run stories on the death of a privileged 18-year old? Here's an idea, if these stations are so short of news: Come here. Send an additional 5-15 reporters and cameramen. We have plenty of 18, 19, 20...25, 35, and 45 year-olds dying every day or three. Pick some. Tell their stories to America. Learn who they were before they came here. Follow up on the latest developments in their units. See how their buddies are doing. Interview (when they are ready, if they ever are ready) their parents, spouses, children. Find out who killed them. (Was it Sunni extremists, former Ba'ath party leaders, common criminals, Syrian provocateurs, jihadists...) Help America understand that we are, no kidding, at war.

And try to do it without Geraldo this time, ok? Please? From Iraq, Bob Bateman.

I'd imagine the media doesn't want to cover the war all that much because Americans really aren't very interested in it, and would get tired of "bad news all the time."

Now, this is just my opinion, but... I think that every news organization should lead off every single broadcast with the latest developments in the war - every single day, on every single program.

Every single newspaper should have a front page story on the latest developments, every single day.

Every single soldier who dies in Iraq or Afghanistan should get as much attention as the latest "white woman in trouble".

A few posts down, I posted a picture of a 19 year old black female service member that was killed in Iraq last week. There are some strange circumstances surrounding her death. Unless you are an obsessive news junky like me, you have no idea what I'm talking about, but you sure as hell know about the missing party girl in Aruba, right?

Want to sacrifice just a teeny tiny little bit for this war? Find out who she is, and what the circumstances of her death are. I'm not going to give an easy link - just do it.

Am I being sanctimonious? Probably, but I'm really tired of being surrounded by stupid people, who are being dumbed down even further by a complicit media that refuses to report the stories that really affect us. It seems that every single day the sun comes up, I have a lower regard for Americans in general. I don't think it has anything to do with malice. It's all about the walls we use to separate ourselves from the bad things that go on in the world. It's this constant pursuit of something that doesn't exist.

I see them all the time - at the gas station, the grocery store, everywhere I turn in the big city of Dallas... people with a blank look on their faces, and righteous indignation of anything that could possibly controvert their concrete ideas of the world.

And I just want to stop a random person with the yellow sticker on their SUV and ask them if they know how many Americans were killed in Iraq in the previous week. And then I want to ask them if they know the name of the missing teen in Aruba. And I want to ask them if they really give a shit about anything but their own lives.

And then I want to move to Canada...