MemeWatch IX
December 16th, 2003 - 12:32 am
At last! The Washington Post‘s Rajiv Chandrasekaran and Ariana Eunjung Cha aren’t playing the meme game. Here’s the second graf of their story on yesterday’s attack:
The attacks and arrests Monday matched the expectations of U.S. military commanders, who had predicted that the seizure of Hussein would lead to a short-term spike in insurgent activity as well as information enabling the capture of loyalists of the former president.
The only thing shocking here is that it took me ten tries to find a single story which simply reported what we were told to expect, instead of implying that we’d been promised something else.
But that doesn’t mean that MemeWatch is over, either.
Actually, what I find shocking is that you were able to find such a news story (in the non-right-wing media) in only ten tries. The news update on the radio as I woke up emphasized that it had been more than a whopping 48 hours since Saddam’s capture had been announced, but the insurgents were *still fighting*!!!! Why didn’t they totally collapse immediately?? And why does it take a whole 3 minutes to microwave popcorn?? (Sometimes I get the feeling that the majority of Americans, particularly in the media, have the patience of a mayfly…)
As for the media ignoring the fact that Bush said the violence isn’t over: The media have been ignoring what Bush said for what they think Bush implied for years; why should they stop now?
My husband and I watched the English version of Die Welt’s news and the ME roundup on Worldlink TV.
Some actually said, during the report on the splodydopes, that W did say there would be more attacks.
I was very, very surprised.
And the Egyptian female reader, when describing that Israel killed 2 Palis, used the word “insurgents.”
And I think it was Egypt that did a retrospective of Saddam’s life and trashed-talked him, IMHO.
“Insurgents!” How disgusting, isn’t it?
What about starting to use the “t-word” for anything you don’t like and want. It surely drastically’s reduces the world’s complexity, if that’s what you need.
Hey, Old European. Good to see your knee reflexes still work. Too bad your mind can’t keep up.
I understood Sandy P. to be approvingly noting that the Egyptian newsreader seemed to be recognizing that the Palestinians who got shot may have been violently inviting retaliation, and not just having a lazy lunch at a pizzeria when the IDF arbitrarily decided to off them.