Garbanzo Toons

Annoying Articles

It's a darn good thing the Detroit Free Press is totally unbiased in its reporting of the news. Otherwise I might suspect them of cheerleading instead of reporting. For example, there was this report the other day,

Luanne Laemmerman is the first to roll her eyes when she says something she considers corny about the environment:

"If we all just did a little bit, it would make a big difference."

"I consider all of us to be on the same team."

"Our human survival depends on it ... as corny as that sounds."

But while Laemmerman tempers the hurrah comments with eye rolls and self-deprecating jokes, she also says she means every word.

"I'm an activist, plain and simple," she said.

To many Macomb County nature lovers, that's a good thing.

Laemmerman, 43, of Royal Oak moved into a new job as the county's environmental prosecutor last week. She will be responsible for enforcing federal and state wetlands regulations. The job, a rarity in county government, marries her two loves: the law and the outdoors.

The Free Press is celebrating an environmental fascist. Yes, we should take care of our environment, but as American citizens we also are supposed to have property rights. It's one of the bases of our society. How many of these rights will Laemmeran self-righteously trample on in order to protect the sacred environment from us nasty human beings?

On the Free Press letters page, there were two letters in support of Ismael Ahmed, whom I've written about here.
Did they receive any negative letters? I know of at least two. I wrote them in response to previous puff pieces on Ahmed.

Newsweek did a long piece on Ken Burns' World War Two series. It sounds like something I'd like to watch, but that means not only remembering to tune in at the right time and on the correct channel, but arguing with family members who may be watching something else at the time. The aspect of the article and the series that annoyed me was Newsweek and Burns forcing WWII onto the Iraq template. Yeah, yeah, he's against the Iraq War, so what. But at one point in the article,

It deliberately cuts from footage of the ruins and radiation victims of Hiroshima to an inappropriately raucous VE-Day celebration in Times Square, with Glenn Miller on the soundtrack. "Yup," Burns says, "we stick it in your face." He was concerned enough about this point to write, in a follow-up e-mail, "I share your sense of the obscenity of celebration after atomic obliteration. That's why we did it that way, and that's the way it was here in these United States, despite the skin-crawling nature of it."

Sorry Ken, but these people had a damn good reason for their celebration. They had just gone through four years of war. Millions had been horribly killed and now the killing had come to an end. Their fathers, brothers, and sons were coming home instead of being forced to invade the Japanese mainland. Millions of American soldiers were getting their lives and families back. What is inappropriate is, just because you don't like the way the war ended (and yes, it was awful, it was a war) to continue to second guess the decision to drop the atomic bombs from the comfort of a studio sixty years after the fact.

I had to get that out. I feel better now.

Labels: Detroit Free Press, Ismael Ahmed, Ken Burns, Newsweek, World War II

posted by Harry @ 7:25 PM