A Plague on Both Your Houses

The Newsweek article and the riots that followed it leave me with a feeling of disgust and anger at both the MSM and the Islamofascists who actually did the killing and rioting.

From James Likeks, via Hugh Hewitt we get this:

"It's not right to ask who's side the media's on. They're on the side of America, of course. But it's a rather perfect version they love - at least more than the real messy manifestation. They want the United States to be respected and true to its ideals, and that's why it's important to run a little blurb informing the world that .0000000001 percent of its armed forces put a holy book in the loo to get some information from a detainee. (One wonders if the detainee had 'fessed up to a plan to bring down the Newsweek HQ - would the editors have felt a relief or regret? Fruit of the poisoned tree, you know.) They want America to be good, which is why the actions of some yahoos one wacky night in Abu Ghraib must overshadow and define the entirety of the reconstruction effort. They want the soldiers to win, of course - of course! But if a Marine shoots an enemy who's already down but may have a suicide belt, this must lead the news. Future enemies will know we play clean, and do the same. "Play clean" for them means using a fresh scimitar for beheading, but it's a start.

Everything makes sense from an office high in Manhattan. It's all quite clear.

Newsweek's Jonathan Alter summed up the Big Media position on the Imus show: 'I think the larger question that people have to ask is, do they want news organizations out there trying to dig or do they want to take all their information from the government? And, we are still you know, pretty determined, very determined, to be out there digging.'

True. Absolutely true. But to what end?"
Why money and fame and power of course. But most certainly not the national interest.

Absolutely dead on right.

From Andrew Mc Carthy at NRO, we have an equally valid response:

Someone alleges a Koran flushing and what do we do? We expect, accept, and silently tolerate militant Muslim savagery — lots of it. We become the hangin' judge for the imbeciles whose negligence "triggered" the violence, but offer no judgment about the societal dysfunction that allows this grade of offense to trigger so cataclysmic a reaction. We hop on our high horses having culled from the Left's playbook the most politically correct palaver about the inviolable sanctity of Holy Islamic scripture (and never you mind those verses about annihilating the infidels — the ones being chanted by the killers). And we suspend disbelief, insisting that things would be just fine in a place like Gaza if we could only set up a democracy — a development which, there, appears poised to empower Hamas, terrorists of the same ilk as those in Afghanistan and Pakistan who see comparatively minor indignities as license to commit murder.
"Minor indignities? How can you say something so callous about a desecration of the Holy Koran?" I say it as a member of the real world, not the world of prissy affectation. I don't know about you, but I inhabit a place where crucifixes immersed in urine and Madonna replicas composed of feces are occasions for government funding, not murderous uprisings. If someone was moved to kill on their account, we'd be targeting the killer, not the exhibiting museum, not the "artists," and surely not Newsweek

If there was only a way to get the MSM and Islamofascists destroy each other, I would be willing to watch that spectacle.