Republicans...

[Mister Bushice]

Hey, I was once in Virginia, but that was about 15 years ago...I'm betting things have changed significantly in that time frame

I sure as hell wouldn't claim to know the intimate details of what goes on in the Virgina legislature even though I was "there" once......

exactly

[Tom In VA]

I'll stick with the guys I've talked to that have spent time over there within the last 12 months and have faced the daily grind that Iraq has now become........but you can choose to believe whoever you want to....

You make a few valid points. But as I said, I cannot use my friends experience either. In fact, I'd reckon that most soldiers serving now, would agree with mvscal's personal anecdote and experience about how the media ... and propaganda ... can and does shape events.

Tell your friends I am extremely grateful for their sacrifice.

[Felix]

Tell your friends I am extremely grateful for their sacrifice.

you and me both brother........

I've told them countless times.....and will continue to tell them.....

oddly enough, they tell me they've received exceptionally warm receptions from virtually everyone, regardless of how those people feel about the war......

it restores my faith in humanity......

[BSmack]

Tell your friends I am extremely grateful for their sacrifice.

you and me both brother........

I've told them countless times.....and will continue to tell them.....

oddly enough, they tell me they've received exceptionally warm receptions from virtually everyone, regardless of how those people feel about the war......

it restores my faith in humanity......

It's not odd. The same thing happened to many Vets who came home from Viet Nam. Like this guy, Lt Col Wally "Moe" Newcomb,



who was given a hero's welcome by his hometown of Painted Post after five years in a North Viet Nam POW camp. The people who did spit on vets were the minority, not the majority in this country. And they sure as hell didn't represent the majority of those whom I grew up with.

The affection Americans are showing towards the troops is hardly something new. It is more like history repeating.

[Mister Bushice]

I sure as hell wouldn't claim to know the intimate details of what goes on in the Virgina legislature even though I was "there" once......

Why don't you go ahead and link me up my claims of knowing intimate details of what is going on there, dumbfuck.

FIrst it is your general know it all attitude, then there are these quotes of yours:

What you're getting from the media bears absolutely no resemblence to what is actually happening on the ground.

I've personally seen that principle in action.

The "reality" of the situation is that the picture presented by the media is distorted out of any recognizable context or perspective.

That is reality. I won't even call you a fucking moron for believing that you are being informed by this soda straw view of events. I had to experience it personally before I could understand it.

So believe me, I'm well aware of how propaganda either witting or unwitting can shape events.

You try to come across as a know it all, always equating your experiences from 1993 as being just the same as what is happening over there in iraq now.

All we can ever go by is what is being reported by any outlet we choose to listen to. I have yet to see ONE, excluding the whitewash the whitehouse gives the war on a daily basis, report anything but how unstable, violent, and bad things are over there.

Like I said, no matter what happened in Haditha, the reality is the IMPRESSION of what happened. the insurgents are very, very good at using even one instance of US GI failure as a recruiting tool, and we are very very bad at using anything going on over there as a positive propaganda spin.

Let me ask you this:

If things are so great, why hasn't the bush administration shown any of this positive progress in the form of a documentary or a nightly news snippet on one of its favored media outlets, like fox? Why is it that all we hear from EVERY media outlet, slanted or not, from all around the globe, how BAD everything is there?

My guess, and it is a guess based on input I have listened to from around the world, is that it's because that IS the reality.

I just got back from southeast asia last week, and all you hear over there are the same stories, without the American political slant.

[Shlomart Ben Yisrael]

The people who did spit on vets were the minority, not the majority in this country.

Nobody spit on returning Vietnam Vets. That was a gigantic myth concocted in the early days of the Reagan Administration. Put that one to rest now.

The only "spitting on" was done by your own government by way of shitty VA care.

Go ahead. Find any reference, before 1981, to returning GI's being spit on. You can't.

[Tom In VA]

To be fair Bushice, a personal anecdote was provided to back up each of your selected quotes.

[Shlomart Ben Yisrael]

To be fair Bushice, a personal anecdote was provided to back up each of your selected quotes.

Well, I'm convinced.

[Mister Bushice]

Tom,

In one breath he says "I know because I was there"

In the next he says "Show me links where I said I have knowledge of details", in regard to what is happening over there now.

It can't be both. Just because you know what is happening on the ground in your area of war paradise doesn't mean you are seeing the big picture at all, and 1993 is not 2006. Different enemy, different battlegrounds, different administration, and completely different circumstances.

[Felix]

eggzactly......

[Mister Bushice]

The people who did spit on vets were the minority, not the majority in this country.

Nobody spit on returning Vietnam Vets. That was a gigantic myth concocted in the early days of the Reagan Administration. Put that one to rest now.

The only "spitting on" was done by your own government by way of shitty VA care.

Go ahead. Find any reference, before 1981, to returning GI's being spit on. You can't.

I clearly recall news broadcasts from 1975-ish of vets being met at the airports with protestors waving "Baby killer" banners. I know a few vets, older guys ( I was way too young to go there) I've met, and they all say that when they came back , the reception was not warm except from those who knew them as family or friends. The general public gave no accolades, and they were not recognized well enough for the fact they put their lives on the line for their country.

It did happen.

[Tom In VA]

Just because you know what is happening on the ground in your area of war paradise doesn't mean you are seeing the big picture at all, and 1993 is not 2006. Different enemy, different battlegrounds, different administration, and completely different circumstances.

Somewhat agree. But more experience and knowledge than one, such as myself, who has not experienced it at all.

[Shlomart Ben Yisrael]

I clearly recall news broadcasts from 1975-ish of vets being met at the airports with protestors waving "Baby killer" banners. I know a few vets, older guys ( I was way too young to go there) I've met, and they all say that when they came back , the reception was not warm except from those who knew them as family or friends.

Bull-fucking-shit.

The general public gave no accolades, and they were not recognized well enough for the fact they put their lives on the line for their country.

It did happen.

Are you completely out of your mind? Fighting a criminal war of aggression in South-East Asia is what you'd call "putting your life on the line for your country"?

Your Lee Greenwood CD is skipping.

[Mister Bushice]

go away marty. Your anti usa tirades are boring and irrelevant

[BSmack]

The people who did spit on vets were the minority, not the majority in this country.

Nobody spit on returning Vietnam Vets. That was a gigantic myth concocted in the early days of the Reagan Administration. Put that one to rest now.

I'll leave it to you to try to prove the negative. My guess is that SOMEHWERE somebody got spat on. There sure as hell have been thousands of accounts of spitting. I suspect most of those accounts are horribly overblown.

But hey, I'll help your case some. I found this story to be quite interesting.

The persistence of spat-upon Vietnam veteran stories suggests that they continue to fill a need in American culture. The image of spat-upon veterans is the icon through which many people remember the loss of the war, the centerpiece of a betrayal narrative that understands the war to have been lost because of treason on the home front. Jane Fonda's noisiest detractors insist she should have been prosecuted for giving aid and comfort to the enemy, in conformity with the law of the land.

But the psychological dimensions of the betrayal mentality are far more interesting than the legal. Betrayal is about fear, and the specter of self-betrayal is the hardest to dispel. The likelihood that the real danger to America lurks not outside but inside the gates is unsettling. The possibility that it was failure of masculinity itself, the meltdown of the core component of warrior culture, that cost the nation its victory in Vietnam has haunted us ever since.

Many tellers of the spitting tales identify the culprits as girls, a curious quality to the stories that gives away their gendered subtext. Moreover, the spitting images that emerged a decade after the troops had come home from Vietnam are similar enough to the legends of defeated German soldiers defiled by women upon their return from World War I, and the rejection from women felt by French soldiers when they returned from their lost war in Indochina, to suggest something universal and troubling at work in their making. One can reject the presence of a collective subconscious in the projection of those anxieties, as many scholars would, but there is little comfort in the prospect that memories of group spit-ins, like Smith has, are just fantasies conjured in the imaginations of aging veterans.

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editor ... ing_image/

[Mister Bushice]

All we can ever go by is what is being reported by any outlet we choose to listen to.

Which means you are never going to know what is truly happening. The media will never get the story right. They don't even pretend to provide any context or perspective in their stories. Since they don't know what the fuck they're talking about, how in the hell do you expect them to inform you?

I don't have to know what is happening in Iraq this minute to know that the media coverage is fucked up. I've seen that fucked up reporting first hand. I've escorted utterly clueless reporters who had absolutely no idea what they we're seeing. That is my point.

So out of the hundreds of media reporters on the ground reporting this war, not a single one of them gets anything right?

I find that hard to believe.

Like I said, no matter what happened in Haditha, the reality is the IMPRESSION of what happened. the insurgents are very, very good at using even one instance of US GI failure as a recruiting tool,

Even if they have to stage this "GI failure" themselves. I suppose we ought to simply surrender in the face of their relentless propaganda offensive, right?

At some point you have to recognize that not everything is "staged", not everything is going well, and that fighting amidst a decade long, (if not older) bloody rivalry between two religious factions is like trying to piss away a forest fire. We cannot win that war. Neither side will ever relent.

[Felix]

So out of the hundreds of media reporters on the ground reporting this war, not a single one of them gets anything right?

I find that hard to believe.

I find it impossible to believe.....

especially when you consider that reporters from other countries are reporting virtually the same thing....

apparently they've got it out for the Bush Administration too.......

[Felix]

That's because you don't what the fuck you're talking about.

This response is beginning to grow on me....

"5 killed in roadside bomb" is all you ever get. That means nothing. It tells you nothing.

here's your chance....show us how the death of 5 people killed by an IED should be reported......

[Mister Bushice]

At some point you have to recognize that not everything is "staged", .

Wake the fuck up, clown.

This entire "insurgency" is a staged media event. These attacks accomplish nothing and have absolutely no military significance. What they do is "create an impression" in the minds of people who don't know any better and our media seems more than willing to dance to their tune.

dozens of dead civilians every week are not staged media events. Many of those are retaliations of one religious faction against another, a part of this war we will never be able to stop until/unless the factions agree to disagree without bombs strapped to their chests when they go to lunch.

[Felix]

You don't report it all, dumbshit.

so you'd prefer the casualties of the war just be swept under the carpet......

how very Orwellian of you.......

[BSmack]

You don't report it all, dumbshit.

so you'd prefer the casualties of the war just be swept under the carpet......

how very Orwellian of you.......

This "insurgency" has no hope of ever being able to force a favorable military solution. What we are engaged in here is a war of propaganda, dumbfuck. You win such wars by controlling the flow of information. What are these AQ douchebags going to do without the publicty we provide for them?

In WW2, a German submarine torpedoed a troop transport on a training mission in the English Channel. Hundreds of soldiers were killed. I suppose a dumbshit like you thinks it should have been trumpeted on the front page of every newspaper in the country, right?

In any event, the incident was not reported and wasn't even declassified until decades after the war was over. That is how you win a propaganda war.

That the training mission was a prelude to D-Day was a glaring omission from your report.

[Felix]

This "insurgency" has no hope of ever being able to force a favorable military solution. What we are engaged in here is a war of propaganda, dumbfuck. You win such wars by controlling the flow of information. What are these AQ douchebags going to do without the publicty we provide for them?

So what you want me to believe is that prior to rigging up an IED or strapping explosives to themselves, the insurgents sit around reading the New York Times to find out how the war is going and how they're fairing......

gotcha........

[BSmack]

I only included the relevant details. The ungodly clusterfuck that was Operation Tiger can be discussed in a separate thread, if you'd like.

That's OK, I too watched the Millitary Channel last night. The relevant point is that Operation Tiger was only kept secret for the period of time that it was absolutely essential.

To keep the Germans from possibly learning about the impending Normandy Invasion, casualty information on Exercise TIGER was not released until after the invasion. On August 5, 1944, Supreme Headquarters, Allied Expeditionary Force released statistics on the casualties associated with the Normandy Invasion, which included information about the German E-Boat attack on April 28. This information was also published in the August 7 issue of The Stars and Stripes, the daily newspaper of the U. S. Armed Forces in the European Theater. The Textual Reference Branch, National Archives and Records Administration, 8601 Adelphi Road, College Park, MD 20740-6001, holds the originals of both these sources. Over the years, details on the training exercises and the resulting losses have appeared in such published sources as Samuel Eliot Morison's The Invasion of France and Germany, 1944-1945 (1957), volume XI of his 15-volume History of United States Naval Operations in World War II, and Roland Rupenthal's Logistical Support of the Armies (1953) and Gordon Harrison's Cross-Channel Attack, which are both part of the multi-volume series United States Army in World War

Thus, since August 1944, information about the training exercise also commonly called Operation TIGER has been available to the public. The naval records relating to Operation TIGER, which are declassified, were transferred to the Modern Military Records Branch, Naitonal Archives and Records Admiistration, 8601 Adelphi Road, College Park, MD 20740-6001. Before transfer, the Operational Archives Branch had placed all the naval action reports from this exercise on microfilm reel, NRS-601. To order a duplicate film for the cost indicated on the fee schedule, please complete the duplication order form and send it with a check or money order made payable to the Department of the Navy, to the Operational Archives Branch, Naval Historical Center, 805 Kidder Breese SE, Washington Navy Yard, DC 20374-5060.

http://www.history.navy.mil/faqs/faq20-1.htm

[Tom In VA]

So what you want me to believe is that prior to rigging up an IED or strapping explosives to themselves, the insurgents sit around reading the New York Times to find out how the war is going and how they're fairing......

The "officers" who are directing them certainly do. You better fucking believe it. They are very media savvy.

RACK and 110% correct.

Felix, I"m actually shocked you'd even suggest they WERE NOT doing just that.

[Mister Bushice]

It doesn't matter, Tom. There is no Way we will EVER control the world media, so we can just dismiss this as a possibility right now.

What is happening over there WILL be reported by many media outlets worldwide.
The B.A is horrible at propaganda.
The insurgents have internet access, and they use it well.
The sectarian violence will continue over there whether we are there or not.
We are a convenient target for all that is wrong about what is happening in Iraq, and we always will be.

Bottom line we cannot possibly win this war under those terms. It won't happen.

The best we can hope for is we get out sooner rather than later, and that the local military gets its act together sooner rather than later so we can make that happen.

The shit happening now will continue after we leave.

[Dr_Phibes]

I just got back from southeast asia last week, and all you hear over there are the same stories, without the American political slant.

Just curious - which part, Mr. Bushice?

[Tom In VA]

It doesn't matter, Tom. There is no Way we will EVER control the world media, so we can just dismiss this as a possibility right now.

Oh I don't know, the British did a good job of it during WWI, ergo our involvement in that war ...

But yes, Felix's and anyone elses gross underestimation of our enemies' abilities does matter. It shows a clear lack of understanding the current state of affairs.

[Shlomart Ben Yisrael]

I just got back from southeast asia last week, and all you hear over there are the same stories, without the American political slant.

Just curious - which part, Mr. Bushice?

I think it was one of those [cough] Thai get-aways [/cough].

[Mister Bushice]

It doesn't matter, Tom. There is no Way we will EVER control the world media, so we can just dismiss this as a possibility right now.

Oh I don't know, the British did a good job of it during WWI, ergo our involvement in that war ...

But yes, Felix's and anyone elses gross underestimation of our enemies' abilities does matter. It shows a clear lack of understanding the current state of affairs.

No way you can equate the two, given the vast global communications network that exists now that did not exist then.

[Felix]

We certainly can detain journalists we find objectionable.
No, we can't keep all of them out, but we can keep them down to a bare minimum of easily discredited outlets.

so which journalists are "objectionable", the ones that file reports that go against the tripe the Bush Admin is trying to sell....

do you actually believe that the leaders of these insurgents need newspaper reports to recruit suicide bombers.....

the feeling of being marginalized is the biggest recruiting tool they have at their disposal.......

[Shlomart Ben Yisrael]

the feeling of being marginalized is the biggest recruiting tool they have at their disposal.......

No, the sight of your kid with a bullet in the back of her head is.

[Tom In VA]

We certainly can detain journalists we find objectionable.
No, we can't keep all of them out, but we can keep them down to a bare minimum of easily discredited outlets.

so which journalists are "objectionable", the ones that file reports that go against the tripe the Bush Admin is trying to sell....

do you actually believe that the leaders of these insurgents need newspaper reports to recruit suicide bombers.....

the feeling of being marginalized is the biggest recruiting tool they have at their disposal.......

Well for instance, take WWII as an example. Journalists sympathetic to the French Resistance were GOOD. Journalists sympathetic to Vichy would be detained.


And lastly, there is no such fucking thing as TRUTH in war, until it's over. And even then there's some question.

[Felix]

No, the sight of your kid with a bullet in the back of her head is.

that's about the saddest thing as you've ever written........and that's saying a lot.....

it must really suck to be you dude........

[Shlomart Ben Yisrael]

No, the sight of your kid with a bullet in the back of her head is.

that's about the saddest thing as you've ever written........and that's saying a lot.....

it must really suck to be you dude........

Hey bitch, wake the fuck up.

You don't like my sentiment? Stop acting like your are not complicit in mass murder.
Every last fucking one of you has the blood of women and children on your hands.

"RACK the troops" my fucking ass.

[Shlomart Ben Yisrael]

Every last fucking one of you has the blood of women and children on your hands.

I'll be losing all kinds of sleep over that. Let me tell ya...

Nice.

I'm sure that it's your "freedom" they hate you for, not the lunatic ramblings of half-cocked
psychotics like you, and millions like you.

[Shlomart Ben Yisrael]

In word, they hate because we are better them and they know it.

I'm glad you were able to distill the entire Iraq quagmire down to a playground level.

Just call them "poo-poo pants", wipe some snot on the back of their jackets, and call it a day.

[titlover]

In word, they hate because we are better them and they know it.

I'm glad you were able to distill the entire Iraq quagmire down to a playground level.

Just call them "poo-poo pants", wipe some snot on the back of their jackets, and call it a day.

doesn't need to be complicated if it's true.

[Tom In VA]

You don't like my sentiment? Stop acting like your are not complicit in mass murder.
Every last fucking one of you has the blood of women and children on your hands.

As do you comrade, as do you.

[Felix]

You don't like my sentiment? Stop acting like your are not complicit in mass murder.

and why am I "complicit" in mass murder

"RACK the troops" my fucking ass.

so what your saying is that we should be spitting on our service people as they return from Iraq.........

I think you should be out at the airports meeting each and every service man and woman that gets off a plane and call them baby killers as they enter the terminal.......

step up to the plate and take your swings.....

[Terry in Crapchester]

No, the sight of your kid with a bullet in the back of her head is.

that's about the saddest thing as you've ever written........and that's saying a lot.....

it must really suck to be you dude........

Hey bitch, wake the fuck up.

You don't like my sentiment? Stop acting like your are not complicit in mass murder.
Every last fucking one of you has the blood of women and children on your hands.

"RACK the troops" my fucking ass.

Go away, Perk. Seriously.