The Truth
The first casualty of war is the truth. I am not sure who said it first but if no one wants to take credit, I will.
Hello Bartletts!
It is a sad fact that in times of war, the truth is the third piece of information that comes out.
As in life there are three points of truth, your version, my version and the truth. The truth always seems to lie somewhere out there and at this point I think it is just very hard to discern what is true and what is not.
The best example of this is the bombing of the Al Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza City. The first blaring headline said over 500 killed in the bombing. The next piece of bad information was that it was an Israeli airstrike that caused this catastrophe. This piece of misinformation was from that bastion of the truth, The New York Times quoting “unnamed sources”. Huh? Then 2 minutes later CNN and MSNBC all picked up on the story and ran with it. No one initially verified anything, they just went with it.
Hold the phone you morons.
The reporting was done without any fact checking or verification. It would seem that the NYTimes decided to file a report directly from the Hamas Ministry of Information. A guy with a laptop and two cell phones. I’m kidding and I know none of this is funny but sometimes that is the only way to get through the reporting.
The Israelis denied the attack and said (rightly so) it was an errant missile from the Islamic Jihad group somewhere in Gaza. After further review, it was clearly a missile fired from within Gaza that had broken apart and landed, I believe, in the parking lot of the hospital. Still, over 100 people died in this disaster and again, it’s 100+ people that did not need to die.
Filing a clearly error prone report by a major news agency is tantamount to pouring kerosene on the burning embers of hatred in the Middle East.
I get, “Fog of War” and reporting is difficult under normal circumstances but when one makes a clear mistake and reports something that is that monumental in the overall span of what was happening that day you would think the organization would apologize clearly and succinctly. Maybe I missed it but I haven’t seen any correction or apology.
Hubris I guess is also result of war.
I have always been critical of the reporting we have gotten from the NYTimes, CNN, FOX, NBC,CBS,ABC. It’s just how I operate. I don’t believe there is any network or news organization that is unbiased and reports fairly so when they butcher something I will bring it up.
This, however, is a huge mistake and they don’t take ownership of it? Blame it on bad sources but how about blaming it on bad systems in place. You can’t make an accusation like that without verifying it as best as you can. You would think the Old Grey Lady was the NYPost.
There will be bad reporting because that is just the nature of war. You hope to get facts and know that those facts are reliable but sometimes in the desire to be first to report, you drop that journalistic ethos. They did. They should apologize because the implications could have been terrible.
It’s like they were relying on twitter feeds to report (I refuse to call it X).
The other place were truth is a casualty is the US Government. More precisely, Washington D.C.. What in God’s name is happening in the Capitol? Do these clowns not realize that the job of the government is to govern?
Unfortunately, whatever is happening in the House of Representatives is a joke. Driven by clowns who have yet to get out of the clown car.
All the back room infighting and front page backstabbing is not going to help the GOP win back the White House and maintain that slim margin they have in the House.
The Senate? What right thinking independent would vote Republican this time around.
When Joe Biden was elected President I wrote a column blaming the Republican voter for the loss. They never showed up at the polls and no matter how much misconduct happened on election day, Donald Trump lost and we all have ourselves to blame.
The country was moving in a generally conservative direction. President Trump upset a lot of apple carts and probably did as much damage as Obama did in splitting this country along political lines. Trump threw what was to become a more moderate America into some washing machine of political upheaval. Trump lost his next election but the country still has not regained it’s balance.
The Biden Presidency has done little to regain that balance and may have even created more division and yet, the Republican party could not take advantage. They are a true embarrassment to the political system and that embarrassment will spill over to this years local elections and next years Presidential election.
I really don’t care who’s feelings I hurt here but I will say two things: Joe Biden may be the worst candidate to ever run for the office of President (yes, worse than Trump 1.0 or Trump 2.0). He is a blathering idiot who has lost a fair amount of his mental acuity and he may also be corrupt. The second thing is that the Republican Party is a clown show. The GOP has maybe the greatest opportunity in decades to take control of things in Washington and what do we get, possibly one of the most despised people in American history running for President and the inability of the the party to right a rocky ship in the House.
As the saying goes, “You get the government you deserve”
Tough but that is the truth.