I would say “So what?” faster than you could blink and I wouldn’t be the the only one.

Perhaps your social circles are overly homogenous.

Some US troops question Woodruff coverage
http://www.upi.com/SecurityTerrorism/view.php?StoryID=20060131-041958-8164r

If a bunch of us were sitting around face to face, and somebody walked in to convey the news that someone whose name was known to all of us had just been seriously injured, nobody would ever think to reply, “So what?” It would be so wildly inappropriate that everybody above the age of 8 would just instantly know how inappropriate that would be. Forget all the excuses about media celebrities and the cosmic implications of human suffering: It just wouldn’t be right, and everybody would instantly know it wasn’t right. As Cortney says, show a little respect.

Only on the Internet would there even be a discussion of whether some anonymous ass (you had it right the first time) was right to express public indifference to the suffering of others. This isn’t conversation; it’s shock therapy.

http://icasualties.org/oif/Wounded.aspx

OK, the group hug is over now.

Thanks.

I’ve been talking with media folks who wonder why I would not kill a comment such as the one he made at the start of this thread. This is why.

Trump is correct, although perhaps a bit blunt for some people’s emotional shells. His comments did not justify the a$$ epithet pinned upon him by the ‘authorities’ here.

The MSM is overwhelmed by its mawkish hyper-sensitivity toward the truth of normal suffering & death in human existence.

Indeed Jeff, as when you made your (in)famous “facts don’t matter, only the greater truths and lessons matter” statement during Katrina.

Maybe you want to think twice next time before slinging mud at me…

That doesn’t demean the injury of a journalist, it just puts it in perspective.

No way those comments make Trump an “ass”.

Of course the media is going to make a bigger deal when one of their own gets hurt. If they prolong it, then I will take offense.

But I am still waiting for Hollywood filmmakers to get upset over the murder of Theo Van Gogh.

Why is it that we should worry more about these injuries than the daily injuries that occur in Iraq? Why do you highlight these, and not others? Trump suggests it is because of celebrity status and becuase they are journalists. Do you agree? What does this say about our media culture that their injuries makes the front page, but not the kid from across the street who got hurt yesterday in Iraq?

When the press does focus on the “staff sergeant grunt from DeMoines” who gets badly wounded the press is accused of focusing on the negative in Iraq. Remember the hysteria when Nightline showed the faces of all the US soldiers who had been killed?

That’s a difficult question, but I think the intuitive answer is yes, whether one in question is a Sunni factionalist who will not accept the current regime, or a member of Al-Qaeda in Iraq. The time to have struck in order to destroy the gov’t completely was back when the first election was being held, and ministers of the gov’t could be shot at in broad daylight, and the road from the airport wasn’t secure - you know, around Feb. of last year.

Now it’s quite conceiveable that nothing in Iraq is secure, but the longer this goes, the more the enemy must be growing impatient. For there is no supreme commander of insurgent/Al-Qaeda forces who can see “Aha! We’ve lost Fallujah, but we have a few tribal chiefs around Basra,” etc. Either the Iraqi gov’t is there, or it’s not. It seems there to stay right now, at least from my comfy view in front of the computer screen. If the terrorists see it even a smidgen the way I see it, then the only thing left is to discredit the gov’t, which means attacks on men & material or getting provinces to revolt or establishing training camps or allowing Iran & Syria to establish groups friendlier to them than the current Iraqi regime are all on the backburner - what matters most is spectacular body counts, and camera footage of stuff blowing up.

The strategy is to get this stuff all over Al-Jazeera & whatever else, and make people sick to their stomachs, I would assume. When the violence subsides, the corruption of the current Iraqi gov’t - and I’m sure there’s enormous corruption - will become an issue, and the political infighting might be enough to destabilize the whole country.

It sounds like a nutty strategy, but one has to think long-term, I would guess. The current insurgency probably knows its not going to prevail, so it has to do things to establish itself and make the current regime look bad so that if circumstances change, it can take power, or at least dissolve the status quo entirely. And one can conceive of individual insurgent groups having this sort of strategy, each independent of the other, so I submit this for all of your consideration, and add that I am guessing and could be wrong about all of this.

In short we’ll be bombarded with precisely the kind of pseudo-patriotic and tearful “tribute” which the media would never in a million years give a staff sergeant grunt from DeMoines.