Wednesday, April 27, 2005

Lefties: 'Abu Ghraib' Does Not Symbolize What You Think It Symbolizes

A couple of letters to the editor in response to this WSJ article say it best:
Liberals Use Abu Ghraib as a Weapon--Against Themselves
Duane Speight - Prosperity, S.C.

I wish someone would research how much the Abu Ghraib kerfuffle hurt the Democrats. Everywhere I went all I heard was how could any real American be more concerned about some joker putting panties on a terrorist's head than about poor terrified innocents having their heads slowly sawed off in front of video cameras.

In my opinion, the liberal Democrats and their sycophants in the media have suffered irreparable damage over Abu Ghraib. The coddling of Muslim terrorists while persecuting American soldiers is now a graven image in the Democrats' permanent political portfolio.

The left has long been known to most Americans as unpatriotic. Why would liberal journalists even wish to report, much less editorialize, on any issue that emphasizes this weakness? And during an election year!


'Overhyped' Is an Understatement
C.K. Amos - Princeton, W.Va.

Overhyped? Not even close to describing how overreported and overblown Abu Ghraib was and remains.

It's 12:20 a.m. EDT Wednesday. I just searched the New York Times archives for "Abu Ghraib" and got 1,000 hits. A Google search for that exact phrase returned about 2,470,000 hits. Of those, No. 2 was Sy Hersh's New Yorker tome, "Torture at Abu Ghraib."

For comparison, a Google search of " 'mass graves' Iraq" got 311,000 hits. "Oil-for-Food Scandal" got 458,000 hits. " 'Free elections' Iraq" produced 175,000 hits.

Based on this instant research through the most popular Web search engine, that means there's 800% more mention in cyberspace about Abu Ghraib than the murder of as many as 300,000 men, women and children by Saddam Hussein and his monsters. There's 540% more than for the worst scandal in U.N. history that surely led to the deaths of Iraqis, Americans and coalition troops. And a free election for more than 25 million Iraqis in almost four decades got 8% the attention paid to it as Abu Ghraib.

The Dems, liberals and leftists can protest all they want that they're aren't biased, as can the advocacy media. Execrable is the most printable word I can find to describe their words and pusillanimous about their behavior about things that matter.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Ugh, although I agree with the point made in the articles (to state it mildly, as they say) I feel moved to point out that the indicated Google search would also count posts like the two we just read. In other words, if everyone on the right who was outraged by the over-coverage of Abu Ghraib posted their objections, wouldn’t these comments be included in the above huge figures? What if every conservative posted: “Abu Ghraib? If the liberal press or left wingers write one more story about Abu Ghraib I am going to make them write Abu Ghraib on the blackboard a million times.” Using the statistical method cited, that would be 3 more hits X the number of CONSERVATIVE posters. My point? We need to be careful about the statistics we use.
A good reason for the low number of hits on the other topics cited is that there is not much to argue on the other side of these issues. Any mention of these topics meets a resounding silence from the left.

Matteo said...

Good point.