As predictably as sunrise the news arrived on Christmas Day that American casualties in Iraq now “equal” the number of deaths in the fall of the Twin Towers on Nine Eleven. Oh, what fanfare. Global coverage by a gleeful Press tried to trumpet a somewhat mysterious connection between the murders in New York on a morning in September 2001, and the battle dead in the Middle East.
If you accept that this supposed tie between murder most foul and casualties within War have meaning, that there is any relevancy at all in comparing one statistic with another, then I have a modest suggestion for the nation and the men and women who transmit the news…a question they and we might address for national debate:
How many of those deaths in Iraq are directly tied to the ceaseless wail of anti-war, anti-American protests that began on 9/12/01? How emboldened were the forces of religious fanaticism in the Islamic world by the utterances of American Fifth Columnists? How many roadside bombs were built while listening to the words of self-loathing Americans?
What is the count in American dead when you call the Commander In Chief a liar, a drunk, a fool, and a dummy? Can you equate hate speech toward our military leaders with the contents of body bags filled in combat zones? Or do the anti-war voices of policy dissent whose lives are so shallow they have nothing to fight for believe their words won’t reach beyond national borders?
What is the probable body count (not to mention the erosion of national will) tied to the virtually invisible images of 9-1-1? I can almost count the frames of the 1941 Pearl Harbor attack on the battleship Arizona, but someone somewhere decided that the sight of Americans jumping from the 100th floor of the WTC was just too raw for Americans…as well as the video of journalists or American POW’s being beheaded by our enemies. Don’t want anyone reminded of why we fight, do we.
So, for those who continue the tradition of never having to say they’re sorry, I suggest the following: If you bashed the President or the nation he represents, if you denigrated our troops and compared the Secretary of Defense to Hitler in the time between the attacks of 9-1-1 and the Christmas announcement of “equality” of troop deaths with the Tower’s dead, either take responsibility for the deaths you have caused or encouraged others to cause or stay off our nation’s airwaves until you do.
I don’t know why the words Traitor and Treason have lost their impact and meaning with the Press, but they both still have currency with me. I want each of these nay-sayers identified and the date on which they first publicly denigrated our war effort to appear on the screen each time they’re featured on television…and just as every conservative spokesperson is identified as such…I want the Press to include the Can’t Win/Don’t Fight crowd’s coming-out date (when they began speaking out against military victory in Iraq) to be tied to their name.
It’s time to attach a cost to these words of betrayal. It’s time for that cost to be paid.
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