I met Pilger in Vietnam. He’d just gotten back from Hanoi having sodomized Jane Fonda with his nose.

I don’t mean “patronize” in its most common popular cultural usage: “condescending to” (the second of Merriam-Webster’s three definitions for the word), rather I mean “to be a patron of; to support” (the first of Merriam-Webster’s definitions for the word).

I know what you meant – I just don’t think it’s as cut and dry as that. Our writers don’t choose the content of our Google ads, after all. And neither does your typical shoot ‘em up necessarily patronize warfare itself (or so I personally believe, a case can be made either way).

(Jesus wept — give me a subliterate drive-by wingnut over these lefter-than-thou Obama-is-teh-IMPERIAL-DEBBIL!!!1 f*ckwits.)

Kthnxbbai!

“Then again, I don’t think that gaming necessarily ‘patronizes warfare’ to begin with.”

I don’t mean “patronize” in its most common popular cultural usage: “condescending to” (the second of Merriam-Webster’s three definitions for the word), rather I mean “to be a patron of; to support” (the first of Merriam-Webster’s definitions for the word). Similar war games based on commercially available software are used by the US military to train troops. There was one called “Aegis” that made it all the way to the War College, and a couple of others they’ve long used to train tank crews and snipers. In fact, simulation software based on commercially available PC war games is in widespread use for combat training throughout the US military.

This is all a bit off topic however, since Ms Jaffe’s article suggests America’s mainstream media somehow gives a damn about dead American troops. They don’t, not any more than they care about dead Arabs, Iranians, Afghans, Palestinians, Jews or the 36,000 bullet-riddled corpses that litter our own neighborhoods every year. Witness the absolute disappearance of “antiwar” demonstrators from America’s streets now that Obama is President. Their onion skin deep empathy for people dying in the world’s hotspots (Iraq, Afghanistan, Detroit, Chicago, Washington, DC, Los Angeles, etc.) itself died the nanosecond they were elected into power.

To America’s left-wing mainstream media, those flag-draped aluminum coffins represent a means to a political end –a propaganda tool to be hackneyed for political gain. On a visceral level, they represent something far more sinister, an incomprehensible ephemeral condition wherein people, whether radical Islamic martyrs or US Army Rangers, are willing to die for abstractions, willing to forfeit their lives for a tenet, whether derived from religion, ideology, or politics. Things like that terrify the American left. Such self-sacrifice flies in the face of godlessness, degeneracy, self-indulgence, and cowardice, all hallmarks of Western liberalism. Thus the power of that flag-draped icon must be devalued, demeaned, and dehumanized. That’s what this is really all about.

Obama’s comments on the issue are just as vapid and superficial as anything else he’s had to say on any other issue. Consider the fact that during 2008, the year he ran for president, 506 people were murdered in his Chicago senatorial riding while tens of thousands of others were shot, stabbed, robbed, raped, or otherwise violently assaulted. During the long weekend when he accused rural whites of being gun-loving rednecks, fourteen people were shot to death in his Chicago senatorial riding. You want to make the cost of war transparent do you Mr. Obama? Start with the buckets of blood being spilled in your own backyard before you condescend to fix to the rest of the world.

Then again, I don’t think that gaming necessarily “patronizes warfare” to begin with.