DU makes Headlines!

[PaDUer]

DU Makes HEADLINES

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5744,6823826%255E23189,00.html

And, unhappy freepers are talking..http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/955398/posts

Distraction of media missiles fired at wrong targets

By Andrew Sullivan, The Sunday Times
July 28, 2003

THERE was something wonderfully strained about how various media organisations dealt last week with the news of the deaths of Qusay and Uday Hussein. From the BBC to Reuters, there was palpable – if sternly repressed – dismay. One of the first headlines that the Ba'athist Broadcasting Corporation put out on the news was: "US celebrates 'good' Iraq news."

The quotation marks around "good" did not refer to any quote or source in the text. They were pure editorialising on behalf of the BBC, whose campaign to undermine the liberation of Iraq is now in full swing. It was not clear to the BBC that the deaths of two of the most sadistic mass murderers on the planet was in any way a good thing, especially if they rebounded to the credit of President George W. Bush or British Prime Minister Tony Blair.

And immediately, of course, pundits started to criticise the American action as "extra-judicial", as a violation of the law against assassination, and so on. Their immediate impulse on hearing this terrific news was: how can we spin this against Blair and Bush?

Commentators on the popular American left-wing website Democratic Underground were more explicit about how they felt: "Doesn't a part of you wish that Queasy and Duh-day were alive? I'll admit they're scum and rightfully so, but anything that lands even more humiliation on W's grotesque shrivelled face is that much the better.

"It's sad, really, that as despicable as they are, Saddam's family seems to be the lesser of two evils when you compare them to the wretched little bastard occupying the White House and destroying America in the process . . ."

To be fair, this guy was upbraided by other contributors to the site. But he wasn't alone. Here are two others: "What I really hate about the way our Government has been taken over is that I'm at the point where I almost don't want anything good to happen in Iraq, I want them to screw up, I want them to fail."

Another vented: "Bush and his ilk are far, far worse than Saddam and his two degenerate brats, and that's saying a lot.

"Yes, it is saying a lot, but the anti-war hysteria that has crept over the US and British press in the past few weeks has tended to obscure the reality of what is actually going on in Iraq.

The New York Times, for example, which has become far less tendentious since the exit of its discredited former executive editor, Howell Raines, still refers to the contract killings and Baathist remnants' murders of small numbers of US soldiers as "an uprising".

It also refers to the American and British presence in Iraq as an "occupation". You get the idea. Colonial powers opposed by restless population. Far more congenial to anti-war types than: liberators still opposed by remnants of totalitarian regime.
-snip--
For entire article--
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5744,6823826%255E23189,00.html

[pmbryant]

1. Locking

Please use the same headline as the original article when posting in the LBN forum. Also, this story is from several days ago and so does not fit into the 12-hour window that counts as 'Late Breaking News' under the DU rules.

Thanks,
pmbryant
DU Moderator