Letters to the Editor
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Bedtime for Moosie.
Goodnight and many thanks to all.
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Other Iraqi blogs
http://washingtonbureau.typepad.com/iraq/
A shooter-type , spouting the heroic liberator narrative, paid a visit there a few days ago.(Telling an Iraqi how much better off she is . O-M-G!) Got slapped around a bit. Don't think he learned anything , though.
Riverbend's blog ,Baghdad Burning, and several others are linked on the author's blogroll.
Here's another . He doesn't post often, but there are also links to others .http://pentra.blogspot.com/
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It's not just the occupation, baby. They'll lie about anything.
Thanks for your good work Glenn.
How about the subjects of global warming, energy alternatives, alternative lifestyles, etc. They'll lie about anything.
The one that has me the most right now is of course the murder and pillage is Iraq. The 4,000 dead is the tip of the iceberg when you consider the permanently disabled, and the emotionally disabled the numbers go way off the scale and that is just Americans. Look at the civilian side and the impacts on neighboring countries. How long are we going to allow these idiots to keep committing these crimes in our name?
The one that has me the second most is really part of the one that has me the most. This whole oil thing is clearly manufactured by big oil/big auto to manipulate and exploit the American public and our sellout government has played along the whole way. Yesterday there was an announcement that a French group will have available an air powered car. Pump it up in one to two hours and it goes 1,000 miles at speeds to 96 miles an hours. Guess who just won the green jobs contest for the next 30 years--not detroit. Our corporate idiots are really no smarter than our government idiots and they thought they could maintain this oil hoax until they could put in place the hydrogen hoax(gm got 13B from idiot george as a gift) and now they get nothing because the gas pigs they have been shoving done our throats are now garbage. The Model A Ford in 1928 got 48 miles to the gallon and went 60 miles per hour so how did we get to today. Meanwhile our silly government argues if we should require a couple more miles a gallon like it matters. Some idiot senator from the south(seems to be one of those available for any occasion) was actually on the idiot box saying he wasn't going to force americans to drive alternative cars. Thanks bozo--now get back to the circus and no stopping by the men's room at the airport either.
So look at the energy conversation and tell me its no less scripted than the occupation/murder conversation and then ask yourself what these people are doing with this money they are willing to do all these evil things to get. Well buying gold plated toilet seats is good but how many of them can you sit on at a time. The depleted uranium shells being littered upon the ground in Iraq will cause birth defects for longer than John McCain's one hundred year occupation and who talks about that. You can be sure the parent of a birth defect child will talk about it but you can be pretty sure it won't be on America propaganda news network.
Today, I weep for my country. Actually, it's been a little longer than just today.
Thank you, Conrad C. Elledge
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Screwtape Letters
Being introduced to that book was one of the few things I got from my religious phase. A favorite passage:
The use of Fashions in thought is to distract the attention of men from their real dangers. We direct the fashionable outcry of each generation against those vices of which it is least in danger and fix its approval on the virtue nearest to that vice which we are trying to make endemic. The game is to have them running about with fire extinguishers whenever there is a flood, and all crowding to that side of the boat which is already nearly gunwale under. Thus we make it fashionable to expose the dangers of enthusiasm at the very moment when they are all really becoming worldly and lukewarm; a century later, when we are really making them all Byronic and drunk with emotion, the fashionable outcry is directed against the dangers of the mere "understanding". Cruel ages are put on their guard against Sentimentality, feckless and idle ones against Respectability, lecherous ones against Puritansm; and whenever all men are really hastening to be slaves or tyrants we make Liberalism the prime bogey.
Here's a link to the whole book, online.
http://members.fortunecity.com/phantom1/books2/c._s._lewis_-_the_screwtape_letters.htm
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Screwtape Letters
meant to tiny-url it.
http://preview.tinyurl.com/4vaoh
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The attorney/blogger, the professor and the journalist nail it
When Glenn first put up the Sinan Antoon and Ali Fadhil interview on Charlie Rose's show, it immediately reminded me of the most lucid analysis that I had read up to that point regarding our occupation of Iraq: the 8/19/2007 NYT op-ed written by seven soldiers (two of whom subsequently were killed and one severely wounded in action) from the 2nd Brigade of the 82nd Airborne Division stationed in Iraq, The War as We Saw It @
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/19/opinion/19jayamaha.html?ex=1345176000&en=5a8349a0e944e61b&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss
Antoon/Fadhil and the soldiers make the common-sense - and imo moral - appeal to listen to those who have to live daily with the consequences of our occupation, the citizens of Iraq, and to base our assessment of progress or lack thereof on their welfare rather than basing it on X amount of violent deaths and injuries per week or other such benchmarks that we arrogantly pre-determined were best for them. The lack of any significant progress in most of benchmarks is the surest indicator that Iraq leadership had little or no stake in their conception. The similarities of the soldiers’ appeals to those of Antoon and Fadhil are striking:
… Given the situation, it is important not to assess security from an American-centered perspective. The ability of, say, American observers to safely walk down the streets of formerly violent towns is not a resounding indicator of security. What matters is the experience of the local citizenry and the future of our counterinsurgency. When we take this view, we see that a vast majority of Iraqis feel increasingly insecure and view us as an occupation force that has failed to produce normalcy after four years and is increasingly unlikely to do so as we continue to arm each warring side.
… At the same time, the most important front in the counterinsurgency, improving basic social and economic conditions, is the one on which we have failed most miserably. Two million Iraqis are in refugee camps in bordering countries. Close to two million more are internally displaced and now fill many urban slums. Cities lack regular electricity, telephone services and sanitation. “Lucky” Iraqis live in gated communities barricaded with concrete blast walls that provide them with a sense of communal claustrophobia rather than any sense of security we would consider normal.
… In the end, we need to recognize that our presence may have released Iraqis from the grip of a tyrant, but that it has also robbed them of their self-respect. They will soon realize that the best way to regain dignity is to call us what we are - an army of occupation - and force our withdrawal.
Until that happens, it would be prudent for us to increasingly let Iraqis take center stage in all matters, to come up with a nuanced policy in which we assist them from the margins but let them resolve their differences as they see fit ...
Bush’s manipulative, tone-deaf appeals to not let U.S. soldiers die in vain while ignoring the sacrifices of Iraqi citizens only reinforce Iraqis’ belief that it is more about us than them.