Articles worth reading, re-reading, re-printing....

Our New National Divide

Owen West
September 13, 2007

Last month I was running the Central Park loop when a runner wearing a U.S. Marine Corps shirt approached. I alerted the two boys in the jog stroller and my eldest, who met this world with a father in Iraq, shouted, "Semper fi!"

The man saw the emblem on my visor and said, "You hear about Doug Zembiec?" If most Americans have six degrees of separation, Marines have no more than two. I nodded and stopped my watch. But all he managed to say was, "That one hurt." Then he plunged down the hill toward 72nd Street, cutting his own path against the flow.

I tried to make sense of it. Not the encounter but the sheer madness of the surroundings. Runners were chattering about school applications and subprime predictions. Yet most of them told pollsters that Iraq was the single largest anxiety in their lives. Like the majority of the nation, they were exhausted by a war in which they had no role. And they wanted out. MORE.

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November 12, 2007, 0:00 a.m.

Slandering the American Soldier
An American media tradition.

By Mackubin Thomas Owens

As anyone who has not been vacationing on the moon knows, The New Republic embarrassed itself this summer by publishing and defending a series of stories by one Scott Thomas Beauchamp, an active-duty soldier serving in Iraq. As we know, Beauchamp told of his comrades in Iraq mocking a woman horribly scarred by an IED, wrote of another wearing part of a human skull, and depicted yet another using a Bradley fighting vehicle to run over stray dogs. All of the stories have been discredited.

There’s not much I can add to the substance of the story. But what bothers me most about the whole dishonorable episode is what it says about the attitude of the media toward the American soldier. There is, as I have argued before, a troubling predisposition on the part of the press to believe the worst about those fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. There is plenty of talk about supporting the troops, but it is a sham. MORE...


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