Google Hits:HERO- Marine Sgt. Rafael Peralta 3,500 vs.231,000 DESERTER- Navy Petty Officer Pablo Paredes

Col. Oliver North' s recent column,HUMAN EVENTS ONLINE :: HERO IN FALLUJAH: Marine Laid Himself on Top of Grenade to Save Rest of Squad by Oliver North ,
on the heroism of Marine Sgt. Rafael Peralta who, despite his wounds, reached for a live enemy hand grenade and used his body to save his mates from the blast vs. the media hype surrounding AWOL-Petty Officer Paredes who called a press conference to announce he was "resigning" from the WOT is a near perfect illustration of Robert Kagan's essay "The Media and Medievalism" on the mainstream media membership in the cult of victimhood. Run a google check on each name and despite actions that will most certainly receive the Medal of Honor there are only, as of today, 3,500 hits of interest for Sgt. Peralta. Paredes' actions receive 231,000:

You see, Pablo Paredes, a Navy Petty Officer 3rd Class, did something the liberal elites consider "heroic" and the media consider "newsworthy" - he defied an order. Last week, Paredes refused to board his ship bound for Iraq along with 5,000 other sailors and Marines. He showed up on the pier wearing a black tee shirt that read, ``Like a Cabinet member, I resign.'' North.

The cult of... " victimhood is a legacy of the 1960s and its immediate aftermath — when, according to Peter Novick in The Holocaust in American Life (1999), Jews, women, blacks, Native Americans, Armenians, and others fortified their own identities through public references to past oppression. The process was tied to Vietnam, a war in which the photographs of civilian victims — the little girl fleeing napalm — “displaced traditional images of heroism.” The process has now been turned upon the American military itself. When not portraying them as criminals in prisoner abuse scandals, the media appear most at ease depicting American troops as victims themselves — victims of a failed Iraq policy, of a bad reserve system, and of a society that has made them into killers."

"Yet the soldiers and Marines with whom I spent months as an embed in ground fighting units found such coverage deeply insulting. At a time when there are acts of battlefield courage in places like Fallujah and Najaf that, according to military expert John Hillen, “would make Black Hawk Down look like Gosford Park,” media coverage of individual soldiers and Marines as warrior-heroes is essentially absent.⁴ "KAGAN