Good News From Iraq

Rightwingers have been bitching and moaning about how the media only covers bad news coming out of Iraq. That's because it's almost all bad news. But now, we have some actual, verifiable good news, and the media has not been shy to report it.

Jill Carrol, the Christian Science Monitor journalist who was kidnapped in Iraq, has been released.

This is 100% good news. There is no downside to this story.

This means, of course, the right wing will make one up.

See, Jill made the mistake of saying that while being held hostage, she was “well treated”. Which led the idiot who runs the idiotioc Powerline blog to snipe:

This is a sentiment that one often hears from people who have been released by kidnappers; one gets the sense that the victims are grateful—understandably, perhaps—to the terrorists for letting them go…

Or maybe, idiot, one gets the impression that she was well treated. You know, the opposite of “treated poorly”? She never once said she was grateful, not once. You, idiot, made that up. If, under the circumstances, she was “treated well” and then says so, who the fuck are you to tell her what she meant? You’re pretty obviously projecting what you wish she would say, so you can use it as a weapon in your losing ideological battle.

Later, the idiot says this:

But let’s not encourage a lot of warm feelings toward the murderous thugs who kidnapped Carroll, shot her translator, and may well have received a ransom to let her go.

Did I miss the memo? Are there hordes of people with “warm feelings” for kidnappers? No, there aren’t, Don Quixote, so go battle some other imaginary giants.