The Treason Times Strikes Again
By Chuck Hyde, Editor of StandBesideHer.com
The New York Times has once again proven it’s not going to let the facts get in the way of a good story. On Sunday the Times ran a story about troops returning from Iraq and Afghanistan committing murder. The article Across America, Deadly Echoes of Foreign Battles is part one of a series War Torn. Which is nice because this means we will be treated to yet more misguiding attacks on our troops.
According to the times, and these are figures that seem to be widely accepted, vets returning from Iraq and Afghanistan have committed or have been charged with committing 121 murders. In themselves these are alarming numbers and, if you are a family member of one of the murder victims, one is an alarming number. The Times made this out to be a murder spree of epidemic proportions. Crazed vets are coming home and running amok in our neighborhoods, killing our loved ones. And why, as the Times makes the case, wouldn’t they? After all, these are trained killers. Trained to kill, sent to a foreign country with an incompetent commander in chief, and then returning with that same indifferent commander in chief not letting them have the mental health access they desperately need. Who wouldn’t be a mad butcher after that?
The only problem with the Times article is that is entirely misleading. As I said at the beginning, it doesn’t appear that anyone disputes the Time’s number of murders. The problem is context. If you compare the murder rate of all Americans aged 18 – 34, the typical age of returning vets, the murder rate is five times the rate of the vets. In other words, if the vets had the same murder rate as the general population they would have murdered about 600 people instead of 121.
Using their numbers, it appears that going to war makes a person less likely to commit murder. In fact, based on these numbers, the staff members of the New York Times are more likely to commit murder than the average returning veteran. Unless, of course, they are a returning vet.
This is yet another in a long list of hit pieces against our military by the main stream media. From what I have read the Times used nine staff members to produce this article. You would think one of them could take the time to Google murder rates for 18 – 34 year olds. I did and within seconds came up with this site Bureau of Justice Statistics Homicide trends in the U.S.: Age. Maybe the Times hired some of the fired fact checkers from the famous Dan Rather/CBS George Bush Texas National Guard story from 2004. They couldn’t figure out that the piece of “record” from Bush’s file was a forgery.
The final interesting piece of this story is the lack of story it created. Fox News talked about it. Beyond that, silence. You would think that a major newspaper essentially fabricating a story would be a big deal. I wonder if MSNBC would cover it if the Times had fabricated a story about Barrack Hussein Obama?
I have a thought, maybe these veterans aren’t crazed killers because of the war and George Bush. Maybe they were finally pushed over the edge when they returned and saw all of the vile, libelous filth reported about them in the liberal media. We do have to give the libs a little credit though, at least there only metaphorically spitting on the returning troops this time. That’s what’s on my mind.
About The Author: Chuck Hyde is editor of StandBesideHer.com. He is also a husband and father of two teenage boys and a younger daughter. His family lives in the northern Midwestern rural United States, where they enjoy camping, fishing, and other outdoor activities together. Chuck is a Registered Nurse in an inner city emergency room and has had a lifelong addiction to politics.
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