Melanie Morgan, née Goebbels

The angry update

In a previous post, I reported how Melanie Morgan of KSFO radio in San Francisco used an article in WorldNetDaily to lie about Iraq. She said we were definitely “winning” because American troop deaths were dropping every month. That's a questionable criterion for success in the ill-advised Iraq war—surely a necessary condition but hardly a sufficient one. Furthermore, her claim is demonstrably untrue. She could give it a certain truthiness only by truncating the month of August. The day after she published her WorldNetDaily column, her claim had already been invalidated.

One of the truly damnable things about Morgan and her ilk is how they make easily refutable statements about Iraq, terrorism, patriotism, or what have you, and, when you refute them, they claim you are glad they are wrong. Yes, aren't we all delighted that the rising body count quickly gave the lie to Morgan's specious claims? It's nasty, but it's how they do business. “The Iraq war is foolish and unnecessary,” you say. “Oh, well then you support terrorists!” they say. “We're going to lose hundreds (now thousands) of men and women in our armed forces in this unnecessary war!” you say. “Aha! You hate America and you're happy about our casualties!” they scream.

The September casualty count has been compiled now and here is the “happy” result. Morgan penned her propaganda with several days left in August, enabling her to float the fiction that the U.S. body count was still dropping. Instead, however, we see that the August result was a secondary spike, jumping back up to 67, just short of the May total of 69. We are continuing to feed our troops into a meat grinder for no better reason than that George W. Bush wanted to “get” Saddam Hussein, to show that he's a bigger and tougher man than his Daddy (who was smart enough in the first Gulf War to stop after achieving the goal of liberating Kuwait).

As I write this, on September 11, the U.S. body count for the month is already at 26, with nineteen days left to go. At this rate, September will match or exceed August. This is miserable, galling news. I keep forgetting how pleased I should be that the loons who support the Iraq war are always being proved wrong. What comfort is there in being right when it doesn't matter? The man in the White House will keep staying the course, even if he has trouble explaining what that course is, and there'll be no improvement in the lot of our military until he is hobbled and neutralized. Even a determined Democratic congress, however, will have trouble reining in our imperial president, who thinks that “commander-in-chief” means “king.”

It makes you want to vomit.