Katherine Kersten is a carbuncle on the ass of the Star Tribune.
I said a few weeks back I was going to swear off Katherine, because she’s such an easy target, but damnit, yesterday she just made me mad all over again.
The story was one of her usual: the good soldier, or the good religious person, or the good whatever. Today was about a medic from Rochester who went beyond the call of duty to teach Afghan medical personnel some advanced therapy techniques.
It was going fine (except for the inevitable smarminess) until she got to the last graph. Here it is: “We’ve grown used to news media reports that portray U.S. troops as a malign influence. In recent months, the words prisoner and torture have frequently appeared in the same sentence. Is Buhain the odd man out in an army that is otherwise an oppressive occupying force? Or does our military have countless soldiers like him?”
I forgot. It’s the media’s fault that reports of torture have leaked out of the war zone. It’s not the fault of the torturers. IT’S THE GODDAMN MEDIA!
Right you are, Katherine. If it weren’t for the media, we wouldn’t know about there being no WMD. We wouldn’t know about “rendition.” Hell, we wouldn’t even know there were American casualties or burned up Afghani and Iraqi babies. And, of course we wouldn’t know that the NSA has been listening in on our phone conversations.
And, we wouldn’t know that all of our loved ones who are in the military have somehow changed into monsters and forsaken all their moral values and become vicious torturing thugs.
Thanks Katherine for setting us all straight again. How would we ever know what’s important without you?
Leave a Reply