DON'T TRUST REPUBLICANS

The Patriotic BS is just that--pure BS. Here's a sample, via Michelle and Sheldon Rampton:



That bit of propaganda was used by the website IowaPresidentialWatch.com. The photograph had been heavily doctored from the original, shown here:



The picture was taken by Bosnian photographer Damir Sagolj, who was (is?) working for Reuters in Iraq. Here's Sagolj's translated caption:

An Iraqi family happened to come to a checkpoint. Shooting began–no one knows who started it. It was a war zone. The family's car was caught in the crossfire, and the Americans raked it with gunfire for about ten minutes, using every weapon they had. In the process the mother was killed, several daughters were wounded or killed, and the father sustained multiple wounds. It's possible that the shooting began from the car behind this family's. There were a number of moving, shocking photos in the series that I took–for example, the father looking at his dead wife and embracing his wounded daughter, whose eye had been shot out.

This photograph of the child was taken out of context and published on the covers and front pages of American national and local media, as if to say, see how our soldier tenderly holds an Iraqi child in his arms. I got a phone call from People, the largest American magazine, with a circulation of 22 million. They wanted to know whether this American soldier had any children of his own, what he was feeling at the time, and so on. They weren't interested in what had happened to the child in the picture, whose mother had been killed and whose father had been riddled with bullets by American soldiers.

Note that not only has the background been removed, but the face of the child has been replaced! (One of the comments at Rampton's site suggests that the child is actually a boy.) In any case, to the extent that the child was conscious or alive when the photo was taken, if he or she knew what had just happened, there's no possible way that he/she could be glad that he's there. But Republicans will lie about ANYTHING. (So will most Democrats, but that's another post.)