[Chefelf]

Time Names U.S. Soldier as 'Person of the Year'
Sun December 21, 2003 11:07 AM ET
By Hugh Bronstein

NEW YORK (Reuters) - "The American Soldier" was named on Sunday as Time magazine Person of the Year, giving credit not to those who formulate the foreign policies of the United States but those who face bullets and grenades as they execute those policies.

There was little disagreement in Time's newsroom that the U.S.-led war in Iraq was 2003's top story, Time Managing Editor Jim Kelly told Reuters. But he said there was a spirited debate about who would best represent that story as Person of the Year.

The American solider was represented on the cover of Time by three helmeted and uniformed soldiers from an artillery survey unit of the US. Army's 1st Armored Division nicknamed the "Tomb Raiders" after being assigned the task of searching for weapons in a Baghdad cemetery.

The three were named as Sgt. Marquette Whiteside, 24 from Pine Bluff, Arkansas, SPC. Billie Grimes, 26, from Lebanon, Indiana, a medic and the only female soldier in the unit, and Sgt. Ronald Buxton, 32, from Lake Ozark, Missouri.

President Bush and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld were candidates, but "the very messy aftermath of the war has made it clear that Washington's policy was going to have to be carried out day by day by the soldiers on the ground," Kelly said.

"We thought the title belonged to those people."

http://www.reuters.c...storyID=4027961

Please excuse me while I barf all over myself.

[civilian_number_two]

I thought "Person of the Year" was supposed to go to the most newsworthy individual, the person about whom the most stories were written. Frankly, I don't remember one story about the soldier as a concept, but I do remember reading about Bush and Saddam Hussein.

Time magazine is not a news magazine, by the way. It is the magazine equivalent of the Reader's Digest, with a dash of the National Review. Cover stories about the lives of the apostles and "scientific" searches for evidence of God, and now this horse hockey, show some kind of an agenda.

[K1NGWARREN]

Wow, what a dumb p.r. stunt.

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[Enhasa]

How politically correct!

Groups of people should not be able to win person of the year.

[civilian_number_two]

How politically correct!

Groups of people should not be able to win person of the year.

Oddly, it's perfectly appropriate to award "person of the year" to a concept, seeing as the US is waging war on a concept (terror) rather than any actual named enemy.

I've already forgotten what organization it was that named the 100 most influential people of the last millennium (right before the ball dropped on Y2K). But for all I know it was Time/Warner. In any event, one of their "most influential people" was "Patient Zero," the alleged first person to have carried AIDS to the human population. So the norion of awarding places of distinction to completely artificial persons and concepts has some recent precedent.

[Reader]

They're just one autonomous being.

Maybe they all transform and connect to create one of those huge-ass Transformers or something (names fail me at the moment)

[Supes]

They're just one autonomous being.

Maybe they all transform and connect to create one of those huge-ass Transformers or something (names fail me at the moment)

Constructacons???

[Reader]

Yea, i think that's it!!

They should have just but three Constructacons in place of the soldiers. Or...

[Jordan]

I like the soldiers, sure its hacky, but they are the reason you enjoy a quality life. That and the nuclear bombs we got.

[Chefelf]

How politically correct!

Groups of people should not be able to win person of the year.

This is the second year in a row that a group has won "person of the year". It's annoying.

Last year it was "the whistleblowers".

And I'm sick of people telling me that I have my freedom thanks to the soldiers in Iraq. My quality of life hasn't changed one lick since invading Iraq. I don't have the soldiers to thank. Killing Iraqis and occupying an area where we are completely unwanted is not preserving freedom. What it is doing is furthering global hatred for America. With just cause, I would say.

[Supes]

And I'm sick of people telling me that I have my freedom thanks to the soldiers in Iraq. My quality of life hasn't changed one lick since invading Iraq. I don't have the soldiers to thank. Killing Iraqis and occupying an area where we are completely unwanted is not preserving freedom. What it is doing is furthering global hatred for America. With just cause, I would say.

Could not agree more Nate. I can tell you as an international that the general feeling towards America has really taken a down turn since the shift from chasing Osama to Kkking over Saddam. Where once we simply saw America as being an arrogant older brother we now feel a great deal of resentment towards it's "world policy".

Diplomacy seems to be a thing of the past. America's word is now becoming law and the world as a whole is really beginning to hate this stand. It's almost as if the government has started the huge steel ball rolling down the hill and they now have no way to stop it so they are just going to keep saying, "well you best just get out of the way". The very idea that if you disagree you must be harbouring some sort of terrorist intent in completely insane, but they still seem to be able to trot it out and look like they actually believe what they are saying.

I seriously hope America get's a change of government. I'm not completely sure it will radically change the policy, but something has to give and perhaps a change of leadership will generate a new hope.

[Ninja Duck]

And I'm sick of people telling me that I have my freedom thanks to the soldiers in Iraq. My quality of life hasn't changed one lick since invading Iraq. I don't have the soldiers to thank. Killing Iraqis and occupying an area where we are completely unwanted is not preserving freedom. What it is doing is furthering global hatred for America. With just cause, I would say.

I hope this batch of soldiers doesn't turn out like the 'Nam vets.

[civilian_number_two]

And I'm sick of people telling me that I have my freedom thanks to the soldiers in Iraq.  My quality of life hasn't changed one lick since invading Iraq.  I don't have the soldiers to thank.  Killing Iraqis and occupying an area where we are completely unwanted is not preserving freedom.  What it is doing is furthering global hatred for America.  With just cause, I would say.

Could not agree more Nate. I can tell you as an international that the general feeling towards America has really taken a down turn since the shift from chasing Osama to Kkking over Saddam. Where once we simply saw America as being an arrogant older brother we now feel a great deal of resentment towards it's "world policy".

You said it brother. Americans have their freedoms for the same reason that Canadians have their freedoms. Their countries are just too big and too difficult to invade, and noone else has the long-range missiles necessary to destroy them utterly. The thing is, noone out there secretly wishes they could destroy Canada, while there are plenty of organizations that wish they had a shot at the US. I'm pretty sure were the US not so whimsically violent (Bush has yet to clearly prove a connection between Osama bin Laden and Afghanistan, let alone the so-called "Axis of Evil" or the justification for invading Iraq), then peoples worldwide would not hate and fear the US so much.

It's a children's argument that the current administration is using :"They hate our freedoms and our way of life. That's why they're attacking us, and that's why we've been bombing them for the last twenty years." Yeah, sure. I can really imagine how that would be. It's because they hate freedom. That's why they are willing to die if it means it may hurt the US.

Internationally, to say the US has a bad reputation is like saying that Germany was unpopular during the 40s. I'd like to see a different administration in power, but I fear that they'd need to be very strict regarding homeland security. The probablility that someone will commit a serious crime against the US is now exceptionally high.

PS: Incidentally, Bill Mahr lost his job for making a crack about how he thought it was ridiculous to try to call people willing to die for a cause "cowards," while calling others willing to die for a different cause "heroes." Books are banned in the US, albums are pulled out of multinational stores, small businesses are harassed by customs, people are detained without just cause, and elections are fixed. Add to which the middle class in shrinking as more and more the minimum wage class grows. Recently the army adopted a ruling that made it so they would no longer place soldiers in jail for being known to be gay, so long as the soldiers were willing to keep quiet about it. So the freedoms you enjoy, whether they are won in Iraq or in some other way, aren't so amazing that we need to keep waxing on and on about them.

[Jordan]

Ya you guys have convinced me lets abolish our armies! The world is a loving place lets embrace it. Pass the joint over my way!

[civilian_number_two]

Ya you guys have convinced me lets abolish our armies! The world is a loving place lets embrace it. Pass the joint over my way!

Oh, that's not it at all. Noone wants to abolish the army or, necessarily, to smoke pot.

The Bush administration is engaged in its second unjustified war since September 11. First, the US demanded that the Taliban, a US-supported regime, give up Osama bin Laden or the US would invade. There has yet to be any evidence that Afghanistan was hiding Osama bin Laden, and it is well documented that the majority of the hijackers were Egyptians and that they left the middle east from Saudi Arabia (a US ally, and important to the oil trade), not Afghanistan. Bush just said in a speech that the hijackers came from Afghanistan, noone bothered to correct him, and it was ok to invade.

Now the US has toppled the governent of Iraq, claiming to have been looking for "weapons of mass destruction." Bush frequently cited Spetember 11 in his speeches about the invasion, and of course Iraq has no weapons of mass destruction and Iraq has no connection to the events of September 11. It's been reported all over the place that those who claimed that they had evidence of the weapons in Iraq were lying.

During the course of the war, American civil liberties have been reduced, not enhanced. And corporations controlling information and the media behaved attrociously, censoring anything but the wimpiest of anti-war speech. The usual social programs have suffered as a result of increased military spending, meaning it is that much worse to be an American in America, and it's now damned awful to be an American abroad.

Halliburton has made a killing on its unbid government contract in Iraq, and of course the military will remain in the region as long as it needs to keep Halliburton safe.

Disagreeing with this war is no kind of dipshit hippie defiance. Sometimes it is patriotic to disagree with what your government is doing. If the US decided to invade France, and gave no strong argument (say, "they're testing nuclear weapons, like we did in the fifties"), then I would hope that you would find that objectionable.