War is hell; thank God for the men and women who serve.

I wonder if the good doctors could perform anoral/analectomy on Jacko Layton. You know, in order to get his head out of his butt.

Texas, the medical term for that would be an anal-cranial inversion. Epidemic among Dippers I understand.

The best treatment discovered so far is a nice violent mugging. Pulls their heads right out.

Except for the guns, this read doesn't sound all that different than what goes on in emergency rooms around here. Its possible the poor Afgan guy got more face time with his surgeons and other specialists than the average in Ontario.

Doctors are the un-sung heroes of both war and peace.

I should add that this post is the best example of what's killing the dinosaurs in the earlier post. Nobody wants to think their soldiers are bastards, particularly when they aren't. CBC/CTV/Global, this is your wake up call.

That's excellent work. Richard Johnson's writing, and his art and his whole perspective feels to me somehow attached to the bedrock of Canadian history, as opposed to being another dropping of a media machine whose responsibility is, it seems, to measure out and apportion time-bound, limited partisan political views. I'm really glad the National Post is supporting and exposing his work, too.

"The remaining journalists had been pretty much stuck here at KAF...mostly held here by a media monster...with a gaping maw for bad news, waiting to be fed every detail on the tragedy. Who, when, what, where and why? Then, how did this happen? Then, who is to blame? Then the panel of experts, and the death toll statistics...

"The repetitive sameness of the formula irks me, and yet it is right and fitting that we should pay homage to the fallen as the nation they represent. I just feel as a nation we should pay them a little more homage when they are alive."

That last sentence is a sad understatement. Those same media elements who are most apt to trot out left-lib ivory tower experts to proffer UN-driven international law in defense of captured Taliban, and who for domestic partisan political reasons are happy -- eager, even -- to portray our soldiers as complicit in war crimes, are those most likely to co-opt Canadian soldiers' deaths, and to use the images of flag-draped coffins to shoulder a poll number a couple of points in one direction.

And, with the heady ambition of partisan politics, and therefore their own journalistic careers, in mind, there's no doubt that they do all this in a practiced, formulaic manner, to use Johnson's adjective, and from a position portrayed as being the personification of some kind of international moral high ground.

You'd think it would be confusing that those whose domestic personal/political ambitions trips up and hobbles our Canadian soldiers abroad are the same ones smoothly co-opting the name of peace and justice, but it isn't at all.

And when you see how the same media who with each broadcast undermine the support and therefore the safety of the troops are the ones most likely to broadcast images of the coffins, and the most lavish in their prurience, and the most likely to broadcast images of the grieving families of the fallen, it should cause confusion about who really cares about the well being of the troops, but it doesn't; it's actually clarifying.

Richard Johnson is right that as a nation we should pay the soldiers a little more homage. Behind his modest understatement and quiet irony, though, it's evident that he knows that CTV, say, is not the "nation," and that a lot of the media's funeral coverage, proffered up to satiate the craven demon of domestic partisan politics, is not actually in any manner homage to the soldiers.