Ever feel like your medium of choice for taking in the daily news isn't giving you the whole picture, Dear Consumer? Well you're not alone! In today's crazy, post-9/11 culture, with its constant fear of terror attacks, preemptive wars, restrictions upon civil liberties, and celebrities pulling stupid stunts for attention, the media are just
scrambling to keep up with the public demand for news,
news,
NEWS!!! So, of course some things are going to be missed, glossed over, or completely overlooked, like cohesion, context, insightfulness, and a point. And backstory? Fuhgeddaboudit!
But fear not, Gentle Reader, for I am here to help you with a review of some of today's TOP STORIES affecting our nation and our world!
From
Reuters we learn that our brave Boys and Girls in Uniform stationed in Baghdad have begun shifting their bases of operation away from the city center and towards the outskirts. U.S. troop commanders offer the following as rationale:
The United States has said it is shifting its troop presence to Baghdad's perimeter to ease newly trained Iraqi police officers and Iraqi Civil Defense Corps soldiers into their eventual role as the capital's guardians.
Now, you're probably thinking, "Gee, that's awfully nice of them to give the Iraqi police a chance to put their training to good use, but isn't it a little too soon?" Well, you'd be right! The ICDC is, for all intents and purposes, a fledgeling operation, which, you may recall, the Bush Administration has pushed through training at an alarming rate. They will be going up against insurgents who have been effective at killing our troops at the rate of 1 a day, all without the benefit of full training, and certainly without the quality of equipment that our troops have been afforded...though even that has been scarce. So, if you get the sense that this pulling back is actually something of a military retreat on our troops' part, that its indicative of the fact that things aren't going so well in Iraq, that it's entirely motivated by politics (i.e. Bush's reelection), and that we're sending a bunch of lambs to the slaughter, well...you'd be right.
Moving right along, we also find another Reuters story, this one dealing with Bush's waffling about the reasons we went to war in Iraq in the first place. In line with the recent State of the Union Address, which put the reason for war as "weapons of mass destruction-related program activities" (that's quite a mouthful!), Bush put forth the following:
"He had the capacity to have a weapon, make a weapon. We thought he had weapons. The international community thought he had weapons. But he had the capacity to make a weapon and then let that weapon fall into the hands of a shadowy terrorist network," Bush said.
If you, too, feel this is a spurious arguement, then you'd be right. The Bush Administration is making it clear that they want to blame the CIA for not being able to pony up the goods, i.e., now that we've been through war and haven't found anything they're looking for a scapegoat. Those of us without self-inflicted memory holes will remember the tone the Bush Administration set before the war, with its declarations of UN irrelevance, namecalling towards Old Europe, and the rapid pace in which this country was railroaded into war, once the Bushies set their sites on Iraq, these shifts in rationale come across as either ridiculous, or part of a bad dream. All of this brought to you by the man who said he would restore honor and integrity to the White House!
Next, we have this Associated Press article discussing the Bush Economy. The gist is that the Bushies believe the economy is in full recovery, and that we'll see 2.6 million new jobs created, this year. Ain't that funny, 'cause 2.6 million jobs, depending on your source, either will allow Bush to break even with the number of jobs that were in place when he took office, or allow him to come out with a slightly positive number. Of course, with the frequent upward revisions of the number of jobs created, these predictions may seem some what inflated (rhyme unintended). Couple that with the upward revisions of the cost of Bush's spending requirments, you've got the recipe for how this Administration operates: hope for the best and proactively spin it so that the worst sounds like the best!