The idea that Yeltsin somehow stopped the coup and "rescued" Gorbachev is just wrong. The Soviet Army overthrew the coup by pulling their support for it and green-lighting the pro-Gorbachev forces. As you might remember, Yeltsin invested a huge effort in making sure the coup plotters never came to trial. Why you think that might have been? Could they have known more than Yeltsin wanted to emerge? You bet your ass. And how about those tanks in the streets of Moscow, shooting up the Parliament, a Parliament that was elected by the same Russian people who elected Yeltsin? A real lover of democracy, that Yeltsin. And then using state media and massive vote fraud to get his handpicked KGB apparachik, Putin, elected to take his place, on condition that the billions in ill-gotten gains of Yeltsin, his family, and his cronies, never be investigated. All this while living conditions collapsed, the nation was looted, and Russians died while thier economy was "privatized" by Western ideologues bent on a free market utopia to replace the Communist one. A paragon of virtue. Spare us the Odes of Boris, please.

The problem here is that in war, real acts of heroism do take place, but not in a timely manner and not with an obvious, scripted message. The fact is, the warmongers are completely disinterested in real acts of heroism, largely because they are, well, so damn specific to a place and time, and usually inspired by a need to save some specific indivudual's life. Rare and wonderful acts of heroism happen without a script or a didactic purpose. Therefore, they cannot easily be used to push any agenda, unless that agenda exists outside the act. Heroic acts in World War II or the Civil War fit into a larger national narrative of collective purpose and sacrifice. Those heroic acts didn't make the wars meaningful or justified--the wars made the acts of heroism meaningful and justified. And that's why the warmongering bastards who pushed the Lynch and Tillman lies are such scum--they wanted to use their own lies about these incidents to justify their war and stifle any opposition to it. They were and are not really interested in celebrating American heroes; they are interested in using real or fabricated acts of heroism by Americans to push their political agenda. And that stinks.

Dear Victroycabal,

The media are so baffling because they are stuck in a paradigm that they will not relinquish--that, sure, in the past the government has lied to reporters, but my friend Dick here, he couldn't possibly be lying TO ME. To admit that their sources are ALL suspect would be to open up the need to check the validity of every statement handed to them, a process that would be so difficult and time-consuming, and put them behind the eightball compared to all the other "stenographers to power" who don't piss off the powerful by being gauche enough to point out that they are lying, that their careers would grind to a halt. Their editors would yell at them and maybe fire them; they would regularly get "scooped" (even if the scoop was a dollop of shit) and lose access. In such a situation, you would need 75% or more of the reporters to shift paradigm on a dime for it to be sustainable by any of those individuals, because those who make the leap are doomed within the current system so long as it remains the current system. So, like Vladimir and Estragon, they may say that they are going to move on, but almost nobody will risk professional suicide and do it.

When anyone starts blathering about torture, and how "I don't really approve of it, but..." (a sentiment I've heard from men too smart not to know better), or tries to downplay it, say: "If you saw pictures of GIs being treated the same way, or heard about these techniques being used against Americans, would you think it's OK?" Throw it right back at them. Especially remind the Christians about that "Do onto others" stuff they are supposed to believe in. The pathogen in American life is the moronic faith that this is not really an issue; of course it would be wrong, evil, and worthy of a death sentence if we caught some foreign bastards doing these things to our troops, but if we do it, well, that's OK, BECAUSE WE ARE THE GOOD GUYS AND THEREFORE EXEMPT FROM LAW. Not, we are the good guys because we follow the rules; no, we are the good guys so the rules don't apply to us. This is the childish, arrogant, idiot sin at the center of all this Bush madness, the idea that, like Dirty Harry, we don't have to honor the law because we are the law--judge, jury, and executioner. I could waste your time by pointed out how this flows from the doctrine of Justification by Faith but won't (think about it--Bush is washed in the Blood of the Lamb, Redeemed--his faith in Christ will earn him salvation, so why worry about his works on this Earth or what happens to this Earth). We've got to grow up and take responsibility for our actions. If we want to be the good guys, we have to act like good people.