New York Times: Bad things are bad

Hi friends, I have heard loud and clear that I am boring the bejeebus out of you with this net neutrality stuff. So let’s get back to good old, inane, pro-death media bias.

Don Surber does a good job taking apart the latest NYT editorial which celebrates the purported failure of some of our Marines in Haditha. Like most on the right and left, of course I believe they should be tried and the guilty convicted. I also think they should, you know, be tried.

But let’s look at the worst-case scenario. If 7 of our Marines did indeed commit what would be war crimes, what does that say about our people in uniform? Out of 150,000 currently in the field (over 200,000 if you count those that have rotated through) that means that .0035% of our Marines have broken the rules of engagement.

Let’s add in, liberally, 20 people who were purportedly involved with Abu Ghraib. Now we are up to .018% of the military currently in Iraq. That’s just under one-fifth of one-tenth of one percent. Meaning that over 99.9%+ of our folks have acted by the rules, in a situation the difficulty of which you and I will never know.

(Psst — find me a city anywhere in the world, in peacetime, that has such a low crime rate. Or an ethnic group, or a gender, or a faith, or any group at all.)

Now, for those who are outraged at the Haditha accusations: good. It takes great moral courage to say that bad things are bad, I admit. But it is hardly leadership, as many lefties would like to believe.

If the real impetus behind the NYT editorial is that intentional killing is a bad thing (again, moral courage), then I wonder how much editorial ink they they dedicate to the 24,000 innocent civilians that have been targeted and killed by the insurgents?

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Update: let me pull one passage out, emphasis mine:

Now that we have reached the one place we most wanted to avoid, it will not do to focus blame narrowly on the Marine unit suspected of carrying out these killings and ignore the administration officials, from President Bush on down, who made the chances of this sort of disaster so much greater by deliberately blurring the rules governing the conduct of American soldiers in the field.

What is this “one place”? Two possibilities. The first is that we have reached a place where we are perceived as war criminals, fairly or not. A PR disaster in other words.

I have no doubt this will be a huge, exploitable black eye — with the NYT’s active assistance and regardless of the actual outcome. Well, my notes above tell the basic truth that overwhelmingly, we are not war criminals, and that overwhelmingly, our enemy are. Yet one has to wonder, if the NYT is sincerely concerned about this perception, why do they go to such great lengths to promote it?

The other possibility is that the one place is not about perception, but reality. That our military have indeed lost a moral compass and that they wantonly kill as standard procedure. If that’s the case, then I would imagine something more .018% of them, over three years, might have been accused...

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Another update and into the breach: Michelle Malkin points out that the military will certainly be painted with a tar brush by those who think themsleves pacifists. But what sort of logic would this follow?

Imagine a redneck, sitting in front of the TV, watching COPS. On the show, a black guy, drunk and violent, is pulled from his house in the midst of beating his wife. Based on his vision of one guy, the redneck points out “Well, they’re just all that way, aren’t they?”

In polite society, we would call this the logic of a “bigot”. On the left, when applied to other select groups, the more appropriate term is “mainstream”.

Comments

[goldendroplets]

(Psst — find me a city anywhere in the world, in peacetime, that has such a low crime rate. Or an ethnic group, or a gender, or a faith, or any group at all.)

Umm, what about the octogeniarian bingo playing group, I think their rate is lower than that. Thus, your entire argument is ripped to shreds.

[The Gentle Cricket]

Of course the NYT blames bush and the "higher-ups" in the military for the accused actions. Forget about the fact that the insurgents do not wear uniforms, frequenty use women and children as shields or to hide weapons, and the fact that women and children are often insurgents. I would say that these actions "blur the line" more than President Bush.