IRAQ: WHAT'S THE BIG WHOOP? YOU COULD BE RITUALISTICALLY BEHEADED ANYWHERE

Al-Qaeda-linked terrorists mutilated two U.S. soldiers, and an al-Qaeda-linked group now claims to have killed four Russian hostages, beheading two on video.

Fortunately, according to Lorie Byrd at the righty blog Wizbang, that's not a particularly bad thing:

Those politicians and journalists who use such media-driven atrocities as an indication of the overall situation in Iraq or of the status of the War On Terror (and there were many of them last week) mislead their readers/viewers/voters. Iraq is a very dangerous place, at least certain cities there are very dangerous, but what happened in Iraq could just as easily have happened down the road from me in Jacksonville or Fayetteville, NC. It would probably even be easier to snatch a couple of soldiers or Marines in one of those two U.S. cities, while they are going about their business in town -- banking, shopping or stopping off for a beer or two. Just look at what Jeffrey Dahmer did in Wisconsin, and there was only one of him. There really isn't much to keep a group of determined jihadists with the proper weapons from doing the same to someone, even a soldier or sailor or Marine, here in the States.

Yeah -- probably seven or eight people have been ritually beheaded in this country while you were reading this sentence.

But the goal is not to convince the American public that the U.S. military is failing in Jacksonville or Fayetteville, NC, is it? The goal is not to create public pressure on politicians to cut off funding or to call for a pullout of the troops based at Fort Bragg or Camp LeJeune. Evidently, the U.S. media does not grasp this concept because if they did so many would not have reported the heinous, barbaric murders of Pfc. Kristian Menchaca and Pfc. Thomas Lowell Tucker in the context of the status of the war effort in Iraq. Instead they would have focused on the desperation those in the jihadist movement must be experiencing to have to sink to such depths of depravity and brutality in order to draw attention to their cause, which is experiencing major setbacks every day. They might also have done a few pieces about how a movement claiming religious motivation could employ such sub-human methods. If such terrorist attacks were reported in that context, there wouldn't be as much point carrying them out in the first place either though, would there?

OK, I have an idea. Let's just ask the troops to put down their weapons and allow themselves to be captured, tortured, and killed. Maybe if the "MSM" sees enough of this kind of brutality it will finally get the message: the torture and barbarity is a sign of failure and desperation, and the more of it there is, the clearer it is that we're winning.