I think we may be seeing a new technique the Powers That Be use to shield their own when the media catches onto widespread wrongdoing and legal culpability on the part of nabobs of various stripes.
Find a guilty female and throw her to the media. While the spotlight is on her, the cockroaches can scuttle into the darkness.
That’s what I think has happened to Martha Stewart – on the scale of fiscal culpability her responsibility is truly minor, but she gets all the media attention while the stockbrokers and traders who were serving up tasty IPOs to favored clients while the little guys got no information about them … they go unnoticed and unprosecuted, or prosecuted with a halfhearted little fine that’s all out of proportion to the money to be had by lawbreaking.
Now we see Pvt. Lynndie England played up big-time by the media. Of course, the male grunts who were involved in the abused at Abu Ghraib and got caught on camera are also being prosecuted, but Lynndie’s getting most of the ink and eyeballs. Meanwhile, the chain of command that stretches from Bush to England is slinking into the darkness.
Yeah, I see a pattern here. The big guys know the media will go for a female villain every time, and so they cynically serve them up to keep the media off their own. “Pay no attnetion to these dull, business suited guys lurking in the shadows, not when we have this halfway-decent looking WOMAN who did all the bad stuff, too, to concentrate on!”
Misdirection is a very old technique, this is just a new iteration of it brought on by the successes of feminism that allow women to make the same mistakes men do.
Except “Leash Girl” (I like that nickname!) wasn’t thrown to the media by “the powers that be”, rather she was outed by the single grunt (forget who his name was) who blew the lid off this whole mess.
I’ll be very surprised, and supremely disappointed, if some higher ups don’t end up in the slammer because of this whole situation. Even if the grunts were just having their jollies (and I doubt that veru much), someone was in charge and gave them the impression they could get away with this. I don’t know how high up the chain this went, but it had to be at least as high as the person running the prison and whoever else from the CIA or MI who was in charge there.
I don’t know if its specifically something against females… 2 cases hardly make up for a trend. Though certainly both are being highly visible scapegoats. Maybe its a sign of the times… women aren’t fragile home bound creatures. They now are also doing all the wrong things men do too. We are still chauvinistic and feel women are “less prone to wrong doing.”
It’s not something against females – it’s just opportunism. The media like female villains a lot more than they like male villains, cause let’s face it, male villains are a lot more commonplace and considerably less sexy on the whole. The big guys aren’t doing it because they dislike women, and the media are ATTRACTED to women, so there’s no antipathy involved.
It’s probably early to call it a trend for sure, but my logic strikes me as sound.
BTW, the guy who outed Abu Ghraib outed EVERYBODY there, not just England, so this argument reinforces my theory, rather than arguing against it.
Good lord. The reason why Lynndie England is getting all the attention is because she was featured on the photographs. It was she grinning over the pyramid of naked bodies. It was she pointing at the penises. It was she holding the leash.
Male soldiers, when they were in the pictures at all, were mainly background; England was in some cases the focal point.
This is one story that the media is not controling, so put your tin foil hat away.
If it were just Lynndie I’d accept my tinfoil hat gracefully. But the Martha Stewart thing is pretty much the same. I’m not saying there’s a cabal saying, “Let’s have our underlings do this when they get in trouble,” I’m saying that underlings are doing this, and it’s working for them. I think the media’s attention on the bright shiny woman villain is being used, and is well on its way to becoming a strategem. I don’t think that gets into tinfoil hat territory.
Some people around here are a little too prone to yell “tinfoil hat.” After awhile it stops being a way of guarding against wild conspiracy theories and becomes a cheap, worthless rhetorical device.
But of course, I’m not naming any names. THEY would come after me if I did that.
“If it were just Lynndie I’d accept my tinfoil hat gracefully. But the Martha Stewart thing is pretty much the same.”
Martha Stewart is a celebrity, ya’ know? She’s the “face” of her company and has hosted TV shows, etc. People will watch/read a story about her, because they know who she is. Thus she’s featured by the media.
Was there a similar conspiracy after Princess Di got killed? I mean, after all, relative to Di there were so few pictures and stories about the others involved…
Don’t you guys see what’e going on here? Martha and Lyndie both have short hair! Its so obvious that there is a trend here of the media focusing on short haired women.
Perhaps, but this little flight of fancy is worthy of the moniker.
The media loves a good scandal because it gets ratings, and they don’t particularly care about the sex of the target of that scandal. Have you so quickly forgotten Kobe Bryant, Scott Petersen, etc, etc, etc?
Martha Stewart was prosecuted because she committed a crime and tried to cover it up. Her case hit the courtroom before other examples of corporate wrongdoing (Enron, etc) because her case had a simpler universe of facts than the others (indeed, simpler by an order of magnitude).
That doesn’t mean prosecutors aren’t going after the others – indeed, Fastow and Skilling have already copped pleas in exchange for testimony. But the nature of the Enron case (and others like it) is that it takes longer to build a prosecutable case because the facts are maddeningly complex.
The media’s fascination with Martha is simply explained by her celebrity. Unlike some anonymous suit in a boardroom, she was in people’s homes regularly via her TV program and magazine.
Ditto Leash Girl. Television is a visual medium. It needs pictures to make a story work. Leash Girl is prominently featured in the pictures. Other soldiers are not. What is the media supposed to do? Photoshop a male soldier over Leash Girl?
So yes, I think the tinfoil hat moniker is appropriate.
Oh, look, a bunch of Great Sky Fairy believers and Invisible Hand worshippers are measuring me for a tinfoil hat. Thanks guys, I’ll pass. You can keep yours, though.
Why don’t you try addressing the (very sound) reasons put forth for describing your theory as at odds with reality instead of stamping your feet and pouting?
I won’t even start to get into the fallacious reasoning that equates a generalized belief in a higher power (note: not biblical literalism) with membership in the tinfoil hat brigade, or of the incredible foolishness that calls favoring private-sector solutions to policy questions a crackpot conspiracy theory.
Given the title, I thought that this was going to be a very different sort of thread. I thought Evil Captor had a prediliction that might reasonably include Ms. Coulter as well in febrile images.
Some of it may well be a bit of “man bites dog.” Both the military and top corporate executives are heavily male dominated areas, and there’s always some added level of interest when a story involves a female in a heavily male field. On the other side of the coin, Jessica Lynch, and to a lesser extent Shoshona Johnson, were the focus of the POW stories in the initial invasion, sometimes to the virtual exclusion of their male comrades.