Sunday, July 4, 2004
I guess it's when President Bush talks about them. So many of Reuters' problems encapsulated in one little article, from the use of scare quotes around 'values' in the headline, down to the constant drumbeat of negativism that makes it sound as though George Bush will be looking to escape from the United States rather than run for re-election. Just incredible.
Boston.com: Bush Extols American 'Values' in West Virginia
"As in other times, Americans are serving and sacrificing to keep this country safe and to bring freedom to others," the Republican president said, recounting military successes against Afghanistan's Taliban and Iraq's Saddam Hussein.
Bush described the United States as "the world's foremost champion of liberty" and said "terrorists" cannot be negotiated with. "We must be relentless and determined and do our duty!" he declared while pounding the podium.
"We will fear no evil and we will prevail."
In a state with a large number of military veterans, Bush lavished praise on the sacrifices of U.S. soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan, including the 989 killed and 5,726 wounded in both countries as part of his administration's war on terrorism...
Who's war on terrorism?
Any favorable developments were overshadowed by a continued drumbeat of bad news from Iraq, however, including a seemingly endless stream of military deaths culminating in the reported beheading of a captured U.S. marine.
A spate of opinion polls showed Bush's job approval ratings scraping fresh lows and suggested the public was becoming increasingly skeptical about the value of the Iraq war and the administration's justification for the March 2003 invasion...
...Recent opinion polls suggest Kerry, a decorated Vietnam combat veteran, could be gaining an edge over Bush in West Virginia, which controls five votes in the Electoral College.
West Virginia is home to two of the most prominent faces of the Iraq war: Jessica Lynch, the Army supply clerk elevated to fame by media reports of battlefield heroism that later proved false; and Private Lynndie England, charged with abusing Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad.
The president's arrival was delayed by the failure of one engine on Air Force One, discovered while it was still on the ground in Hagerstown, Maryland. The flight was delayed about 90 minutes as a second aircraft was flown in from Andrews Air Force Base near Washington.
That forced him to forgo a Sunday church with conservative evangelicals, a key Republican constituency.
I'm surprised that even at this stage of the game, Reuters still comes up with articles so agenda-laden they can still make me say, "Wow."
I read one of those stories this weekend and noticed the words they chose to use. "Slumping" is a powerful words, loaded with imagery. They want to portray Bush as a slumping man, weak, impotent. And the use of quotations around "values", or course, is that Bush's values (traditional, decent) are different from those of leftist news services.