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The Bush Cartel Ministry of Propaganda Made a Mistake When They Tried to Make a Heroine Out of Jessica Lynch: She Turned Out to Really be One

A BUZZFLASH EDITORIAL

When Jessica Lynch's unit was first captured by Iraqi soldiers, she was reported dead. In an initial article about her at that time, it indicated that Lynch had joined the army because she couldn't find a decent job in her hometown, Palestine, West Virginia. She had been turned down for a position at Wal-Mart.

Her true story is the REAL story behind the young men and women who serve as cannon fodder for the Bush Cartel, as the children of the Bush Administration and members of Congress (with one exception, the son of a Democratic senator) avoid service in Iraq.

Jessica Lynch, if initial reports of her death had proven to be true, would have remained a one-day blip in the horror story of American losses in the Iraq War. She would have become quickly forgotten, because that's the way the Bush administration wants it.

They prohibit coverage of the returning coffins of our dead to Dover Air Force Base. Neither Bush nor Cheney have attended one funeral of a soldier killed in Iraq. The Pentagon doesn't go out of its way to quickly identify the casualties. The better to depersonalize the deaths. Bush Cartel officials minimize the deaths of our soldiers. In short, Bush and Cheney would have wanted the death of a pretty blonde girl from West Virginia -- should Lynch have actually been killed -- to fall quickly down the Orwellian hole of a war where soldiers die as impersonal statistics.

The "Bush team doesn't want people to see human cost of war," the Toronto Star observed, "Even body bags are now sanitized as 'transfer tubes.'" [LINK]

But as we now know, Jessica survived due to the dedicated intervention of Iraqi doctors, working under extremely difficult circumstances. That's when Jessica Lynch's story -- and her life -- made an unexpected rendezvous with the Karl Rove/Defense Department Soviet-style "hero of the revolutionary forces" propaganda machine.

It is at this point that the Bush Cartel, at a time that the initial stage of the Iraq War was not going well (before the opposing army mysteriously vanished), decided to create a "larger-than-life blonde girl battles Iraqis with guns a-blazing and then is abused by them before being saved in a dramatic rescue conducted against battling hostile forces" heroine. The Bush propagandists even found an Iraqi lawyer to identify as the "hero who braved his life to cross through enemy lines and lead American forces to the rescue."

As we know now, the story that the military created to dominate the American media and stir Americans to an emotional pitch of anger at the Iraqis was virtually made up out of whole cloth. Even the Washington Post, the White House press release machine on the Potomac, was subsequently forced to print an article pointing out how the Pentagon had "mischaracterized" what happened to Lynch.

It all backfired for the White House. The Lynch story has become emblematic of how the Bush administration has adopted Soviet and Goebbels propaganda techniques to try to influence public opinion.

Sometimes, on the rarest of occasions, you create what you wanted, but not what you intended.

That's what happened to the Pentagon and the Bush Cartel Ministry of Truth apparatchiks when they made Jessica Lynch into a hero.

Much to their dismay, she turned out to be one.

She was fine with the Bush fiction writers as a one-dimensional cardboard comic book cut out, but when she turned out to have the stuff of a true American hero, you could hear the Bush Cartel Stalin-style public relations writers cursing up a storm from D.C. to little Palestine, West Virginia:

Lynch said she was thankful to the soldiers who rescued her but said she was troubled by the way the incident was portrayed by the military.

"It does (bother me) that they used me as a way to symbolize all this stuff ... yeah, it's wrong ... I don't know why they filmed it, or why they say the things they, you know."

...Sawyer asked Lynch if she went down "like, somebody said, Rambo?"
"No, I went down praying on my knees," she replied. [LINK]

Lynch says that a Native American soldier, Private Lori Piestewa, a woman with two daughters, was the one that went down shooting. But an "Indian" wouldn't fit the bill for a heroine for the Bush Cartel, not when Bush wants everyone to think he's a cowboy. And then there is Shoshana Johnson, an African-American woman, who fought off the Iraqis and sustained injuries. Blonde girls from West Virginia trump a black woman in the world of Bush's Ministry of Truth.

But Lynch is having nothing of the deception. She's the real thing, an honest American, a concept totally alien to this administration:

'Lynch is basically saying the whole thing was made up, a fraud,' said media critic Michael Wolff. 'At the same time, the media is going on with this elaborate production effort to make her into a hero. It's as if the size of the attention itself makes her a hero. Everyone is committed to making her the face of the war whereas the other story is that this is all a kind of scandal.'

But the story may be too far along to reverse. 'She can't take back being a star. The fact that she says it's all made up doesn't make a difference. It's been decided she's a star, and that's the only indisputable fact,' said Wolff. [LINK]

Even her alleged attorney savior has a lot of explaining to do. He and his family were whisked out of Iraq after he was proclaimed Jessica's savior -- and within no time he got a hefty book contract from Harper Collins publishers, owned by, you guessed it, Rupert Murdoch. And he instantly got a job in D.C. with a firm run by former Congressman Livingston, you know, the one who never became speaker of the House because he was exposed as a serial philanderer by Larry Flint.

The Iraqis at the hospital say they tried to get the Americans to come and take Lynch, but were turned back. It appears that the Bush administration decided they NEEDED to rescue her. So they sent in a unit and claimed that the soldiers had to shoot off Iraqi guards. As it turns out, they didn't have to shoot at anyone. They were told where Lynch was -- and took her back to the American lines.

"They used me as a way to symbolise all this stuff," she said in an interview to be aired on US television on Tuesday. "It's wrong."

When the former Iraqi lawyer came to Palestine, West Virginia, to visit Lynch, she curiously couldn't find time to meet with him. That told us all we needed to know. Apparently, she wasn't going to play the role the Bush Cartel wanted her to play in their carefully crafted script.

So this, in summary, is what happened: The Bush Cartel Ministry of Truth heard that a young blonde female soldier was severely injured and they made up a heroic story about her, as part of their ongoing Iraq-war attempt to manipulate American public opinion.

And what does Jessica Lynch do? She has the nerve to toss out the script the propagandists wrote for her. She has the audacity to speak for herself. She has the American heartland respect for the truth. She became a hero, in an entirely different role than the Bush Cartel wrote for her.

Jessica Lynch, the young woman who joined the army after she was turned down for a position at Wal-Mart has something no one else in the Bush Cartel has -- or anyone in the fawning corporate media -- or anyone of the braying "amen choir" of millionaire GOP television and radio pundits: Jessica Lynch has integrity.

A BUZZFLASH EDITORIAL

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