Dig this video clip of John McCain on FAUX News. He’s talking about the Russian incursion into Georgia as they continue to struggle over South Ossetia. The very last thing he says is (and I quote): “In the 21st Century, nations don’t invade other nations”.
Somebody really needs to bring Old Wrinkly White Guy up to speed.
A few dispatches for those of you who have been out of the loop recently:
An important civic leader known for his crusading against immorality was caught up in a shocking prostitution scandal this week: apparently Client #10 is the police chief of Tehran, who was reportedly nabbed in flagrante delicto with six…count ‘em, six…prostitutes. Somehow I don’t think a simple resignation is going to get this guy off the hook.
While we were all busy watching Clinton and Obama hack and slash at each other, Dennis Kucinich managed to fend off the four other Democrats running against him in the primary contest for his seat, scoring a large enough majority to avoid a run-off. So did Ron Paul. And there is now a second Muslim in the House of Representatitves: Democrat Andre Carson won the special election to fill the seat that was vacated when his mother passed away a couple of months ago. Sorry Rush and Hillary, Barack Obama is NOT the other one. Also flying under the radar was the news that a Democrat won the Illinois Congressional seat vacated by former speaker Dennis Hastert.
The Pentagon would like you to know that they’ve concluded that there were absolutely NO ties between Saddam Hussein’s government and Al Quaeda. However, the White House would prefer that you didn’t know that. After all, if Saddam didn’t have WMDs, and he wasn’t working with Al Quaeda, then what the fuck have we spent $3 trillion dollars for?
If you’re a kid attending school in Oklahoma, pretty soon you can ace every exam from here on out just by saying “Jesus did it.” The Oklahoma legislature will vote on a bill that will allow students to express their religious viewpoints without being penalized in class, on homework, or in any other way. Of course, as Phil at Bad Astronomy Blog points out, that applies to everyone, not just Christians, so if you’re a Pastafarian you can credit the Flying Spaghetti Monster without fear of summer school, too. The Texas legislature is considering a similar meaure.
And that’s the way it is….
Over the weekend, George Bush vetoed a bill that would have prohibited the CIA from using waterboarding and other forms of torture.
In this video (via boingboing), former FBI interrogator Jack Cloonan, who was featured in the Oscar-winning documentary “Taxi To The Dark Side”, says that, while torture is practically worthless as an intelligence-gathering tool compared to standard interrogation, it has been most effective in persuading people in Muslim countries that jihad against the U.S. is morally acceptable.
So do photos like this recently-released picture from Abu Ghreib (WARNING: graphic violent image).
We have become the very thing we say we wish to destroy.
In every city, town, and small village across America, there are hundreds, nay thousands of Iraqi invaders. You see them among your friends and neighbors, along your busy main streets and quiet residential drives, in your back yards, and occasionally even inside shopping malls! They are at your church, your synagogue, your amusement parks, your national monuments, even in the bushes and trees!
They are called HOUSE SPARROWS!
The war is not meant to be won, it is meant to be continuous. Hierarchical society is only possible on the basis of poverty and ignorance. This new version is the past and no different past can ever have existed. In principle the war effort is always planned to keep society on the brink of starvation. The war is waged by the ruling group against its own subjects and its object is not the victory over either Eurasia or East Asia, but to keep the very structure of society intact. — 1984 by George Orwell
In the latest issue of Time Magazine, former U.S. Army General and CENTCOM Commander John Abizaid is quoted as telling an audience at Carnegie Mellon University this week that American troops are likely to remain in Iraq and the Middle East for the next 50 years.
You’ll recall that earlier this year the British Army announced that Prince Harry would be going into combat in Iraq along with his squadron, only to change their minds a few weeks later due to “security concerns” and despite Prince Harry’s own public statements that he wanted to go.
Now, an artist has created a “memorial” to a “fallen” Prince Harry that goes on display today in the Trafalgar Hotel in London. (via)
The sculpture is reminiscent of those that grace many of the tombs of English kings and nobles in Westminster Abbey, but also comments directly on the celebrity aspect of the royal family and Harry’s mother, Princess Diana, in particular. A further twist comes from the vulture that stands waiting and watching at the dead prince’s feet.
Personally, I really like the piece and the deft way it deals with the reinterpretation of the British royals from national heroes to pop culture icons. I could entirely imagine this being an actual memorial for Prince Harry had he gone to Iraq and met an untimely demise. As a commentary on the war itself, I think it points out that the media have not been able to “celebritize” the war itself despite clumsy efforts like “Private Jessica”, and also points out what a complete distraction our celebrity fetishism is from the reality of life-or-death situations soldiers face.
On November 19, 1863, President Abraham Lincoln appeared along with former Massachusetts Senator Edward Everett and a host of other dignitaries to dedicate the opening of a cemetery for the Union soldiers killed at the Battle of Gettysburg. Lincoln was a last-minute invitee and second on the bill to Everett, who was considered to be the nation’s greatest orator, but his brief remarks have lived on as one of the greatest speeches of all time.
For this Memorial Day, I share with you the text of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address:
Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation, so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.
But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate — we can not consecrate — we can not hallow — this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us — that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion — that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain — that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
We Americans love to imagine ourselves as heroes. Our entire national mythology is presented as a steady stream of noble victories in the neverending battle for freedom and justice. Our telling and retelling of history endures no limit of twisting, rationalization, willing denial, and outright misrepresentation of events in order to preserve our almost child-like need to preserve our national self-image as warriors of liberty.
Once in a while, the truths of history even align in a way that we can reassure ourselves of this belief without having to cast a blind eye to reality. Nearly 8,000 men, Union and Confederate alike, died on the fields of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania fighting a war that was not really about slavery or freedom, but about the very basic and oppositional concepts that framed the founding of the American nation. Two very different visions of America, but both stemming from the philosophies of those founding fathers Lincoln invoked. Heroes all were they who fell at Gettysburg, and Lincoln’s blessing applies to them all equally.
Nearly a century and a half has passed since the American Civil War. Despite the superficial scars that seek to rejoin those disparate notions of American freedom, we are as deeply divided as we were on that autumn day in 1863. Blue and Gray have been succeeded by Red and Blue, but our idealistic visions of ourselves and our country still stand on far edges of a chasm, one that seems to widen with each passing day.
And in that chasm, once again, thousands of soldiers are pitched in battle. Though they do not fight against one another, the nature of their war and the struggle they represent is not about bringing freedom to the world or about the noble causes of enlightement, it is about us. The men and women who fight a war thousands of miles away from home are, in truth, fighting about our competing visions of ourselves. And, because we are so willing to bend reality to our liking, we have visited the devastation and death not upon the towns and villages of Pennsylvania or Georgia, but upon the innocent peoples of Iraq and Afghanistan. They die by the tens of thousands in a struggle that means nothing to them.
Lincoln’s assessment of his own remarks was wrong, to say the least. The entire world remembers those eighty-six words and the refrain of “government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” That people should be able to freely choose and determine the course of their own governance is not just idealism, it has become recognized as a basic right of every living person on this Earth.
But as I write these words, we are marking a day to remember not just those killed in the Civil War, but all of our war dead, including 3,455 men and women who have died fighting a proxy civil war. Just as the blood shed by those boys in Gettysburg consecrated that field where Lincoln stood, so does the blood shed now in acts of individual heroism continue to consecrate the graveyards of America. But make no mistake, their sacrifices have made no “noble advance” of the “great task”. Their deaths and the deaths of those thousands in Iraq and Afghanistan are, so sadly, entirely in vain.
Thus I would say to you on this Memorial Day that it is up to us to take even greater heed of the words of The Great Emancipator and re-dedicate ourselves to the standard of government of the people, by the people, for the people; to stand united against the ruthless men in power who try to take advantage of our divisions to profit from war waged under deceitful rationales; to live up to Lincoln’s words for as long as history lets us hear them.
Why did we invade Iraq?
Saddam was responsible for 9/11!!!…no, wait, that wasn’t it.
Saddam had Weapons of Mass Destruction and was going to nuke America!!!….oh, right, not that either.
Ooh, I’ve got it! We had to get rid of Saddam and his regime to make Iraq safe for Freedom And Democracy™!!
Hmmmmmmmm…okay, so how does that explain why we’re so busy reinstalling all of Saddam’s loyalists in high government positions and key military intelligence roles?
This is going to get blogged to death over the next day or so, but you HAVE to go and have a look.
The ABC News website has a photo slideshow of correspondent Bob Woodruff’s simply miraculous recovery from the massive head wound he suffered in Iraq. The picture above is a CT scan of what was left of his skull (the entire left side was blown away) when he arrived at Bethesda Naval Hospital. Last summer he had a cranial implant to replace the missing bone, and now, scarcely more than a year after his injury, he is recovered and back to work.
The photos are a promo for a primetime special featuring Bob Woodruff that will air next Tuesday evening.
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