Darn!

Just as Dan Balz in the Washington Post the other day made it clear that he regarded the absence of a pre-ordained result in the Republican primaries to be a disturbing departure from the way things ought to be, the New York Times makes it clear that it is unhappy that military prosecutors will be unable to prove a My Lai-type massacre by U.S. Marines in Haditha, Iraq:

The Erosion of a Murder Case Against Marines in the Killing of 24 Iraqi Civilians

BAGHDAD, Oct. 5—Last year, when accounts of the killing of 24 Iraqis in Haditha by a group of marines came to light, it seemed that the Iraq war had produced its defining atrocity, just as the conflict in Vietnam had spawned the My Lai massacre a generation ago.

But on Thursday, a senior military investigator recommended dropping murder charges against the ranking enlisted marine accused in the 2005 killings, just as he had done earlier in the cases of two other marines charged in the case. The recommendation may well have ended prosecutors’ chances of winning any murder convictions in the killings of the apparently unarmed men, women and children.

“May well have ended prosecutors’ chances of winning any murder convictions.” This is the kind of language that the Times uses when someone it sympathizes with is prevented by unfortunate circumstances from realizing his dreams, e.g., “Poor third-round finish in British Open ends Tiger Woods’s chances of winning Grand Slam this year.” The implication is that the prosecutors through the tough breaks of life were deprived of something that, under more favorable conditions, they would have rightfully had—proof that the American involvement in Iraq is defined by the mass murder of Iraqis by U.S. servicemen.

It is not pleasant to know that there are people in the world who hate you and unrelentlingly seek to harm you. Yet that is the experience that normal Americans have regarding the New York Times and the rest of the liberal media—that they hate America and unrelentingly seek to harm her.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at October 06, 2007 07:20 AM | Send