Cynic's inc.

So many things in the news this week it’s hard to pick what to talk about. Let’s start with the obvious: North Korea. Apparently Dr. Evil has accepted to shut down a nuclear reactor in exchange for energy guaranties. I don’t know about you dear reader but that sounds furiously close to the deal hashed out under Bill “I didn’t inhale” Clinton. Deal, which you may remember, was much maligned by the conservatives as being weak. The way I understand this, but I am not very bright, is that it took the current administration six years to get back to the same point Clinton had arrived at. If you read this, unlikely, and know what makes those two agreements intrinsically different please enlighten me.
If you listened to the President’s news conference this morning you probably noticed that he was in a cheerful mood. He didn’t seem to understand that people might not take the administration at its word when it presents information linking EIDs to Iran. Maybe, just maybe, the American public is remembering something about WMDs in another Middle Eastern country that we used to like but don’t anymore. I know this is crazy talk.
Finally I stumbled upon this blog a few weeks ago. It’s a milblog (Dear Lord can’t you save me from neologisms?) but the author, an army officer, is actually quite handy with his pen. I would even say that the first posting of his that I read is material for a literary journal. The poetic rhythm of his prose and sparseness of language powerfully translated his emotions about the death of a colleague. The blog does have its faults. The man is writing in order to support the war not to bring an impartial picture of it. He does have rants that border on the right-wing nut. Especially when it comes down to the mass media. Sometimes he seems justified, others not so. One of his latest entries falls under the latter part. He complains that media outlets got the ranks of some KIA soldiers wrong. Let me ask this simple question: where do you think the reporters found their information? Being that I know a little bit about reporting, I would say reporters either received a press release from the parent unit with the KIAs info or called the parent unit after being alerted of the deaths. In either case, the information must have come from an admin clerk, hence the problem with accuracy in my book. (Admin: the people who underpaid me last summer and haven’t fixed it yet!) Instead of calmly looking at the facts and realizing that some private fucked up, the blogger goes into another tirade about the mainstream media. Does it make sense to you dear reader? It doesn’t to me but I am just a stupid, enlisted jarhead.