The many Afghan and Iraqi civiian deaths and the deaths of American servicemen have been getting very little play for a very long time. Trying to link the dearth of coverage and public reaction to these event to MJ's death is specious. And that headline is just as manipulative as the tabloid coverage you are decrying. CNN is a tabloid. MSNBC is a tabloid. Don't pretend to be surprised and "shocked, shocked that gambling is going on in these establishments!" It makes you and your ilk look stupid and you're not. The MJ coverage was shameless, tabloid, exploitative and over the top but none of the excess (including the reactions of his fans) was surprising to anyone who has not been in a cave for the last 20 years. That being said, leave the moralizing fake outrage to the right wing and STOP TELLING PEOPLE WHAT TO FEEL AND THINK! ITS ORWELLIAN! And its a bitch move. If people want to weep, gnash their teeth and rend their garments over a dead celebrity what's it to you? People in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Gaza had impromtu MJ mourning celebrations. Does your moralizing apply to them too? This article and those like it have nothing to do with the "righteous others" whose loss we should spending our time contemplating. This has to do with people hating this man (which is fine) and/or not relating to why people feel his loss so deeply (again, fine) and the need to feel superior to other people (human nature). All that is fine -- just don't try to sell it to me wrapped in the sheep's clothing of dead Afghan babies. Its a loathsome tactic.

(holding hands over ears and eyes) I NEVER WANT TO HEAR THE WORDS PALIN OR MICHAEL JACKSON EVER AGAIN!

The ONLY name or words I DO want to hear over and over again are BUSH, CHENEY, ROVE, RICE, RUMSFELD, ASHCROFT, GONZALES (et al) and PROSECUTION... oh yeah, and JAIL!

No more 'bread and circuses'! Americans WANT and CAN HANDLE the TRUTH... AND NOW.

Good column that puts the tragedy in Afghanistan in perspective, but who listens to Thomas Engelhardt's cautionary tale here anyway? Just below Salon's Engelhardt's article is a boldfaced headline screaming: 'Everybody likes Obama's approach in Afghanistan...Even Bill Kristoll likes it"...

Really, Salon?

In a few short weeks, Obama's rented Pakistani army ($1.5B per day 'rental' fee courtesy of U.S. taxpayers) and his 'friendly fire' army have caused over 3 million refugees to flood the Af-Pak border in tents, hundreds of injured by drones, women pregnant and injured under filthy tents, children and young girls and boys selling their bodies for food at night. Tons of bombs have been dropped and there is no end in sight for Obama's War to ensure access hegemony over Unocal's Cheney-inspired oil pipelines to the Caspian. That's why they're really there. Not because gives a flying stool (any more than Dubya did) about girls' feminist achievements. But you won't hear or see the truth in our sanitized, celebrity-hypnotized, incompetent media. Michael and Paris and Britney dominate the hoi polloi's pablum-screens....

Obama's big interests-supporters want to make sure their spokesperson allows their oil company pipelines a "stable" environment for accessing Pakistan via Afganistan. But didn't the big boys learn anything from the Nixonian catastroophe that was Cambodia? Barack is too young to know this, but back in the early 70s, Nixon bombed the hell out of Cambodia's civilians (more than the tonnage dropped in WWII) to ensure this neutral country would not allow access to the Viet Cong. But heavy artillery just didn't work. On the contrary, Khmer Rouge, the atrociously barbaric communist forces, killed 3 million in pure genocidal fashion--thanks to Nixon's strategic blunder encouraged by war criminal Kissinger.

Congress just approved $106B for expansion of the war in Afghanistan and the military budget approved for this year is a stunning $665B. (This does not include billions of dollars addendum to the military budget for supporting over 1000 military bases, covert and otherwise, in foreign countries. The U.S. is the largest landowner of these anachronistic, unwanted-by-natives and obscenely expensive--think Healthcare instead!--useless military bases!)

Now, wouldn't Barack be better advised to either use the half trillion dollars allocated to his mighty military budget towards eliminating the Deficit?

Or, better still, Obama could immediately stop creating chaos and destabilizing yet another country and use the half trillion to legislate Single-payer Universal Health care for all his citizens. And he could always ask Hillary for advice on how Healthcare could best be effected as his own plan is thoroughly defective, ineptly ineffective, and takes care of the insurers' own health, and not the intended insured. Shame, really....

You ask: "Will what we don't know (or don't care to know) hurt us?"

I say: It is what we think we know but is patently false that hurts us more. Glenn Greenwald (7/9/09) has the latest installment on this truth, the gist of which is: a paper of record prints a leaked(!) claim from an anonymous(!) source; echo chambers amplify the claim; authorities proceed to make policy based on the claim, only to discover later that the claim was dubious at best.

Consequently, a bigger concern should be how to police the record.