punched in the face by irony

We have had non-stop media coverage for several hours of the Virginia Tech shooting and the media is attaching huge significance to the number of victims with the thirty-one now known to be dead, already labeling this event as "the worst mass-shooting in US history" and "a tragedy of monumental proportions."

Non-stop, wall-to-wall, exhaustive coverage on every single news channel since it started, all due to the tragedy of 31 people who died in a single violent attack this morning as they went unsuspectingly about the normal daily business of their prematurely extinguished lives. While this is obviously a horrible event, it is being treated like a national catastrophe. Even Congress had a "moment of silence" broadcast by the television media and George Bush is going to make a public statement shortly.

Yet, when thirty-one Iraqis meet their fates under similar circumstances in their home town, the result of our country's reprehensible invasion of a sovereign nation, it seldom rates more than a paragraph on page 13.



What the fuck is wrong with this country? Every single day we are fed some form of the story that in Iraq, this would be a "growing pain" that is just barely noticed by the broader Iraqi society, yet here it turns into hour after hour of incessantly self-pitying and gratuitous news coverage?