Posted by
IOL on Monday, January 28, 2008 11:44:30 PM
Thanks MarkNew York Times found 121 cases in which veterans of Iraq
and Afghanistan either "committed a killing in this country, or were
charged with one." The "committed a killing" formulation includes car
accidents. Thus, with
declining deaths in theater, the media narrative evolves. Old story:
"America's soldiers are being cut down by violent irrational insurgents
we can never hope to understand." New story: "Americans are being cut
down by violent irrational soldiers we can never hope to understand."
In the quagmire of these veterans' minds, every leafy Connecticut
subdivision is Fallujah and every Dunkin' Donuts clerk an Abu Musab
al-Zarqawi with an annoyingly perky manner.
It
was the work of minutes for the Powerline website's John Hinderaker to
discover that the "quiet phenomenon" is entirely unphenomenal: It
didn't seem to occur to the Times to check whether the murder rate among recent veterans is higher than that of the general population of young men. It's not. Au contraire,
the columnist Ralph Peters calculated that Iraq and Afghanistan vets
are about a fifth as likely to murder you as the average 18-34 year-old
American male. Better yet, the blogger Iowahawk meticulously drew his
own "patchwork picture" of another "quiet phenomenon": the Denver
newspaper columnist arrested for stalking, the Cincinnati TV reporter
facing child-molestation charges, the Philadelphia anchorwoman who went
on a violent drunken rampage. As Iowahawk's one-man investigative unit
wondered:
"Unrelated
incidents, or mounting evidence that America's newsrooms have become a
breeding ground for murderous, drunk, gun-wielding child molesters
Full Story