Perspective sure would help

The Daily Dish from Sullivan is as close to a daily must read in the blogsphere as is possible. Here are two items (here and here) that provide some much needed perspective to the diet of bad news shown on the "mainstream" media. Sullivan reprints an email he received. Excerpt:

He has been in downtown Baghdad for a year in the middle of it all! He said that it's really like an inner city that has a lot of gang activity. The people that live there are happy that the troops are there and are very friendly and supportive (women and girls always blowing kisses, men waving and smiling!) They point out the "bad guys" and call them "Ali Baba"! He said that so much has changed for the good over there. Kids are back in school, adults suddenly have internet access and telephones where before they had no way of knowing what was happening in the outside world. Businessmen are tearing down old falling apart mud and stone buildings and building real businesses.

Sullivan reports an item from Yahoo! News. Excerpt:

On Sunday, for example, scores of masked mujahedeen, shouting "Allahu Akbar," or "God is Great," paraded four men stripped down to their underpants atop the back of a pickup truck that drove through the city. Their bare backs were bleeding from 80 lashes they had received as punishment for selling alcohol. They were taken to a hospital where they were treated and released. Residents said a man found intoxicated last week was flogged, held overnight and released the next day.

Clearly the prison abuse by US troops is wrong and must be investigated and proper punishment delievered. But the critics who are running around like headless chickens decrying it have no sense of perspective.

As for the whole Iraq war, indeed, things are still chaotic but I keep hearing stories like the one Sullivan relays. Why don't these kinds of stories once in a while pop up on the mainstream media?