They do the things they do because their military is a bunch of assholes, not unlike the US military.

Only in twelvepacks, alas.

I hope this thread does not degenerate into a shouting match between pro-Basketball and anti-Basketball advocates.

Basketballs are the teeth of Satan!

Hey, can you get those at Wal*Mart?

The BBC World Service’s reporting can be summarized thus:

That message ain’t nurturing terrorists.

Not even Irish ones?

Matthew Yglesias and the like are pro-Basketball and point out Obama is too. FWIW …

Actually, they are perfectly rational.

Of course, one could argue the grievance Joe Sixpack has toward liberal cultural elites is perfectly rational (so long as the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy is accepted as “rational”) given that (Republican caused) decline in Joe Sixpack’s socio-economic status immediately followed the civil rights revolution: of course, Joe Sixpack will begin to think civil rights are zero sum and buy into the GOoPer policies (the very same ones that actually screw him over) that dictate less freedom for thee means more for me.

But “rational” grievances” still need not be nurtured and magnified with all sorts of scare and rumor mongering.

Moreover, as much as we need to be less credulous toward, e.g., US claims, that doesn’t mean, for example, that the Israelis are believing so irrationally. The Israelis do the things they do not because they are evil Jews Zionists …

Get Bloatie and the Hootfish in there to make it a trifecta.

Can we just use the Conspiracy’s Telsa Earthquake Machine to cause the earth to open up and swallow them?

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Creed do not merit an airstrike.
On the other hand, interviews of political figures conducted by Charlie Gibson or Chris Wallace… send in the B-2s with missiles hot and take Chuck and Chris OUT.

Can we at least hold off until they conference with Avril Lavigne? We’ve got to save a few bucks and I figure one mission is better than two.

Why woudl they do that????

Stephens here identifies here a very real problem. A problem which, of course, applies to his paper’s editorial page as much as the French media. But it is a legitimate complaint nonetheless: media nurturing of grievances, whether it is the French media nurturing Arab grievances, the Rwandan media nurturing Hutu grievances or the Ironically-Called-Liberal-Media nurturing war-fantasizing GOoPer grievances does help fuel (respectively) terrorism, genocide and stupid wars in Iraq.

He’s completely wrong about the BBC, though, for example — the BBC World Service is not nurturing terrorist grievances. The BBC World Service’s reporting can be summarized thus:

“The world is a silly, mad and even dangerous place. Things were so much better when we Brits were in charge of it”.

That message ain’t nurturing terrorists. That message (in a slightly different form) nurtures neo-imperialist neo-con fantasies amongst the twit-ocracy.

Of course, the idea that the media shouldn’t be so credulous when it comes to statements made by terrorists (or, pace Stephens, the GOoPers) doesn’t mean that the media should be more credulous about what the Brits, US or Israelis say. That is just a complete (and purposeful) non-sequitor on Stephens’ part.