The Dike Is Broken

I am writing less often lately, mainly because national discourse has become so utterly divorced from reality that each time I start to write I get a sense of the Dutch boy with his finger in the dike. The trickle has become a flood and it is time to run for your life.

Harvey Weinstein’s devil is revealed, and now every public person of the male gender is being accused of sexual attack by every female person who has ever been within arm’s reach of him. Our elections are supposedly meaningless due to the ability of foreign powers to corrupt them, and yet we are supposed to believe that an election of Democrats next year would be entirely valid and would save the world. Articles purporting to be scientific discourse are filled with “might be” causes and “could happen” events.

When the news was first released that four of our soldiers had been killed by ISIS in the African nation of Niger, my first reaction after sympathy for the soldiers and their families was to assume that they were not killed by ISIS. My next thought was not to wonder why they were in Niger, we have military units everywhere, but to wonder why their deaths were being reported when similar deaths under similar conditions in the Philippines was not.

Last night Margaret Brennan reported on the battle in Niger on CBS News, saying that the unit was attacked by, “an ISIS offshoot operating in the area.” She described the group of “35 to 40 fighters” and its leader and, just twelve seconds after describing it as “an ISIS offshoot” said that the leader “is wanted by US and French authorities, but US intelligence has not established any direct link between him and the ISIS militants that the US is already fighting on the battlegrounds in Iraq and in Syria.”

We won't even go into the US "fighting on the battlegrounds in Iraq and in Syria," which we vehemently claim we are not doing, but how credible is a news organization which, within the span of just a few seconds, says that “an ISIS offshoot” has “no direct ties with ISIS militants?”