Webloggin » More Anti-American Bias at the LA Times

See Update at the bottom of this article

The LA Times, New York Times and all the other aplologists for terrorists in the MSM stretch as far as possible to portray the U.S. government as deceitful and the U.S. soldier as cold blooded killers.

Typical in their anti-American rhetoric is silly comparisons that are meant to draw a comparative perspective that underscores their objections to the war against terror.

Point is case is today’s LA Times story, War’s Iraqi Death Toll Tops 50,000. The byline beneath the headline, Higher than the U.S. estimate but thought to be undercounted, the tally is equivalent to 570,000 Americans killed in three years.

Proportionally this comparative number is accurate based on the 50,000 estimate cited in the article. But what the LA Times didn’t tell you until the very end of the article was that 75% of those casualties are believed to have been caused by terrorists. The other 25% are believed to have been caused in direct military engagement.

Thus the Times might have reworded their salvo against the United States as follows. Had the terrorists successfully brought this war to the United States they could have killed a proportionate 425,314 Americans.

Some may say that it doesn’t matter because the terrorists wouldn’t have come to Iraq if we hadn’t gone in. Of course that would be viewed in a vacuum that doesn’t include varying estimates about the number of deaths attributed to Saddam Hussein thus far. That number is over two million and mass graves are still being uncovered.

The hackish reporters at the LA Times also take President Bush to task for estimating the Iraqi death total at 30,000; a number that the Times Reporters portray as an underestimate as if it was intentional. However, President Bush’s estimate was more than the Iraqi’s own estimates and directly in line with the estimates of well known anti-war activists such as Iraq Body Count as mentioned in the Seattle Times at the time President Bush made the statement.

The Iraqi death toll has been the subject of considerable debate. A group of British researchers and anti-war activists called Iraq Body Count estimates civilian casualties between 27,383 and 30,892, not counting Iraqi troops or insurgents, by tabulating incidents reported in media and human-rights reports. Iraqi authorities have said roughly 800 people die each month in violence there, a rate that if typical over the course of the conflict would come to 25,600.

In fact, as at 19 April 2006, the Iraq Body Count website estimates the number of civilian deaths sustained during the invasion and occupation to be between 34,493 and 38,641.[ref.]

It is fine to project the number of deaths proportionally to the population of the United States. But it is completely and utterly obvious that the anti-American reporters at these popular rags equate and sometimes elevate the United States as terrorist number one above the real terrorists on their list of perpetrators of evil.

All in all the main stream media is guilty of the most egregious form of journalism through illegitimate comparisons that are meant to misinform and mischaracterize the causes and the successes of the War in Iraq and the War on Terror.

When I originally wrote this article I didn’t realize that the Times piece was a two page article. I thought it ended with:

Societies fall apart when people stop believing the government can keep them safe them and instead turn to militias for protection, said Lake, who is a professor of political science at UC San Diego.

But in fact it goes on to continue along the standard doom and gloom play book that predicts failure in Iraq:

“The question is, have we crossed that threshold? My sense is, we probably have, and that’s why I’m worried about the long-term outcome.”

Is everything perfect in Iraq? Of course not, and they won’t be until the foreign fighters are either killed or captured.

Does that mean we shouldn’t wage a war against state sponsors of terrorism? No.

The left lives in a fantasy world where the intentions of evil dictators and anti-American terrorists are viewed as benign threats. They can’t even comprehend the scope of the threat in hindsight; because they don’t want to believe that President Bush was right.

The left’s willing ignorance of the threat is a threat in and of itself.

Side Note:

The current spin cycle is part of a formulaic approach that the left cycles through in varying stages.

To emphasize how the LA Times article is applying that formula we can look back at the 2005 Seattle Time article and see how one particular paragraph is echoed in today’s LA Times. It is as if the Seattle Times article was used as a blueprint.

The estimate marked the first time Bush has personally provided an assessment of the Iraqi death toll, a highly sensitive subject that his administration largely avoids discussing at any level, much less from the presidential lectern. Although the Pentagon keeps careful track of Americans killed in Iraq — now exceeding 2,100 troops — military officers have said they do not count Iraqi dead. – Seattle Times, Dec 13, 2005

LA Times:

The toll in Iraq has been a sensitive issue for the Bush administration, which has maintained that it doesn’t track civilian deaths. However, military officials in Baghdad acknowledged that they track the number of civilians accidentally killed by U.S. troops- LA Times, June 25, 2006

Talk about transparent.

Stop by Wizbang and read The Latest Jihadist Butchery, Desperation And the Media. This article discsuss the state of Iraq, the MSM approach to these issues and the very real fact that the crimes if the terrorists could be happening here in America:

Those politicians and journalists who use such media-driven atrocities as an indication of the overall situation in Iraq or of the status of the War On Terror (and there were many of them last week) mislead their readers/viewers/voters. Iraq is a very dangerous place, at least certain cities there are very dangerous, but what happened in Iraq could just as easily have happened down the road from me in Jacksonville or Fayetteville NC.