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November 17, 2006

For The Press Corps With Bush In Vietnam - 'Iraq = Vietnam'

... And Jules Crittenden nails the AP's Terrence Hunt for his biased and agenda-driven reporting:

It's been a great couple of weeks for the White House Press Corps. Last week, Bush's big Thumpin' ... this week - can you believe this? - President Iraq is off to Vietnam. It's a feast rich with delicious irony. Let's check in with the AP's Terence Hunt:

By TERENCE HUNT

AP White House Correspondent

SINGAPORE (AP) - Hurt by election losses back home, President Bush tried to exert his authority on the world stage Thursday by warning a nuclear-armed North Korea against peddling its weapons and vowing the United States would not retreat into isolationism.

The president then headed for Vietnam and Hanoi, the wartime capital of the once-divided country, in a visit that promised to stir inevitable comparisons between the unpopular war raging in Iraq and the divisive war fought and lost in Vietnam more than three decades ago.

Not to quibble, but that war was lost in the United States, not Vietnam, a rather touchy Iraq comparison that is not promised or stirred in this article and pretty much ... er ... inevitable. But otherwise, those are salient points, Hunt. The promised comparisons are in fact inevitable. We, the reading customers of the Associated Press, are relying on you to stir them.

[...] We look to the Press Corps to start filing stories about Vietnam's lively economy and how great everything is - despite the way our Yankee Imperialist pique has held this totalitarian regime back. That, and the ongoing burdens of a 30-year-old war that promise, inevitably, to be our fault. It might be fun to weigh American war crime slams against references to Commie ugliness. Journalistic decorum after all will require a nod to the elephant in the room.

In the stirring of inevitable, promised Iraq comparisons, we should expect not to hear that bolting from Iraq will produce the same bloodbath and upheaval that exiting Southeast Asia did. In fact, expect not to hear about that bloodbath at all. Or, that an Iraq abandonment inevitably promises to stir future wars, the way the international emasculation of our abandonment of Vietnam stirred the Soviets to invade Afghanistan. And we all know what came out of Afghanistan after that.

Posted by Richard at November 17, 2006 7:39 AM