CBS correspondent Kimberly Dozier is on the mend after being blown up in Iraq:
On July 17, CBS News correspondent Kimberly Dozier was moved from the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda to Kernan Hospital, "a state-of-the-art rehabilitation facility in the Baltimore area." In an e-mail this morning, CBS said "she was released yesterday and will continue her rehabilitation on an outpatient basis." Dozier has released this statement:
"Folks, I'm leaving hospitals behind, ahead of the deadline, or at least ahead of schedule. I've had a couple setbacks, and I still face a couple minor surgeries, but overall, the prognosis is far better than the docs had hoped just after I'd reached Germany. The teams at Balad, Landstuhl, and the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Md. worked overtime -- something like a dozen surgeries at least, including one that lasted 11 hours.
Just a few weeks later, I'm up on crutches and can even manage with a cane. It's not pretty, but I'm walking on my own -- and that, I also owe, to some hard-driving therapists at Kernan Hospital in Maryland, who kept saying, 'Now try this...'
The next step: continued outpatient rehab to get my body used to being in motion full-time.
Thanks to CBS, my family and friends have been close by throughout. That, together with all the amazing cards and e-mails from across the country, has really pulled me through. I've told friends it's been like having 10,000 guardian angels on my shoulders.
I've learned slowly how close I came to joining my friends, cameraman Paul Douglas and soundman James Brolan, both killed by the blast. I owe my life to the quick actions of the 4th Infantry Division's Sgt. Mootoosamy -- who took charge of the scene, with his commander down and many of his men injured -- and medic Spc. Flores, who patched me up. Even with a car bomb cooking off, sending shrapnel through the air just a couple dozen feet from us, Spc. Flores just kept calmly speaking to me and working on my legs -- no wavering, no pause.
Not a day goes by without thinking of Paul and James -- two of the most remarkable characters I've ever known. My heart goes out to their families, and I know no words to stop their grief. The last I saw Paul and James, they were rushing from their humvee to 'get the shot' of a young U.S. Army Captain, James Funkhouser, Jr., greeting Iraqi locals at a streetside tea stand. The bomb hit all three of them, together with an Iraqi liaison officer, and took all four lives.
I choose to remember them from the instant before the blast -- each one of them consummate pros doing a job they loved to support the families back home they loved even more."
#1
Even with a car bomb cooking off, sending shrapnel through the air just a couple dozen feet from us, Spc. Flores just kept calmly speaking to me and working on my legs -- no wavering, no pause.
Courage will be when you speak up the next time you over hear your 'friends' in the MSM who mouth or write the stereotypical garbage about the servicemembers as losers who couldn't get a job in the 'real' world and who are a bunch of uneducated redneck reactionaries to rationalize their own need to feel morally superior.
By Victor Davis Hanson When I used to read about the 1930s the Italian invasion of Abyssinia, the rise of fascism in Italy, Spain, and Germany, the appeasement in France and Britain, the murderous duplicity of the Soviet Union, and the racist Japanese murdering in China I never could quite figure out why, during those bleak years, Western Europeans and those in the United States did not speak out and condemn the growing madness, if only to defend the millennia-long promise of Western liberalism.
Of course, the trauma of the Great War was all too fresh, and the utopian hopes for the League of Nations were not yet dashed. The Great Depression made the thought of rearmament seem absurd. The connivances of Stalin with Hitler both satanic, yet sometimes in alliance, sometimes not could confuse political judgments.
#4
Nothing less than the eradication of every single radical muzzie will end this conflict. They will fight to the death, because Allan wants it. We should accomodate them. Anything that doesn't grasp this harsh reality is truly madness. We don't need a genocide, but rather, an ideologicide.
#5
Something that should re-enter the public lexicon is to start calling the anti-war crowd what they used to be called: "Copperheads".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copperheads
Not ironically, as repugnant as Copperheads were back then, they were proud of their label. And if the moonbat anti-war crowd were called Copperheads today, even if they understood what they meant, they would still be proud of the label.
The old Copperheads were apologists for slavery. The new ones are apologists for socialism and communism.
"Where is the press? Where is the media to see this massacre? Count our dead. Count our body parts." The man complaining this week about the media's inadequate coverage of the Lebanon conflict was a village mayor, Hussein Jamaleddin, whose words and the loss of his son in an Israeli strike were quoted by Associated Press reporter Hussein Dakroub. Later that day, another AP reporter, Hamza Hendawi, filed a graphic description of the funeral: "Weeping as he walked in a funeral procession hours later, Jamaleddin pulled at the limbs of the dead, carried to a cemetery in the bucket of a yellow front-loader."
Writing on this page about Lebanon last week, Riz Khan, the host of a program on Al Jazeera's forthcoming English-language TV channel and a former anchor for CNN International, described "the American media's sanitization of the conflict," and "those observing war from the safety of their living rooms."
Indeed, "those observing war from the safety of their living rooms" have become the most important political force engaged today in modern warfare. There is now a belief, held for different reasons by pacifists and propagandists, that if the media forces the people in America or Europe to see and read the bloody details of these conflicts, then public opinion will force their leaders, as Kofi Annan would put it, to stop the fighting. . . .
Today, print and electronic media are integrated as a force depicting war's carnage and cost. Mere reportage as in WWII has been succeeded by an implicit journalistic moral obligation to delegitimize the use of armed force, "the killing," for political goals. On July 21 as the fighting began, the New York Times's front page published a photograph of a dead person in a black plastic body bag over the headline, "In Tyre, the Dead Wait for the Bombings to End." In the days since, the paper's front-page photographs have been not so much standard journalism as Goya-like compositions on the disasters of this war. If Riz Khan believes the American press is offering a "sanitized" version of Lebanon, I would say he is overreaching.
The way war arrives in living rooms nowadays has an effect, and the effect often is revulsion. How could it not be? The thousands of replayings in 2004 of photos from the prison at Abu Ghraib had a political effect. The published photographs and videos of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's humiliations and beheadings of Western captives also had a political effect. One's emotions and politics are routinely jerked now from revulsion to hatred and back. . . .
Earlier images of human carnage had already brought calls for a cease-fire. At Qana, Israel's bombs purportedly killed more than 20 children, and this reality of course took the form of pictures transmitted globally and continuously of small dead bodies held aloft, often by the same Lebanese rescue worker, for cameramen and photographers. A New York Post headline over a dead-child's photo said: "Enough." Calls for a cease-fire went up from France, Spain and the U.N.; Israel, in the face of what was reported as "international outrage," declared a sudden, 48-hour cessation. It appeared that the modern means to make palpable the horrors of war had trumped politics to simply "stop the fighting."
But then, against this new political reality, Israel resumed military operations. Unlike in the U.S., where Abu Ghraib's photographs quickly sent segments of the political class into active opposition, Israel's political class refocused on the means necessary to achieve its strategic objective--defeating Hezbollah (with U.S. support crucial). A belated ground invasion began this week. Also unlike in the U.S., Israel's population centers were under constant military attack, rather than for one morning. Thus, preventing national extinction remains the more potent moral argument.
Images of war serve diverse purposes today. At Qana, the images' intent is to elicit a moral indictment of Israel's tactics and of war generally; at Abu Ghraib, to refute President Bush's stated nobleness of purpose in Iraq. Zarqawi's camcorder inside his house abattoir was meant to dispirit his American opposition "in the safety of their living rooms."
But whatever the purpose, a world in which people get fed streams of awful images to drive political conclusions produces a familiar effect: They eventually become inured to the images. Human wells of moral outrage are deep, but not bottomless. If emotional outrage is the basis on which they are expected to make judgments about politically complicated events like Lebanon, many will turn away, rather than subject themselves to a gratuitous, confusing numbing of their sensibilities. This is not progress.
Posted by: Mike ||
08/04/2006 07:19 ||
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#1
"those observing war from the safety of their living rooms" have become the most important political force engaged today in modern warfare. There is now a belief, held for different reasons by pacifists and propagandists, that if the media forces the people in America or Europe to see and read the bloody details of these conflicts, then public opinion will force their leaders, as Kofi Annan would put it, to stop the fighting. . . .
Suspect their assessment is a bit off. An accurate analogy might be, we're all Cowboy's fans and we're watching Drew Henson trounce New England in the Superbowl. More popcorn please.
#2
Israel is a small country. The unrelenting years of muslim terrorism has effected every family. They all have been first person witnesses to the barbarity of the enemy. They've played the game of land for peace and they still have no peace. They now know that there can be no 'reason', no 'compromise'. Those are the ground rules established by the enemy. The Israelis have learned that no matter what they do, the 'moral outrage' is reserved for them and not the barbarians. They may have finally realized that their safety depends upon ignoring those so 'outraged'.
Even though most Americans witnessed by distant media the destruction of 9/11 they still in large part have not been touched directly by the terrorist. They are inured of the danager by the fifth column which distracts the attention from the real threat and projects all the blame on a closer target to serve their short term domestic interests of power. We have yet to come to the understanding that the Israelis as a people have now achieved.
#3
"Even though most Americans witnessed by distant media the destruction of 9/11 they still in large part have not been touched directly by the terrorist."
I think that will soon be coming to an end. I would expect that we will begin to see more and more repeats of the Islam inspired murder in Seattle. And it will get worse.
When we have Jihad's detonating themselves on school buses and in malls...etc. We will come to know our enemies as well as the Israeli's. Then, and only then will we be able to do the things necessary to eradicate Islam.
"We have yet to come to the understanding that the Israelis as a people have now achieved."
#4
Where was the moral outrage in Rhuainda? Iraqi when Saddam was killing everyone? Sudan? Israel dead to suicide bombing in the 90s?
The thing is, the "moral outrage" only shows up when it benifits the MSM to show in on the news and fits their political needs. Otherwise, it gets ignored.
So don't talk to me about "moral outrage". Mine is fine, and is pointed at Islam. The rest of you MSM idiots can go fuck yourselves.
#5
I have a feeling that Mr. Henninger is right. Unfortunately, the average American will just tune out and put his/her ipod back on, at least UNTIL what Manolo describes happens here in the States. Sad, but true. I, for one, as well as most here, recognize the threat and would prefer to exterminate it BEFORE it can touch Israeli or US soil.
Posted by: BA ||
08/04/2006 10:38 Comments ||
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#6
"Weeping as he walked in a funeral procession hours later, Jamaleddin pulled at the limbs of the dead, carried to a cemetery in the bucket of a yellow front-loader."
Dang it, I knew I missed that opportunity to invest in Caterpillar. They even have 'em in Lebanon now? D90's!
Posted by: BA ||
08/04/2006 10:50 Comments ||
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#7
They blow up a school bus here or school and the sh*t will hit the fan so deep them muzzy assholes will forever fear the Great Satan. I guarantee the first MSM asshole that sez disproportinate response gets hung from the nearest tree.
WASHINGTON -- Israel's war with Hezbollah is a war to secure its northern border, to defeat a terrorist militia bent on Israel's destruction, to restore Israeli deterrence in the age of the missile. But even more is at stake. Israel's leaders do not seem to understand how ruinous a military failure in Lebanon would be to its relationship with America, Israel's most vital lifeline.
#1
If you believe that paragraph, you show me one politican of substance that will run an 'time to leave Israel fend for itself' platform this fall, other than the usual suspects.
#2
Another in a series of tiresome, downbeat analyses that seem to be the latest fad. And this comes just as reports are airing of some 500 dead Hezbos and Israeli troops clearing out Hezbo terrs from 20 Lebanese towns.
Also, Fox News reports that the IDF is engaged in a pincer movement against Hezbos in border-area towns and villages. As IDF ground troops slam into these fortified positions from the south, other IDF troops are slowing moving in from the north. That translates into move $1,000 payments from Syria to Hezbo families that have had one of their own sent to the heavenly hothouse.
As IDF ground troops slam into these fortified positions from the south, other IDF troops are *slowly* moving in from the north. That translates into *more* $1,000 payments from Syria to Hezbo families that have had one of their own sent to the heavenly hothouse.
Most people are familiar with the quick-strike IDF type of victory (think Six Day War, Lebanon invasion 1982) or recovery from near defeat as what happened in 1973. This is not that kind of war. It is a slow, methodical, plodding effort against a formidable, professional terrorist army.
IT IS DIFFICULT, maybe even impossible, to render critical judgment on a movie such as World Trade Center. The normal aspects of appraisal are meaningless. It would be absurd to measure the film by its pacing or its cinematography. Ultimately, the only thing that matters is whether or not it feels right, and even that nebulous criterion probably has more to do with the viewer than the movie.
All of that said, Oliver Stone's World Trade Center is a solid piece of filmmaking. WTC is an important movie. There were three stories from 9/11 which needed to be told. The first, about the doomed heroics of Flight 93, was brought to the screen by Paul Greengrass earlier this spring. The second, about the FAA's struggle to clear the skies and land 4,452 planes in 180 minutes, has yet to be made.
But Stone has picked the most dramatically satisfying part of the triptych: The story of Will Jimeno, John McLoughlin, Dave Karnes, and Charles Sereika (see this fantastic Rebecca Liss piece for the full tale).
Jimeno (played by Michael Peña) and McLoughlin (Nicholas Cage) were Port Authority officers who went into the Trade Center to help with the evacuation. When the first building collapsed, they were pinned down and buried in an elevator shaft.
Karnes (Michael Shannon) was a retired Marine working as an accountant in Connecticut. When he saw the news on the television at his office, he left, went to a barber for a buzzcut, put on his old uniform, and drove straight to Ground Zero, where he headed out onto the pile, searching for survivors. Authorities were calling the official workers back because night was falling and the area was unsafe.
Amidst the carnage, Karnes hooked up with another man, Sgt. Jason Thomas (William Mapother), and the two roamed Ground Zero, shouting, over and over, "United States Marines, if you can hear us, yell or tap!" After an hour, they heard something: Jimeno and McLoughlin, still alive under 20 feet of rubble.
Thomas went for backup, which arrived in the form of Charles Sereika (Frank Whaley), a recovering alcoholic and a former paramedic, who had also put on an old uniform and come to the crater to help. Sereika, Karnes, and then others, dug for hours to rescue Jimeno and McLoughlin.
Stone tells the story with confidence and an astonishing degree of empathy. . . . if anything, the only criticism which Stone could be open to with WTC is that he's too sentimental, that he feels the material too deeply. He lacks the clinical dispassion Greengrass brought to United 93. Some audiences may see this as a failing; I suspect most will not.
That Stone was able to make a steady, emotionally fulfilling movie from this amazing source material should come as little surprise to those familiar with his work. But what is surprising--astonishing, even--is that Stone has made a full-blown Jesus movie. World Trade Center is filled with Christianity. Karnes goes to church to pray before heading to Manhattan and Stone focuses for long stretches of this scene on the cross above the altar. There are crucifixes and rosaries everywhere. McLoughlin's emergence from the pit is shot as though it were the resurrection. Christ even appears in the film, twice. And all of this is handled not with condescension or even with a distant respectfulness, but with actual reverence.
Posted by: Mike ||
08/04/2006 07:40 ||
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#1
I will reserve judgment until after I've seen the film. However, most of the reviews thus far say that Stone has avoided his penchant for conspiracy tropes and instead has delivered a fine film. We'll see.
#2
Sounds like one I've gotta see, reading most of the reviews. While I can't stand Stone's politics, we should be the first to support him, if this film is as truly politically neutral as many say it is.
Posted by: BA ||
08/04/2006 10:41 Comments ||
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#3
From what I've gleaned, it IS a good film, about people doing the right thing, about heroism, about sacrifice, about helping your fellow man.
However, at the risk of being the lone voice of dissent, I have to say that a film about 9/11 that isn't political misses the point. True, 9/11 did bring out the best in people, and particularly, the best in New Yorkers. But the same could be said about American heroes down through the decades, who, when faced with horror and tragedy, rose above it and acted with the highest nobility and courage.
9/11 was about Islamofascist terror. It was about a paradigm shift. It was about a new and harsh reality in the world, that there are ragheads who want the death of every American and every Jew, and who actively seek to kill them. Of course, this reality wasn't new on 9/11, but the magnitude of the event brought the issue into focus. The WTC film should deal with that as well as the heroes. How do you de-politicize an inherently political and world-changing event?
In many ways, you do a disservice to those who died by de-politicizing the events of that day, because it is only in the context of why they died that their deaths have meaning.
#5
Once the fight starts its not about politics and Islam. It's about survival at the lowest level. I'm sure there will be many movies covering the politics of this war and their strike on 9/11, a time I am not wanting to arrive. The stories of the folks at the WTC and their heroics transcend the politics that lead up to it. This is such an emotional issue; I'm relieved to hear the director left all the politics out when telling these heroic stories. The last thing I needed to hear was Stone's political views during a story this important.
Posted by: 49 Pan ||
08/04/2006 14:45 Comments ||
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#6
Agreed, 49 Pan--- I've already heard his political views and have no desire to hear them again. I'm not saying Stone should have politicized the film, but that a film that clearly delineates what happened, without the BDS or hate America content, needs to be made. In the end though, for what this film is, it's sounding good. My criticisms dealt with what it is not.
#7
M1 I would like to see a movie from a pro US perspective on the politics and struggle we have with the EU cowards, the French apologists, Russia and China stabbing us in the back and Iran, the Soddies all in their true colors. But then there is no one in hollywood that would even concider it!
Posted by: 49 Pan ||
08/04/2006 17:45 Comments ||
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A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
"Folks, I'm leaving hospitals behind, ahead of the deadline, or at least ahead of schedule. I've had a couple setbacks, and I still face a couple minor surgeries, but overall, the prognosis is far better than the docs had hoped just after I'd reached Germany. The teams at Balad, Landstuhl, and the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Md. worked overtime -- something like a dozen surgeries at least, including one that lasted 11 hours.
When I used to read about the 1930s the Italian invasion of Abyssinia, the rise of fascism in Italy, Spain, and Germany, the appeasement in France and Britain, the murderous duplicity of the Soviet Union, and the racist Japanese murdering in China I never could quite figure out why, during those bleak years, Western Europeans and those in the United States did not speak out and condemn the growing madness, if only to defend the millennia-long promise of Western liberalism. 
