Sigh

Over at The Green Knight’s place, the Whamstress has got an important post about IEDs I highly recommend, which starts with the following:

This morning I watched Diane Sawyer (Good Morning America) barely contain her grief as she reported news on her friends and co-workers, Bob Woodruff and cameraman Doug Vogt.

I commented:

It's hard to say this without sounding hateful, even though I don't intend it to be so, but I wish Diane Sawyer and her cohorts showed the same demonstrable emotion for the thousands of soldiers who have been killed and wounded in this atrocity, whose lives were no less valuable just because they weren't on camera or holding one.

I’m not the only one who’s had the same thought. The Fixer at Alternate Brain says it with the blunt anger it deserves:

The impression I get, watching the news heads talk about the incident, is that the news folks are finally realizing this war in Iraq is not a video game and that it just as easily could have been them in the hatch of that APC. It's really something to see them waking up. About time, you motherfuckers. For three years you've been reporting on the casualties as pseudo-TV fiction characters, with your disingenuous false pity for the families. How's it feel now that two of your own will probably be turnips for the rest of their lives? Are you now going to take a realistic look at the waste of lives in the Chimp's folly? I hope so, and I hope you start giving the American people the truth about all we've lost in that dry hole in the sand.

I feel terrible about Woodruff and Vogt—and I feel terrible every single time I read a headline about more troops getting killed or injured, not to mention more Iraqi civilians getting killed or injured. And I get angry when I watch a news anchor blithely reports those deaths or injuries—“Twelve marines died today when a roadside bomb exploded…”—and then segue without irony into a report about President Bush or one of his minions giving a speech on how well the war is going or how we’ve turned a new corner or how Cindy Sheehan is nothing more than a publicity whore. I don’t want to celebrate that this horrific spell of cognitive dissonance might have finally been broken by a tragedy, but, at the same time, I do hope that makes a few people reconsider the ways they’ve aided and abetted an administration and its war of choice that has caused so many unnecessary deaths.