Media Mutinies

I’ve got a lot more to say about this guy (wingnut alert!), but just wanted to quote this part for now:

Another interesting tidbit we're likely never to see in the MSM:
A large majority of the troops serving in Iraq said they were satisfied with the war provisions from Washington (adequate troop protection; body armor; Humvee plating, munitions).
In fact, only about 30% said their equipment is not adequate for the jobs facing them. So much for those media-planted mutinies.

Uhm, this guy’s bragging because only 70% of our soldiers in Iraq think that they’re adequately equipped.  That sounds like a massive failure.  It’s as if he’s forgotten the actual context of this poll, and is just looking for a simple majority.  But I’d put anything under 95% as a failure.  It’s easy to be happy with 70% success, when you’re not in the other 30%.

And if you want a real laugh, try reading the “media-planted mutinies” story he quotes above.  The whole story is a string of Bush Admin and military quotes about how they’re doing “everything we possibly can to protect your loved ones,” and that it’s "a matter of physics, not a matter of money ... It's a matter of production and the capability of doing it."  Holy shit!  Captain Bligh didn’t have things so bad.  It also quotes the infamous: "You go to war with the Army you have, not the Army you might want or wish to have."

And another thing regarding this “media-planted mutiny”, this post of his is from February 28, 2006.  But he had to go all the way back to December 2004 to find this mutiny.  Even worse, the Zogby poll he got the 30% number from came from a recent poll.  So he’s comparing a recent poll with a news story that is almost fourteen months old.  And if you click on the link, you’ll clearly see that his point is wrong.  Can anyone say “cherry-picking”?

And in a way, the wingnut’s got a point.  Despite the Bush Admin’s best efforts, it’s impossible to read that story without concluding that we had an armor problem.  Because the Bushies never deny that there was an armor problem; they only say that they’re correcting it, or that it wasn’t their fault.  But the problem wasn’t anything the media planted.  The problem is that they reported the story at all.  Because again, the article served as a big rationalization for Bush’s screw-up.  So the problem wasn’t with what the journalist wrote, but that he wrote it at all.  And to the propagandic mind, that is mutinous enough.


P.S. The scariest part of that Zogby Poll:
While 85% said the U.S. mission is mainly “to retaliate for Saddam’s role in the 9-11 attacks,” 77% said they also believe the main or a major reason for the war was “to stop Saddam from protecting al Qaeda in Iraq.”