What the Heck was I Thinking!?

Patterico posts about his difficulty in being taken seriously by the CentCom press affairs office while trying to correct a serious error on the part of the LA Times. Patterico’s Pontifications » Fighting the Information War. Patterico’s frustration stems from a brush off answer he gets for not being a credentialed press officer - i.e., MSM.

The military has to recognize that our enemies are not simply trying to
kill our soldiers with bullets and IEDs. They are also trying to kill
our will with false facts.

Bloggers want to get the truth out. They want to correct misleading
press reports. But if they are going to do that effectively, the
military needs to work with them.

Centcom needs to figure out a high speed, low drag method for working with the “army of Davids” that pro-military bloggers represent to them.

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Victor Davis Hansen has a post at RealClearPolitics - Articles - Will the West Stumble? in which he talks in great detail about the contradictions of the Islamic Fundamentalists beliefs, actions and results. In places it’s a depressing litany of the dangers facing the West. In others, it’s a scathing criticism of the shallowness and paucity of soul in the Islamic jihadists:

So again, the problem with the radicals in the Middle East is not the lack of capital or mental energy. Rather under the influence of Islamism and autocracy a deep-seeded cultural malady distorts human effort and creativity solely for destructive purposes. In all of these places, radical leaders such as a Ahmadinejad, Nasrallah, or Sadr–the same thug has a thousand faces that come and go as we saw with Zarqawi, Saddam, and Arafat–are, like the Sultan and Grand Vizier of old, as fascinated with the West as they despise it.

They obviously want Western technology–whether the Internet or the plastic munition–but never the decadence of freedom, democracy, and tolerance that creates the very appurtenances they crave. It is like sacking European Constantinople and then moving into it as your new Window-on-the-West capital, with the requisite minarets plopped on Santa Sophia.

Such parasitism proves no lasting palliative, but only the goad for more envy and frustration. The stark truth is that the radical Middle East is religiously observant, but spiritually poor. Naturally wealthy, it is mostly materially impoverished–and as anti-Western in ideology as addicted in fact to Western attention and consumerism.

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