Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Politics : Stockman Scott's Political Debate Porch -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: No Mo Mo who wrote (31062)	11/6/2003 10:51:51 AM
From: Karen Lawrence	Respond to of 89467

"television pictures of the wounded at Walter Reed [Army Medical Center, in Washington,] would be a jolt to Americans as they head out to dinner or are thinking of the week's NFL match-ups." : "In order to continue to sell an increasingly unpopular Iraq invasion to the American people, . . . [the Bush] administration sweeps the messy parts of war -- the grieving families, the flag-draped coffins, the soldiers who have lost limbs -- into a far corner of the nation's attic," Washington-based reporter Tim Harper wrote in The Toronto Star. "No television cameras are allowed at Dover [Air Force Base in Delaware, where the corpses of U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq come home]. Bush does not attend the funerals of soldiers who gave their lives in his war on terrorism." "You can call it news control or information control or flat-out propaganda," Christopher Simpson, a communications professor at American University in Washington, D.C., told The Toronto Star. "Whatever you call it, this is the most extensive effort at spinning a war that the Department of Defense has ever undertaken in this country." The Canadian newspaper pointed out that this is the first time the bodies of American soldiers killed in a war have been sent back to the U.S. under such secret cover and that the Pentagon, guided now more than ever by public-relations concerns, officially and euphemistically has taken to calling body bags "transfer tubes." After all, British op-ed columnist Mary Riddell noted in The Observer, right now, for Bush, a lot is at stake, and good PR counts. "A presidential race is on, the body bags (360 to our 51 [containing dead British soldiers]) are coming home and Iraq still inflames public debate," she wrote. Now that, for the first time, a poll has shown that more Americans disapprove than approve of Bush's handling of the Iraq war (Guardian), and as the president prepares for a late-November state visit to the United Kingdom, Bush is looking "desperate" overseas, India's Statesman said. The Indian daily advised that, if the president is expecting "a triumphant . . . visit to Britain . . . [and] . . . thinks he can replicate the hysterical audience [he enjoyed] on board the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln [in May], he has another guess coming!" "Bravado disappears" as "Bush's worries multiply," a lead editorial in the newspaper declared. "Uncertainty is more and more palpable at the heart of the American government," a French news report said. (Le Figaro/L' Express.mu) The sharpness of this criticism is being echoed by a range of commentators in newspapers throughout the U.S., too. Detroit News senior editor and columnist Luther Keith wrote, "We don't need to see the coffins to remember the war. We need to see them to remember the dead." In The Stuart News, a Florida daily, columnist Joe Crankshaw assailed Bush for wanting "to put the best light on his war in Iraq, play up successes, play down losses and hopefully divert the public's attention." Back overseas, The Times of India cautioned, "Public protests, plunging approvals, mounting body bags, all compounded by that awful sense of sinking into a quagmire: Dubya had better pray that God -- who willed him to rule America -- continues to want him in the White House." Ultimately, if the White House's PR campaign is effective, a military historian at Texas A&M University told The Toronto Star, it might be because "television pictures of the wounded at Walter Reed [Army Medical Center, in Washington,] would be a jolt to Americans as they head out to dinner or are thinking of the week's NFL match-ups." * * * * sfgate.com