Distaste for Losing

The lack of coverage in the news about the continuing degradation of the situation in Iraq somehow is being translated in the minds of many Americans into "it's getting better". No people it is not "getting better" it is getting markedly worse. And this is just the Americans, I can't begin to keep track of the parade Iraqi death.

The Marines, from Regimental Combat Team 7, died Saturday in Anbar province, the heavily Sunni Arab region west of Baghdad that includes such flashpoints as Ramadi and Haditha, a U.S. statement said without further details.

So far this month, 44 U.S. service members have died in Iraq -- including 10 in Anbar province during the past week. That underscores the threat to U.S. troops from Sunni insurgents, despite the attention paid to recent sectarian violence between Sunni and Shiite Muslims in Baghdad.

Granted all the coverage of the Israeli/American murder of women and children is taking a big chunk out of the news cycle but a whole lot more people are dying in Iraq than in the tragedy we are creating in Lebanon.

Another phenomenon currently unfolding in America is the "ignorance is bliss syndrome". Americans don't like to lose and the don't like losers. You can pump as much sunshine up their pinafores as you want but Americans are finally beginning to see Iraq in the harsh light of reality and are seeing D E F E A T in blood red flashing neon ten feet high. They are also beginning to see the Bush circus for exactly what it is..."a bunch of ducks trying to fuck a football". The net result is that they are simply turning off the news and tuning out the bad, worse, worst. It can't bother you if you don't know about it, right?

Frank Rich in the New York Times has a good article this morning discussing how the media is basically ignoring Iraq.

CNN will surely remind us today that it is Day 19 of the Israel-Hezbollah war — now branded as Crisis in the Middle East — but you won’t catch anyone saying it’s Day 1,229 of the war in Iraq. On the Big Three networks’ evening newscasts, the time devoted to Iraq has fallen 60 percent between 2003 and this spring, as clocked by the television monitor, the Tyndall Report.

[snip]

The steady falloff in Iraq coverage isn’t happenstance. It’s a barometer of the scope of the tragedy. For reporters, the already apocalyptic security situation in Baghdad keeps getting worse, simply making the war more difficult to cover than ever.

The tragedy is that none of it is going to go away until we run Bush, Rummy, Cheney and Condi and all their pals out of Washington on a rail. Until we get some serious thinkers and rational people in charge we are faced with a continuing melt down in Iraq and anywhere else Bushco has dabbled in foriegn policy.