Immediately upon hearing about the abduction of these two soldiers, I had feared it would end in beheading, and now I fear something else-- I will go as far as to make a little prediction.
The Mainstreamedia, over the past five years, have decided on our behalf that we are entirely too sensitive to see horrific pictures of people leaping to their deaths from the Twin Towers, or of the murder of innocent victims like the four American contractors burned alive and mutilated,or journalist Daniel Pearl and contractors Nicholas Berg and Paul Johnson being beheaded. However, sometimes it seems that they (the MSM) don't think we can get enough pictures of American military coffins or recently dead Iraqis (in contrast to the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis found in Saddam's mass graves who are of minimal interest).
The point is that shocking pictures and video which would incite anger against terrorists don't get seen, but disturbing scenes which are likely to turn the public against the President and the war are seen in abundance.
It is difficult to predict how the public might react to graphic images of these two dead soldiers, but it's reasonable to argue that there has been enough of a shift in public sentiment about the war (thank you, MSM, for all your creative work on that project) that images which would have inspired anti-terrorist fury a few years ago might today spawn a new burst of anti-Bush fever. If the media decide that the odds favour the latter, I predict that images of these soldiers which find their way into standard news outlets will be more frequent and more graphic than has been the norm for similar incidents in the past.
I hope the families have braced themselves for the exploitation their sons' deaths are likely to engender. Let us pray that their grief is not eventually compounded by the presence of the wretched and abominable membership of the Westboro Baptist Church/Phelps-Roper tribe spouting their putrid slogans as the mourners try to bury their dead.
Identities of the murdered soldiers have not yet been officially confirmed, but there is every
reason to believe that they are Pfc. Kristian Menchaca, 23, of Houston, Texas and Pfc. Thomas L. Tucker, 25, of Madras, Oregon. May they rest in peace, if not today then on some tomorrow when Iraq is rid of these barbarians, whose brand of butchery was standard fare in Saddam's Iraq-- what we went in there to end, once and for all. We're not there yet, obviously. God willing, we'll be staying until the task is finished.
