(From Salon) Haditha: Selective Moral Outrage

[Unmarked Poster]

Chicago Sun-Times columnist Mark Steyn, a darling of radical rightwing bloggers, treats his legions of fans to this incoherent rant about Haditha. Steyn adds his voice to a growing number of prominent rightwingers who seem to be coming unhinged over recent reports of U.S. atrocities in Iraq. Steyn is a self-styled 'conservative' worshipped by many on the right for his Hitchens-esque turns of phrase (no, not a compliment) and Glenn Reynolds (Instapundit) is a high-profile blogger who fancies himself a libertarian.

<snip>

My beef with Steyn and the many rightwing bloggers who are using Haditha as a tool to bash the left is that they are indulging in selective moral outrage. Their fury at Saddam knows no bounds, but they are strangely silent about other brutal dictators and human rights offenders. They decry every beheading in Iraq as a crime against the human race but can glibly write, "For three years, coalition forces in Iraq behaved so well that a salivating Vietnam culture had to make do with the thinnest of pickings: one depraved jailhouse, a prisoner on a dog leash with a pair of Victoria's Secret panties on his head and an unusually positioned banana." When Steyn suggests that a "gunned-down pregnant woman or a slaughtered wedding party ... makes no difference to the justice of the cause," he is displaying precisely the ethical bankruptcy that the war's opponents are fighting against.

Steyn's flippancy when it comes to the slaughter of innocents should give anyone pause, but rightwing bloggers will eat up his every word. After all, he is engaging in their favorite tactic: whenever the facts undermine their specious logic, turn around and attack principled Americans for defending America's values. (For good measure, he throws in a little Cindy Sheehan and Robert Fisk, as though either of them speak to the much larger question of America's moral standing. He also dredges up the most tired of tired rightwing canards: the "liberal media" - masterfully debunked here.)

<snip>

In their rush to ascribe malicious motives to anyone who draws attention to the horrors in Iraq, these people ignore the obvious, i.e. that the greater the aberration, the more newsworthy, not the less. In other words, it's because the war's critics have faith in the character of our troops and our nation that they are so deeply troubled by such grotesque deviations from the norm. It is the war's critics, not its blind supporters, who assume the best about our military and who harp on stories like Haditha because it is contrary to everything they believe about America. The contrast is stark between those who rise in condemnation and those who shrug off a few slaughtered women and children. I'll end by quoting Huffington Post's RJ Eskow: "Our national identity is based on holding ourselves, and our country, to the highest moral standard on Earth. And that -- rather than this kind of slippery rationalizing -- is true patriotism."

http://daoureport.salon.com/synopsis.aspx?synopsisId=dc42f418-3ba3-4390-8ab7-df5c041ca094

[The Sleeper]

1. "Commander Fang....

Prepare to release the Moral Relativity device..."

[Catrina]

3. Exactly, and when they do that, as the article says, they reveal the awful

truth that rightwing warmongers expect the very worst of US troops. Worse, they applaud and encourage what they claim to denounce, so long as it is US troops doing it.

I also notice the Rush Limbaugh take on Abu Ghraib. What is it about 'panties on their heads' that gets these people so excited? That's all they ever say. The totally ignore the number of detainees who have died in US custody ~ by some reports over 100 so far.

So sad ~ to try to defend the indefensible because their dreams of glory, streets in Iraq named after Bush, flowers and candy thrown at tanks never materialized. They are angry at those who opposed this war, but not at those who lied to them and made it necessary for them to become apolotists for torture and indiscriminate killing of civilians, putting them on the same page as the very people they thought we went there to fight.

[ktlyon]

2. Yes, where was the moral outrage when "shock and awe" killed

innocent civilians?
Where was the outrage when cities were destroyed and more innocent people died?
This is not the first and will not be the last.

[bunkerbuster1]

4. Easy. They just point out that insurgents murder more often than we do.

So, y'know, we shouldn't complain so much.

As someone else implied upthread, it isn't ever moral relativism when they do it.

[lilypad_567]

5. truths

If you really do have the truth, then you have nothing to fear.
You don't need to burn books or censor speech. Truth is its
own best defense.
If we possess the truth, it doesn't give us the right to
be unkind to those who disagree. It didn't give Bin Laden the
right to declare Jihad, hijack airplanes and fly them into the
World Trade Center. It didn't give so-called 'Christians' the
right to kill people in the Crusades. It doesn't give us the
right to be disrespectful or violent.


i got this from perry marshall

[MsMagnificent]

6. Slim pickings??

"...coalition forces in Iraq behaved so well that a salivating Vietnam culture had to make do with the thinnest of pickings"

(Emphasis mine)

What? Slim pickings in a bizarro-world war that (in just one instance alone) chooses not to report the slaughter of dozens of civilians --including women and children-- for months?! With our ever-present, "fair and balanced" embedded press right in the midst of the action?
Say it ain't so!

There is something seriously wrong with this picture. It doesn't pass the smell test. In fact it smells like the Augean Stables of *Brand W* Fascist Control.


Why is it that most if not all of these types of stories are broken by the foreign press? To wit the most recent example, the latest story on US atrocities published by The Guardian over the past weekend . I don't remember anything even near approaching that magnitude covered in the US press as it happened or immediately after -- does anyone else?

Our present-day "journalists" & "war reporters" wouldn't break a story negative to this administration if it bit them in their embedded azz. Any real and timely news (as opposed to feel-good "Truthy Facts") that has issued out of Iraq and Afghanistan from the U.S. Press is extremely sparse-to-literally nonexistent.
Does anyone remember the truly unbiased reportage in the Vietnam years? I was just a child but I remember LOTS of nightly film and news; sometimes uncomfortable and unsettling, yet still reported and depended on & needed by the American people. Moreover it was news with no spin or bias until perhaps the very latest stages and even then only a few key reporters gave their own subjective opinions. We were left to make our own decisions for ourselves as to how good or bad it was, not told how and what to think. Heck, even in Iraq War One I remember as the war was raging practically 24-hour live video direct from that country without spin, without clearance or approval from some military mucky-muck. It was what it was. I was amazed and a bit frightened and awestruck that I could sit in my U.S. living room and --no matter what happened, good or bad for us-- watch in Real Time an actual war half a world away just as if it were a ubiquitous movie of the week.

Dead serious, since 2001 the last bit of Live News I remember seeing was that obvious propaganda piece of that Saddam statue being felled, replete with Iraqis waving the Stars and Stripes (they must have pulled their little American flags out from under their mattress!) and an American serviceman so clueless (Clueless or precognitive?) that he draped our conquering flag in the SOS/'distress' position.

Since then that's all the "News" we're allowed to see as it happens.
But don't worry! ...now let's all fly to Disneyland! Yay!


Big bad tough Bush-hating liberal media.
Yeah, right. :crazy:

When this ersatz "liberal" media finally does print or show clips of any real war-related news, especially if it's negative or disturbing, it's only because the word is out, and out loudly and long. It's only when these stories can no longer be controlled because of other country's Free Press, only when it can no longer be ignored, only when many Americans are asking about it that these things even begin to receive superficial coverage. Sadly, the U.S. coverage is mostly Kool-Aided/Addled Bushbots doing damage control, no matter how illogical or absurd. Instead of just publishing the unvarnished news in an unbiased fashion (just the facts, ma'am!) they strangely report with a nationwide, synchronistic, ultra-pro administration slant which conveniently just happens to be an exact match to the latest W-Brand Republican Talking Points. They construct straw men and extremely faulty logic to, in the long and obscenely bloated shadow of 9-11, rationalize if not downright make excuses for these criminal and outrageous actions.

To a great extent our media promotes this Selective Moral Outrage by donning Selective Rose-colored glasses ...or two opaque eye patches.

A key to a truly free state is the voluntary availability, will and courage of a conscientious press.
The news we get in the Bush, Jr. years, from the pablum and propaganda to the outright ignorance (that word meant literally) and purposeful lies propagated in every expression and venue of our media... aww, forget about it! America is plainly no longer free.

[Monk06]

7. The only thing Canadian about Steyn is his birth certificate which he

used to return to the 'country of his birth' when
he wore out his welcome in England.

It is no accident that his hero is his former boss,
the toff nosed wannabe royal, 'Lord' Conrad Black who,
in typical nouveau riches fashion, bought his way
into the House of Lords with money gained from
defrauding his investors.

The two deserve each other.

As for his laughable reputation as a literary critic;
he has made a career out of dining off other peoples
plates by misrepresenting the writing of people who
can actually write.

The classic example is his topsy turvy grave robbing
eulogy to Mordecai Richler who, in life, wouldn't bother
to piss on Steyn if his face was on fire.

Richler was well known for his disdain for Quebec
provincialism as well as the arrogance of the Upper Canada
English establishment.

Steyn, in typical fashion, reads Richler and comes away with
with the image of Richler as an anti-PC prophet born before
his time.

In fact Richler was a classic Montreal Jewish iconoclast,
not the Tory crank Steyn makes him out to be.

It's rather odd that Steyn could read Richler as Anti-Liberal
when the man spent his formative years in Paris hanging with
Sartre and Camus both of whom were proud Communists, the former
a Stalinist, the latter a disaffected Trotskyite.