20th Apr 2004
Fables of the Reconstruction
Investigative journalist Jason Vest, writing for the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies, has a bombshell story that promises to be the buzz of anti-Iraq war conversations for a while. Reprinted here in the Village Voice, the lede begins:
As the situation in Iraq grows ever more tenuous, the Bush administration continues to spin the ominous news with matter-of-fact optimism. According to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Iraqi uprisings in half a dozen cities, accompanied by the deaths of more than 100 soldiers in the month of April alone, is something to be viewed in the context of “good days and bad days,” merely “a moment in Iraq’s path towards a free and democratic system.” More recently, the president himself asserted, “Our coalition is standing with responsible Iraqi leaders as they establish growing authority in their country.”
But according to a closely held Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) memo written in early March, the reality isn’t so rosy. Iraq’s chances of seeing democracy succeed, according to the memo’s author?a U.S. government official detailed to the CPA, who wrote this summation of observations he’d made in the field for a senior CPA director?have been severely imperiled by a year’s worth of serious errors on the part of the Pentagon and the CPA, the U.S.-led multinational agency administering Iraq. Far from facilitating democracy and security, the memo’s author fears, U.S. efforts have created an environment rife with corruption and sectarianism likely to result in civil war.
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“Lead” not “lede”. PN+1
Under Ever-Changing Miscellaneous Items of Interest, “analisys” should be “analysis” and “movites” should be “motives”. Also, if you would like to read my take on Columbine you can glance over to http://www.theoutrider.com/001127.htm and read my “Return to Denver” series from those bitter post-election days of the year 2000. How’s that for self-promotion? PN+2.
I think I’m going to have to implement a negative point system for you Nazis who challenge me and are wrong. Obviously, I know how to spell “lead” (okay, maybe not obviously, but I do). But “lede” is the spelling traditionally favored by American journalists for the intro to a story ().
The explanation I’ve heard is that there were several such alternate spellings, such as “graf” for “paragraph” and others (none come to mind, but there are others), so that they would catch they eye of the typesetter who would know that such a word was meta information from the copyeditor about the layout and not a word that was supposed to be inserted into the copy. E.g., if they had written “insert new graf here” the printer may have thought there was a graph to insert, instead of a paragraph marker.
Sorry, Pablo, no Nazi Griz points for you. (Inside joke inside inside joke, for the rest of you.) (And yes, that’s supposed to be two “inside”s in a row, Sonic Death Monkey, and besides, mistakes in comments don’t count!)
Okay, you get two points for the “Ever-Changing Miscellaneous Items of Interest” stuff. I’m going to have to really rethink this whole system. I’m sick and tired, among other things, of my comments being filled with nothing but Nazi Spelling Points crap. Stay tuned.