Heavy Stuff, Don’t Read

I can’t decide which I hate worse – the atrocities done at Abu Ghraib prison, or the apologists who think that torture, including rape, can be excused.

Even the erstwhile “Lean Left” gets it awfully, awfully wrong, linking rape and threats of rape with homophobia and sexuality. Rape isn’t sex. It’s merely the most degrading and damaging thing you can do to another person. Worse, far worse than murder, or maiming or physical torture or psychological torture.

What is going to appear below the cut line is pretty heavy, you probably don’t want to read it.

Continue reading “Heavy Stuff, Don’t Read”

I don’t believe it!

‘I take full responsibility’

Stop the presses, something unprecedented has happened! Somebody from the G.W.Bush White House has not only taken responsibility for something, he’s even apologized!

Now if only Rumsfeld would do the traditional thing after a mistake this major, and resign. The only problem with that is that probably (shudder) Wolfowitz would take over.

Of course the real “taking full responsibility” are the poor innocent soldiers on the ground who are going to face a much bigger and more determined resistance/insurgency/uprising because of the actions of the scum who did this. I hope they make the people who took those pictures visit the families of every solider who dies from now on to say “It might be my fault your son or daughter died”.

And Rush Limbaugh can blow me.

Learning the wrong lesson from Vietnam

When I see in articles like this one
Stations to Boycott ‘Nightline’s’ List of the Fallen (washingtonpost.com)
that people think that honouring the soldiers who have died in Iraq is “motivated by a political agenda designed to undermine the efforts of the United States in Iraq”, I have to wonder if the American public, or at least some part of it didn’t learn the wrong lesson from Vietnam.

It seems to me that these people think the US didn’t lose in Vietnam because they went in with no clear plan, were backing one oppressive regime against another, were so afraid of provoking the Soviets and the Chinese that they saddled the fighting forces with ridiculous rules of engagement (especially when bombing Hanoi), and that both Johnson and Nixon micromanaged the war like they were playing with toy soliders. Oh no, the whole reason for the defeat was that we didn’t totally stifle any discouraging words at home. So as long as we censor any attempts to bring home the full cost of this Iraqi venture in lives and money, we’ll be fine.

I don’t fucking believe it.

More in U.S. Say Bush Did All Possible to Stop Sept. 11 Attacks

After Richard Clarke’s forthrightness, and the administration’s spin, evasions, personal attacks on Clarke, and outright lies, MORE people think Bush did the right thing? I think the whole damn country has gone stupid.

Oh yeah, he did all he could. After all, he ignored the warnings of his counter-terrorism advisor, put together a panel that never met, appointed a cold war expert on the Soviet Union as his National Security Advisor instead of somebody who understood the current threats, and concentrated on settling old scores in Iraq to the exclusion of all other foreign policy.

And 43 percent of the nation is buying this line.