Lies

A few things I want to share today. The first two are items reported last night by Bill O'Reilly on Fox News.

If you are someone who reads that New York Times, or even if you're not, you might be aware of a huge, front page story that they ran a few days ago about soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan and killing people. The story told about several Veterans who have been arrested for murder since returning from the war zones, and it told how many have been, but did not put the number in any sort of context.

Upon further digging it was learned that approximately 7 Veterans out of every 100,000 commit murder, contrast that to non-military citizens, 40 out of every 100,000 of them will murder someone. That's right, regular citizens are nearly 6 times as likely to murder someone than is a returning veteran. But that's not how the New York Times told the story. To listen to them you would believe that every returning veteran comes home and goes on a murderous rampage. The message is that, if you are too close to a veteran, you may be in danger.

The reason, it would seem to me, why they would do this, is that they hate President Bush so badly that they wanted to use this story as a way to say, look at how this madman has ruined these wonderful young Americans. It might have been successful too, if it had been true.

Another thing that O'Reilly talked about last night has to do with former Senator, and Democratic Presidential hopeful, John Edwards.

Edwards has been doing a lot of talking about the Economy, and how it's all stacked against the little guy, and how it's designed to keep us all down. It's his "Two America's" message, and he preaches it where ever he goes. Of course, he always fails to mention that the reason that it can be so difficult (he would say impossible) for us to dig ourselves to the top of the heap is that the Government taxes us at outrageous rates, and doesn't take steps to protect us from companies moving operations overseas, and doesn't take steps to curtail illegal immigration. Certainly not things Edwards would try to change.

Anyway, part of his "proof" of this problem is the approximately 200,000 American Veterans who are homeless. This is a sad state of affairs, and needs to be addressed, but Edwards needs to be honest about what is really happening. For starters, he talks about 200,000 veterans sleeping under bridges and on grates. This is untrue because many of these people sleep in shelters, or live at half-way house type places, or live with family, so they are not totally on the street, but they are still homeless. The other part of this is that most of these veterans, indeed many homeless people, are homeless because of drug or alcohol addiction, or mental illness.

Now, I'm not saying that this is a good thing, or anything like that. In fact, this issue needs to be dealt with, however, these veterans cannot get the help they need from someone who will not even acknowledge what the problem is. Simply blaming the economy, and railing against a system which allowed him to be a multi-millionaire himself, in an effort to get himself elected, is not going to solve anything. To solve the problem he needs to talk honestly about it, without the hype and rhetoric, and talk about the need to get these people into drug and alcohol programs, and help those who need mental health programs to get into them. Lies solve nothing.

This next one isn't a lie, but it's still stupid.

A school here in Florida had a program in place, sponsored by McDonald's, that any kid who did well on their report card would get a free Happy Meal. Sounds fine right? Well, one mother didn't think so, and she raised hob about it, and got the school to cancel the program, because she didn't want her daughter eating fast food. So, I'm going to put this as simply as I can... You are the parent, if you don't want your kid to have the Happy meal, DON'T TAKE HER!! But come on, don't ruin it for everyone else. Personally I think it was a great idea for the School, and McDonald's, to reward the kids for their hard work, at no cost the the parent. And hey, any parent that doesn't want their kid to eat there can ignore it and decide to do reward their kids in a different way.

Some say, "Why can't we all just get along?" I won't get into that, but I will say I think it should be, "Why can't we all just be honest?"