Opaque Lucidity

1968 Called...

Today is the 40th anniversary of the My Lai massacre (sorry for the Wikipedia link). Put simply, members of Charlie Company of 1st Battalion, 20th Infantry Regiment, 11th Brigade, 23rd Infantry Division killed between 300 and 500 civilians in the hamlet of My Lai in South Vietnam. Despite the American Left's assertion that the Army tried to cover up the incident, the most the brass can be found guilty of is sloppy investigating. But after 40 years, those who wrote the history have won the day.

Enter Daniel Schorr, the 91-year old correspondent for National Public Radio. Schorr is the last surviving member of Edward R. Murrow's posse, which raises him to the status of demi-god to those who see journalism as not merely reporting the news but a way to shape the world to fit their beliefs. His commentary on this morning's NPR Weekend program mentioned My Lai and compared it to a more recent "atrocity"- Haditha.

Haditha was no My Lai for several reasons. First, the final accusations deal with three Iraqi civilians, not hundreds. That's not to say those three lives were not precious, but it's a lot harder to imply widespread malice with so few innocent deaths. Second, the two Marines with the heaviest charges against them had their cases dismissed last fall. The other accused men are in trouble not because of their actions in Haditha in November, 2005, but because the military believes they tried to cover up events.

Of course, Schorr never mentions any of these facts. Why should he? The pseudo-intellectual leftists in this country want an Anti-American cause of their own to play with and the war in Iraq has given them a whole toy chest of issues. Haditha is just one of them, but it's a shiny one near the top, right there with Abu Gharib.

Schorr is about 20 years overdue for retirement, along with the rest of the fellow travelers from the 50's and 60's who now dominate college campuses and who serve as an inspiration to idiot 20-somethings who make a career out of protesting. The early pinkos like Schorr and their hippyized descendants did and do nothing for this nation; not during Vietnam, not during the Cold War and not now.