Doug's alternative BS

[MalignD at aol.com]

<<<Even if he knows a lot about  the Press and the Media ...>

On the off chance that this is not sarcasm what does he know that the rest of 
us don't know?>>

An unpleasant irony of the on-going arguments around Afghanistan:  one horse 
that Millison has repeatedly flogged is the purported bias of mainstream 
journalism--the NY Times, The Washington Post, the Economist, etc.  Yet he 
posts, incessantly and without comment, articles from such dubious sources as 
ZNet, TomPaine.com, counterpunch.org, AlterNet, indian-express.com, etc., 
etc., which, at least on the evidence of what he posts, pursue and espouse an 
unmitigated leftist slant and agenda.  Do any of these news "organizations" 
have reporters in the field?  A foreign desk?  A policy as to sources?  Who 
knows?   

Millison's own oft-expressed views are flush with name-calling--warmonger, 
cowboy, gang rapists--and an unwavering leftist polemic, short on analysis.  
He's entitled to his opinion, surely; but Millison is a self-described 
journalist of some sort or other, from whom one might expect at least a 
pretense of objectivity.  Instead he has done as much to polarize the 
exchange here as any single contributor. 

Alas.  I think those opposed to a military response are naive misguided in 
this instance.  But I'm generally curious about their position, or would be, 
were it articulated in something like a discussion specific to the issues to 
hand.  Instead, a screed of generally weak and labored analogies to Vietnam 
and tired, shrill, and overblown rhetoric about war profiteering and the sins 
of American foreign policy.

A military response is potentially destabilizing and fraught with hazard and 
there are innocents who will undoubtedly perish as a result of a military 
response.  War is a frightening prospect.  Nevertheless there are 
thousands--thousands--dead here in New York.  American citizens were used as 
weapons and there is every indication that more is coming.  And perhaps 
worse:  the man responsible for the first bombing at the Trade Center 
admittted he had hoped to topple the building sideways and kill a quarter of 
a million people.  

This is very serious business and the choices are new and difficult.  One can 
certainly fall out respectfully on the side of a military response--as a 
sober, defensiblem and rational choice and not merely as a rabid response of 
blind anger and jingoistic ignorance.  If one feels, nevertheless, that it is 
the wrong choice, one should make that argument.  

The reverse is, or course, also true, but there is no one here arguing for a 
military response who daily buries the list in dozens of mostly unreadable 
posts of thousands of words.

If this debate is to be waged by exhausting the opposition in tedium and 
ennui, it has already been won.