They Lied?! How DARE They!

I may have to start subscribing to Newsweek.

I figure it'll be cheap. Because after the right-wing nutjobs get done raking them over the coals, I may be their only subscriber. Accordingly, they'll want to keep their prices low to retain my subscription.

And why all the furor? Well, apparently, during an article detailing the abuses of some detainees at the Guantanamo Bay prison, they quoted someone (who was quoting someone else) as saying that some of the guards would occasionally flush the detainees' copies of the Koran down the toilet. Understandably, this upset a rather large number of Muslims. And there were violent protests in Afganistan and elsewhere as a result.

Well, now, today, Newsweek has backed away from the claim, saying that the original source of this information has also backed away from it.

The important thing to remember here is that this is thirdhand information at least. I think the biggest mistake Newsweek made was even allowing this information in the magazine in the first place.

But, according to the right wingnuts, this article was the sole cause of protests in Afghanistan and other parts of the Muslim world, protests that lead to some deaths.

"Newsweek lied, people died" is one of the screams from the right wingnuts. As if a single news magazine article had the power to inspire thousands of people to riot.

Is it just possible that these protests were caused by more than just a single article in a magazine, and that maybe, just maybe, it was simply the final straw that snapped the back of a heavily overloaded camel.

I mean, there are plenty of other things for the Afghans and other Muslims to be pissed about:

* The invasion and occupation of not just one but two sovereign countries by the United states--and the subsequent installation in those countries of puppet governments that do exactly what the U.S. wants.

* The thousands of innocent civilians in those countries who have been killed during those invasions and occupations.

* The photographically documented abuse of dozens of detainees in Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison.

* The harassment of Arabs in general as a result of the September 11th attacks.

Nah. I couldn't have been any of those things. A single article in a magazine caused the whole shitstorm.

I think what pisses me off the most about the whole situation is that the right-wingers will repeatedly trumpet this as an example of the "liberal" bias in mainstream media, just like they did with Dan Rather and the whole "memogate" scandal. Never mind the fact that Time magazine recently named George W. Bush as their person of the year, and did a cover story canonizing Ann Coulter.

"Liberal media". Yeah. Right.