Joke Headline of the Day

The front page of today's NY Times

Dec 14, 2005
If this war weren't such a tragedy of human lives lost and a civilization destroyed, it would be the stuff that the Joke of the Day website could use as a daily source of material. Take today's headline in The New York Times. The story, reported straight-faced, deals with the recent revelations that the Iraqi government is rounding up Sunni citizens and imprisoning and torturing them in prisons around the country. That government's police force is apparently being run by militias belonging to various fanatical sects with close ties to Iran. These militias have been summarily rounding-up Sunni men, kidnapped from their houses and communities, jailing, abusing and, perhaps, disappearing them.

The incredible part is that the Bush Administration, which installed this "democracy" in the first place and which controls its every action is going to "inspect", (according to the Times), the Iraqi prisons to deter further incidents of torture. Now just you wait a darned second! This paper wants us to accept at face value that the same bunch responsible for the Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo infamies is going to put the kibosh on their Iraqi underlings? Letter to the Editor: Did you mean this to be news or satire?

Each day the war grinds on with fresh revelations of the depravity and brutality of the bunch running our country. It seems the worse things get, the more the corporate-controlled media bows down to distort the truth and provides a cover for their dastardly deeds. The charade that the U.S. stands for freedom and democracy, which both Times and Bush so loudly propound, has long ago been seen by most of the world's people for what it is - propaganda to cover the truth. That truth, plainly stated, is that this country, as the playwright Harold Pinter so aptly said in his Nobel prize acceptance speech last week (buried in a blurb way back in the Times of December 7th), "supported and in many cases engendered every right-wing military dictatorship" over the last 50 years.

The American people, despite the media's attempt to keep the truth from them, are beginning to see through the lies. The truth will eventually prevail. As Dr. Martin Luther Kings, Jr. said, "I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. This is why right, temporarily defeated, is stronger than evil triumphant." Let it be so.