Tom Sowell writes about one of my own favorite themes: The Media's War:

The Marines lost more than 5,000 men taking one island in the Pacific during a three-month period in World War II. In the Civil War, the Confederates lost 5,000 men in one battle in one day.

Yet there was Jim Lehrer on the "News Hour" last week earnestly asking Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld about the ten Americans killed that day. It is hard to imagine anybody in any previous war asking any such question of anyone responsible for fighting a war.

We have lost more men than that in our most overwhelming and one-sided victories in previous wars. During an aerial battle over the Mariannas islands in World War II, Americans shot down hundreds of Japanese planes while losing about 30 of their own.

If the media of that era had been reporting the way the media report today, all we would have heard about would have been that more than two dozen Americans were killed that day.

The military and NASA suffer from the same problem - it is impossible to get anything done with the media broadcasting their every move. Imagine if every time an oil platform worker in the Gulf died or lost a hand in an accident, they shut down all oil production, held Congressional investigations, and re-examined the design of every piece of drilling equipment, while the accident was replayed over and over and over. We'd be watching TV by candle light.

It's even worse than it looks - our FRIENDLY FIRE casualties in world word anything were higher than our current ENEMY FIRE casualties.

Simply amazing!

Heh, I guess you just gave yourself the inspiration for your next history spoof!

You might also want to do one on the Battle of the Leyte Gulf which would have been a media feeding frenzy.