All describe the bizarro-world contrast between what most Americans seem to think is happening in Iraq versus what is really happening in Iraq. Knowing this disconnect exists and experiencing it directly are two separate matters. It’s like the difference between holding the remote control during the telecast of a volcanic eruption on some distant island (and then flipping the channel), versus running for survival from a wretch of molten lava that just engulfed your car.
I was at home in the United States just one day before the magnitude hit me like vertigo: America seems to be under a glass dome which allows few hard facts from the field to filter in unless they are attached to a string of false assumptions. Considering that my trip home coincided with General Petraeus’ testimony before the US Congress, when media interest in the war was (I’m told) unusually concentrated, it’s a wonder my eardrums didn’t burst on the trip back to Iraq. In places like Singapore, Indonesia, and Britain people hardly seemed to notice that success is being achieved in Iraq, while in the United States, Britney was competing for airtime with O.J. in one of the saddest sideshows on Earth.
No thinking person would look at last year’s weather reports to judge whether it will rain today, yet we do something similar with Iraq news. The situation in Iraq has drastically changed, but the inertia of bad news leaves many convinced that the mission has failed beyond recovery, that all Iraqis are engaged in sectarian
Read on. Very illuminating.
Vanderleun has taken the measure of these pathetic little postmodern purveyors of hopelessness and doom, and gets it exactly right (hat tip: Larwyn):
Four years in. An inch of time. Four years in and the foolish and credulous among us yearn to get out. Their feelings require it. The power of their Holy Gospel of "Imagine" compels them. Their overflowing pools of compassion for the enslavers of women, the killers of homosexuals, the beheaders of reporters, and the incinerators of men and women working quietly at their desks, rise and flood their minds until their eyes flow with crocodile tears while their mouths emit slogans made of cardboard. They believe the world is run on wishes and that they will always have three more.
Like savages shambling about some campfire where all there is to eat are a few singed tubers, they paint their faces with the tatterdemalion symbols of a summer long sent down to riot with the worms. They clasp hands and sing songs whose lyrics are ash. "We shall... over... come." Overcome what, overcome who? Overcome their own nation? Is that their dream? It is the lifelong dream of those that lead them, that much is certain.
Four years in and we see these old rotting rituals trotted out in the streets like some pagan procession of idols and shibboleths, like some furred and feathered fetish shaken against the sky by hunkering witch-doctors, to hold back the dark, to frighten off the evil spirits and graven images that trouble the sleep of the dreamers.
Four years into the most gentle war ever fought, a war fought on the cheap at every level, a war fought to avoid civilian harm rather than maximize it. Picnic on the grass at Shiloh. Walk the Western Front. Speak to the smoke of Dresden. Kneel down and peek into the ovens of Auschwitz. Sit on the stones near ground zero at Hiroshima and converse with the shadows singed into the wall. Listen to those ghost whisperers of war.
Four years in and the people of the Perfect World ramble through the avenues of Washington, stamping their feet and holding their breath, having their tantrums, and telling all who cannot avoid listening that "War is bad for children and other living things." They have flowers painted on their cheeks. For emphasis. Just in case you thought that war was good for children and other living things.
There were children and other living things on the planes that flew into the towers.
Go read the entire piece, it is perfect. And extremely appropriate to describe the people who want to make sure we all live under a glass dome; and that any good news never makes it through.
Let's face it. The MSM, Democrats and their leftist base will never ever--under any circumstances and no matter what the actual facts are--say anything positive about the situation in Iraq. They prefer to live under the glass dome.
WE'LL NEVER ADMIT IT'S GETTING BETTER (Reprise)
It's fun to get mad at the Prez
And trash everything that he says
He's holding us down, making us frown
We'd rather love Hugo Chavez!
We'll never admit it's getting better
Here at home or in Iraq
We'll never admit it's getting better
'Til we get the White House back.
We used to be happy, you see
But now we're the knights who say NIE
Iraq got to vote
But we really hope
That no one pretends they are free.
We'll never admit it's getting better
We stand for nothing and have no plan
We simply hate to admit it's getting better
And we hate that we lost and that now he's the boss
And we'll thwart him as much as we can.
We'll never admit it's getting better
Here at home or in Iraq
We'll never admit it's getting better
'Til we get the White House back.
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