Saturday, October 17, 2009

When exposing a serious problem...

There is no reason to exaggerate or sensationalize it.

That's what happened when Grace Kelly over at MPP posted some crude pictures in her discussion of rape and abuse in the US Military.

It's inexcusable.

Many years ago, I did some speaking on the problems surrounding significant numbers of Gulf War Veterans seeking VA care, specifically because of depleted uranium exposure. Some people exaggerated the claims and issues, making the entire cause look bad.

Truth is rape and abuse are significant issues in the military. She's correct in saying that nearly 1 in 3 women will be raped while on active duty. No one denies its a serious issue.

Posting erroneous and crude pictures to further your cause is insulting. It's because of inexcusable acts like this that I am forced to admit that Dave Thul is right.

1 comment:

taxpaying liberal said...

The pulling of the 2 Grace Kelly posts today without explanation is a mistake in my opinion.

Grace had written and posted a story about US servicemen and contractors engaging in rape in Iraq. The picture she linked to the post were suppose to be of U.S. servicemen and contractor raping a 14 year old Iraqi girl but were in fact images taken from a Hungarian porno film. This story was exposed years ago as a hoax and in fact the Hungarian website was taken down at the request of the U.S. because it was used as a propaganda tool for El Qaida.

Many of us made comments about how out of line and offensive Graces posts were and tried to set the record straight. Several of us felt that it was important that liberals, Progressives and Democrats lead the charge so to speak against this post and the one to follow to show that Grace was not reflecting the views that many of us on the left held. We took the time to write comments and posted them on the blog.

When Grace took down her post she also took away our comments. I’m sure that whoever took down Graces post was hoping that the discussion would end there, but Grace’s post has already made it to several other blog’s and the ending comment at one was to say that although Grace and this blog owed an apology to the armed forces he didn’t think that would be coming. Sadly, this turned out to be the case.

There needs to be an explanation about this post. There needs to be an explanation about how and why it was removed. There needs to be an explanation as to why these images we posted on the blog. There should be an explanation as to where Grace got this story.

There needs to be several apologies made and changes to be considered in the rules and standards of some of the contributors. Commenter’s and readers on this blog deserve to have an explanation as to why our reaction was also censored.

We all make mistakes and there were a great many mistakes made in this case. Trying to sweep it under the rug may be the biggest mistake of all.