The Black Informant | African American Commentary, News and Community Building

In my post “The Black Soldier Has Been Sheehan-ized”, I pointed out how all the talk over how Black soldiers were being forced to their deaths in the Middle east (thanks to Bush) has noticeably gone quiet. Now that Obama has become President, suddenly it’s not web chic anymore to show pictures of Black soldiers crying or to use the phrase “No Blood for Oil”.

Politics is a dirty game. It is a game that is not won based on kissing babies, holding town hall meetings, or showing certain groups that you (sigh) really, really, REALLY care about them. It is one that won on the simple principle: Whatever works.

Now that Obama has won and history has been made, the war, the welfare of all the thousands of innocent civilians who, according to critics were being systematically slaughtered by our troops, poor and Black soldiers have all become an afterthought (remember when Ted Koppel and ABC News felt compelled to read the names of our soldiers on the air?). Translation: they were nothing more than stepping stones for an agenda.

Byron York for washingtonexaminer.com also notices~

“Remember the controversy over the Pentagon policy of not allowing the press to take pictures of the flag-draped caskets of American war dead as they arrived in the United States? Critics accused President Bush of trying to hide the terrible human cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

‘These young men and women are heroes,’ Vice President Biden said in 2004, when he was senator from Delaware. “The idea that they are essentially snuck back into the country under the cover of night so no one can see that their casket has arrived, I just think is wrong.’

In April of this year, the Obama administration lifted the press ban, which had been in place since the Persian Gulf War in 1991. Media outlets rushed to cover the first arrival of a fallen U.S. serviceman, and many photographers came back for the second arrival, and then the third.

But after that, the impassioned advocates of showing the true human cost of war grew tired of the story. Fewer and fewer photographers showed up. ‘It’s really fallen off,’ says Lt. Joe Winter, spokesman for the Air Force Mortuary Affairs Operations Center at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware, where all war dead are received. ‘The flurry of interest has subsided.’

[...]

Fast forward to today. On Sept. 2, when the casket bearing the body of Marine Lance Cpl. David Hall, of Elyria, Ohio, arrived at Dover, there was just one news outlet — the Associated Press — there to record it. The situation was pretty much the same when caskets arrived on Sept. 5, 9, 10, 12, 13, 14, 16, 22, 23 and 26. There has been no television coverage at all in September. (more…)

And for those who think some sort of apology should be issued over this, forget it. In politics, apologies are nothing more than an effective tool to show your opponent’s weakness. It has NOTHING to do with the principle of the matter.