As a side note, let me register my amusement that The Washington Post has started a new online military affairs column…and the lead columnist is William Arkin.
I’d meant to blog about him when he was first starting out, and the L.A. Times was using him – and his email address was an igc.org one. Here’s the last paragraph and credits for a 2003 column of his in the L.A. Times:
The real revelation in the released document is that a preemptive war was justified on very weak evidence. The Bush administration decided Hussein had to go, but it hid behind flimsy intelligence to pretend that the imminent threat of weapons of mass destruction was a justification for war.
Credit: William M. Arkin is a military affairs analyst who writes regularly for Opinion. E-mail: warkin@ igc.org.
So let’s go to www.igc.org.
It’s “The Institute For Global Communication,” home to:
Hmmm.
Look, Arkin’s a pretty good writer, and a veteran. But if you look at his opus in Google, you find him on the anti-military side of almost every issue that’s come along since the 1980’s.
And to appoint him lead blogger on military affairs for arguable the leading newspaper in the country certainly looks a lot like appointing ‘Focus On The Family’s’ James Dobson as the lead rap music critic.
I’m not saying that the major media are liberal, or biased against the military or anything. But this sure makes a good case for it.
The Washington Post is merely telegraphing its refusal to offer objective military analysis with the hiring of William Arkin.
BTW, instead of reviewing 50 Cent, I’d prefer James Dobson compare Martina McBride to Michael Nesmith.
lol
Doesn’t the Washington Post run “Ted Rall’s stuff?”:http://www.ucomics.com/rallcom/2005/11/26/
Of COURSE the Media/Press is anti-Military. They “know” the Military is evil and bad.
Arkin is a veteran, all right. Of Greenpeace, the Institute of Policy Studies, the purblind Human Rights Watch, and the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. Leftists will recognize him as being the equivalent of a brigadier general.
Hugh Hewitt “explains more.”:http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/003/279oetfg.asp
One really great way to see how much leftists in the press and elswhere COMPLETELY differ from the rest of humanity…is to watch a Pentagon briefing.
Because Rumsfeld in his daily briefings was enjoying 70% popularity ratings a few years ago…the MSM will not broadcast these briefings anymore except to try to show Rummy out of context (which is easy to do because the man is a thinker who presents devastatingly good arguments slowly).
The other day, I was forced to go to pentagon.mil or the pentagonchannel.com to see a brilliant performance by Rummy in front of leftist journalists.
One “reporter” asked about Willy Pete (White Phosphorus). The US General next to Rummy replied that White Phosphorus was a necessary part of the battlefield (for screening) but that it was not used for killing so much because bullets were much more efficient at going through skin than white phosphorus was.
You could see the reporters wince at the idea that American soldiers preferred a more “efficient” method of killing those the reporters believed to be freedom fighters. Next their will be inquiries on the type of bullets being used: I guarantee there will be such inquiries (“Sir, isn’t the use of 50 caliber bullets inhuman?”)
You would almost think the reporters at some point would try to corner Rumsfeld by saying “Evidence is rising that you and your band of war criminals are actually riding around looking for Iraqis to kill. Is that true sir? Are you really trying to kill civilian men who are not wearing uniforms but simply carrying guns to protect themselves and their families from what they see are invaders?”
[Are you really trying to kill civilian men who are not wearing uniforms but simply carrying guns to protect themselves and their families from what they see are invaders?”]
I just realized that liberals would read the above and agree with it…which shows the huge divide even more! It is part of leftist dogma that US forces are just sitting back like cowards getting killed by freedom fighters who are coming bravely to them. But when the word finally hits the western leftist “street” that the US forces have been doing anything but sit back for the past 3 years…the left will say how horrible it was the US forces spent the past three years actively going in to hotspots and provoking fighters to take them on.
And they also have Jim Hoagland and Charles Krauthammer and George Will in their opinion section … so what?
So, Will, Krauthammer, et. al. are portrayed as straight up editorialists, opinion writers, by the WaPo. Arkin is being positioned as a domain expert. There is no ‘opinion’ banner explicit or implied over his writing. The implication is ‘unbiased’, unless the WaPo has finally abandoned that claim. That’s what.
A.L. knows the left side of the spectrum better than I, but being from the Bay Area, I can certainly confirm that an IGC affiliation would cause me to raise exactly the same questions as he did. They have been ideologues back into the Cold War days.
When Arkin recites the litany in his new ‘blog’, are we to believe he is devoid of bias? Please. It’s time for WaPo and the rest of the MSM to come clean on what they’re doing. Then each faction can have its house organs and we can go onward, a little more honestly.
Arkin is a veteran? Well, I once knew an ex-Navy guy who was so screwed up that he worshipped Castro and the Sandinistas. Arkin cites Abu Ghraib, but it’s not a reason for his hatred, it’s an excuse.
Is that a Cisco ad?
I am going to contact Cisco and ask them if they think our servicemembers are “mercenaries.”
I’m suspicious of Arkin’s resume. He writing reveals a gross ignorance of the military – what motivates us to join, why we fight, the lack of creature comforts, etc.
I don’t believe he was with Intel [no preception, no analytical skills] and would not be surpised to discover he’s lying about his service, or that he spent his tour as an admin pog in some office cubicle.
That being said, I’m really tired of being stabbed in the back by the Left as I protect them from radical Islam. I’m not re-enlisting. America has too many parasitic weasels that aren’t worth defending. As for Arkin, I hope a STA Team finds him before Islam does.
These people are the products of Marxist-tinged educations and social classes. That means anybody we fight is the underdog and we are the Capitalist running dogs. Few of them have ever examined their own assumptions, such as “If the U.S. would just refuse to fight, World Peace would break out and resolve itself like the morning dew.”
They don’t understand justice, as evidenced by their complaints about Saddam’s hanging.
They think that the only cause of poverty is the lack of money and so redistribution of wealth will solve all our social problems, with never a whiff of understanding that it’s not healthy to think that the world owes you a living.
They really believe that the rest of the world revolves around their writing, when only a sliver of it even knows they exist. “The pen is mightier than the sword,” is a fine aphorism in a civil democratic society with a free press, but in a place like the Congo, it’s the AK-47 and RPG that talk. Liberals take our society for granted and assume that the only reason the undeveloped world is that way because they don’t read the NYTimes and WaPo regularly. They live in a virtual world, not the fallen world that is really out there.