The Peculiar Disappearance of the War in Iraq

By FRANK RICH
AS America fell into the quagmire of Vietnam, the comedian Milton Berle joked that the fastest way to end the war would be to put it on the last-place network, ABC, where it was certain to be canceled. Berle’s gallows humor lives on in the quagmire in Iraq. Americans want this war canceled too, and first- and last-place networks alike are more than happy to oblige.

CNN will surely remind us today that it is Day 19 of the Israel-Hezbollah war — now branded as Crisis in the Middle East — but you won’t catch anyone saying it’s Day 1,229 of the war in Iraq. On the Big Three networks’ evening newscasts, the time devoted to Iraq has fallen 60 percent between 2003 and this spring, as clocked by the television monitor, the Tyndall Report. On Thursday, Brian Williams of NBC read aloud a “shame on you” e-mail complaint from the parents of two military sons anguished that his broadcast had so little news about the war.

This is happening even as the casualties in Iraq, averaging more than 100 a day, easily surpass those in Israel and Lebanon combined. When Nouri al-Maliki, the latest Iraqi prime minister, visited Washington last week to address Congress, he too got short TV shrift — a mere five sentences about the speech on ABC’s “World News.” The networks know a rerun when they see it. Only 22 months earlier, one of Mr. Maliki’s short-lived predecessors, Ayad Allawi, had come to town during the 2004 campaign to give a similarly empty Congressional address laced with White House-scripted talking points about the war’s progress. Propaganda stunts, unlike “Law & Order” episodes, don’t hold up on a second viewing.

The steady falloff in Iraq coverage isn’t happenstance. It’s a barometer of the scope of the tragedy. For reporters, the already apocalyptic security situation in Baghdad keeps getting worse, simply making the war more difficult to cover than ever. The audience has its own phobia: Iraq is a bummer. “It is depressing to pay attention to this war on terror,” said Fox News’s Bill O’Reilly on July 18. “I mean, it’s summertime.” Americans don’t like to lose, whatever the season. They know defeat when they see it, no matter how many new plans for victory are trotted out to obscure that reality.

The specter of defeat is not the only reason Americans have switched off Iraq. The larger issue is that we don’t know what we — or, more specifically, 135,000 brave and vulnerable American troops — are fighting for. In contrast to the Israel-Hezbollah war, where the stakes for the combatants and American interests are clear, the war in Iraq has no rationale to keep it afloat on television or anywhere else. It’s a big, nightmarish story, all right, but one that lacks the thread of a coherent plot.

Certainly there has been no shortage of retrofitted explanations for the war in the three-plus years since the administration’s initial casus belli, to fend off Saddam’s mushroom clouds and vanquish Al Qaeda, proved to be frauds. We’ve been told that the war would promote democracy in the Arab world. And make the region safer for Israel. And secure the flow of cheap oil. If any of these justifications retained any credibility, they have been obliterated by Crisis in the Middle East. The new war is a grueling daily object lesson in just how much the American blunders in Iraq have undermined the one robust democracy that already existed in the region, Israel, while emboldening terrorists and strengthening the hand of Iran.

But it’s the collapse of the one remaining (and unassailable) motivation that still might justify staying the course in Iraq — as a humanitarian mission on behalf of the Iraqi people — that is most revealing of what a moral catastrophe this misadventure has been for our country. The sad truth is that the war’s architects always cared more about their own grandiose political and ideological ambitions than they did about the Iraqis, and they communicated that indifference from the start to Iraqis and Americans alike. The legacy of that attitude is that the American public cannot be rallied to the Iraqi cause today, as the war reaches its treacherous endgame.

The Bush administration constantly congratulates itself for liberating Iraq from Saddam’s genocidal regime. But regime change was never billed as a primary motivation for the war; the White House instead appealed to American fears and narcissism — we had to be saved from Saddam’s W.M.D. From “Shock and Awe” on, the fate of Iraqis was an afterthought. They would greet our troops with flowers and go about their business.

Donald Rumsfeld boasted that “the care” and “the humanity” that went into our precision assaults on military targets would minimize any civilian deaths. Such casualties were merely “collateral damage,” unworthy of quantification. “We don’t do body counts,” said Gen. Tommy Franks. President Bush at last started counting those Iraqi bodies publicly — with an estimate of 30,000 — some seven months ago. (More recently, The Los Angeles Times put the figure at, conservatively, 50,000.) By then, Americans had tuned out.

The contempt our government showed for Iraqis was not just to be found in our cavalier stance toward their casualties, or in the abuses at Abu Ghraib. There was a cultural condescension toward the Iraqi people from the get-go as well, as if they were schoolchildren in a compassionate-conservatism campaign ad. This attitude was epitomized by Mr. Rumsfeld’s “stuff happens” response to the looting of Baghdad at the dawn of the American occupation. In “Fiasco,” his stunning new book about the American failure in Iraq, Thomas E. Ricks, The Washington Post’s senior Pentagon correspondent, captures the meaning of that pivotal moment perfectly: “The message sent to Iraqis was far more troubling than Americans understood. It was that the U.S. government didn’t care — or, even more troubling for the future security of Iraq, that it did care but was incapable of acting effectively.”

As it turned out, it was the worst of both worlds: we didn’t care, and we were incapable of acting effectively. Nowhere is this seen more explicitly than in the subsequent American failure to follow through on our promise to reconstruct the Iraqi infrastructure we helped to smash. “There’s some little part of my brain that simply doesn’t understand how the most powerful country on earth just can’t get electricity back in Baghdad,” said Kanan Makiya, an Iraqi exile and prominent proponent of the war, in a recent Washington Post interview.

The simple answer is that the war planners didn’t care enough to provide the number of troops needed to secure the country so that reconstruction could proceed. The coalition authority isolated in its Green Zone bubble didn’t care enough to police the cronyism and corruption that squandered billions of dollars on abandoned projects. The latest monument to this humanitarian disaster was reported by James Glanz of The New York Times on Friday: a high-tech children’s hospital planned for Basra, repeatedly publicized by Laura Bush and Condi Rice, is now in serious jeopardy because of cost overruns and delays.

This history can’t be undone; there’s neither the American money nor the manpower to fulfill the mission left unaccomplished. The Iraqi people, whose collateral damage was so successfully hidden for so long by the Rumsfeld war plan, remain a sentimental abstraction to most Americans. Whether they are seen in agony after another Baghdad bombing or waving their inked fingers after an election or being used as props to frame Mrs. Bush during the State of the Union address, they have little more specificity than movie extras. Chalabi, Allawi, Jaafari, Maliki come and go, all graced with the same indistinguishable praise from the American president, all blurring into an endless loop of instability and crisis. We feel badly ... and change the channel.

Given that the violence in Iraq has only increased in the weeks since the elimination of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian terrorist portrayed by the White House as the fount of Iraqi troubles, any Americans still paying attention to the war must now confront the reality that the administration is desperately trying to hide. “The enemy in Iraq is a combination of rejectionists and Saddamists and terrorists,” President Bush said in December when branding Zarqawi Public Enemy No. 1. But Iraq’s exploding sectarian warfare cannot be pinned on Al Qaeda or Baathist dead-enders.

The most dangerous figure in Iraq, the home-grown radical Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, is an acolyte of neither Osama bin Laden nor Saddam but an ally of Iran who has sworn solidarity to both Hezbollah and Hamas. He commands more than 30 seats in Mr. Maliki’s governing coalition in Parliament and 5 cabinet positions. He is also linked to death squads that have slaughtered Iraqis and Americans with impunity since the April 2004 uprising that killed, among others, Cindy Sheehan’s son, Casey. Since then, Mr. Sadr’s power has only grown, enabled by Iraqi “democracy.”

That the latest American plan for victory is to reposition our forces by putting more of them in the crossfire of Baghdad’s civil war is tantamount to treating our troops as if they were deck chairs on the Titanic. Even if the networks led with the story every night, what Americans would have the stomach to watch?

A Voice in the Wilderness

Via the New York Times

Mr. Boyd said he never intended his sermons to be taken as merely a critique of the Republican Party or the religious right. He refuses to share his party affiliation, or whether he has one, for that reason. He said there were Christians on both the left and the right who had turned politics and patriotism into “idolatry.”

He said he first became alarmed while visiting another megachurch’s worship service on a Fourth of July years ago. The service finished with the chorus singing “God Bless America” and a video of fighter jets flying over a hill silhouetted with crosses.

“I thought to myself, ‘What just happened? Fighter jets mixed up with the cross?’ ” he said in an interview...

In his six sermons, Mr. Boyd laid out a broad argument that the role of Christians was not to seek “power over” others — by controlling governments, passing legislation or fighting wars. Christians should instead seek to have “power under” others — “winning people’s hearts” by sacrificing for those in need, as Jesus did, Mr. Boyd said.

“America wasn’t founded as a theocracy,” he said. “America was founded by people trying to escape theocracies. Never in history have we had a Christian theocracy where it wasn’t bloody and barbaric. That’s why our Constitution wisely put in a separation of church and state.

“I am sorry to tell you,” he continued, “that America is not the light of the world and the hope of the world. The light of the world and the hope of the world is Jesus Christ.”

Mr. Boyd lambasted the “hypocrisy and pettiness” of Christians who focus on “sexual issues” like homosexuality, abortion or Janet Jackson’s breast-revealing performance at the Super Bowl halftime show. He said Christians these days were constantly outraged about sex and perceived violations of their rights to display their faith in public.

“Those are the two buttons to push if you want to get Christians to act,” he said. “And those are the two buttons Jesus never pushed.”

Some Woodland Hills members said they applauded the sermons because they had resolved their conflicted feelings. David Churchill, a truck driver for U.P.S. and a Teamster for 26 years, said he had been “raised in a religious-right home” but was torn between the Republican expectations of faith and family and the Democratic expectations of his union.

When Mr. Boyd preached his sermons, “it was liberating to me,” Mr. Churchill said.

Mr. Boyd gave his sermons while his church was in the midst of a $7 million fund-raising campaign. But only $4 million came in, and 7 of the more than 50 staff members were laid off, he said.

Mary Van Sickle, the family pastor at Woodland Hills, said she lost 20 volunteers who had been the backbone of the church’s Sunday school.

“They said, ‘You’re not doing what the church is supposed to be doing, which is supporting the Republican way,’ ” she said. “It was some of my best volunteers.”

The Rev. Paul Eddy, a theology professor at Bethel College and the teaching pastor at Woodland Hills, said: “Greg is an anomaly in the megachurch world. He didn’t give a whit about church leadership, never read a book about church growth. His biggest fear is that people will think that all church is is a weekend carnival, with people liking the worship, the music, his speaking, and that’s it.”

In the end, those who left tended to be white, middle-class suburbanites, church staff members said. In their place, the church has added more members who live in the surrounding community — African-Americans, Hispanics and Hmong immigrants from Laos.

This suits Mr. Boyd. His vision for his church is an ethnically and economically diverse congregation that exemplifies Jesus’ teachings by its members’ actions. He, his wife and three other families from the church moved from the suburbs three years ago to a predominantly black neighborhood in St. Paul.

Mr. Boyd now says of the upheaval: “I don’t regret any aspect of it at all. It was a defining moment for us. We let go of something we were never called to be. We just didn’t know the price we were going to pay for doing it.”

His congregation of about 4,000 is still digesting his message. Mr. Boyd arranged a forum on a recent Wednesday night to allow members to sound off on his new book. The reception was warm, but many of the 56 questions submitted in writing were pointed: Isn’t abortion an evil that Christians should prevent? Are you saying Christians should not join the military? How can Christians possibly have “power under” Osama bin Laden? Didn’t the church play an enormously positive role in the civil rights movement?

One woman asked: “So why NOT us? If we contain the wisdom and grace and love and creativity of Jesus, why shouldn’t we be the ones involved in politics and setting laws?”

Mr. Boyd responded: “I don’t think there’s a particular angle we have on society that others lack. All good, decent people want good and order and justice. Just don’t slap the label ‘Christian’ on it.”

Taste of Maine

Bullwinkle Speedway set to host 'boat' race
Friday, June 30, 2006 - Bangor Daily News

The Fourth of July weekend is a great time to put that boat on the trailer, attach it to the car or truck and head to your favorite lake, river or ocean.

Or, you could also head to Bullwinkle Speedway in Greenville Junction, a quarter-mile dirt track, and enter a race/demolition derby.

For the second straight year, there will be such a race at the track as vehicles pulling boats will square off Saturday. The last vehicle running with part of the boat still on the trailer is the winner.

And you can expect the other entrants to try to make that feat difficult to accomplish.

"The boat must be bolted on to the trailer if you want to win," said Doris Peterson, who manages Bullwinkle Speedway for owner Doug Whitney.

Obviously, it behooves the racer to drive a beat-up vehicle with an inexpensive boat on the trailer.

Peterson said the race has returned due to popular demand.

"People thought it was a riot last year," said Peterson.

The boat race will follow a busy day of racing at Bullwinkle Speedway, with six classes of competition beginning at 4 p.m.

The classes are big enduro, little enduro, trucks, super streets and two divisions for children.

There will also be qualifying races for Sunday's 100-lap feature for four-cylinder vehicles that will put $1,000 in the pocket of the winner.

On Sunday beginning at 2 p.m. there will be a consolation race to qualify the final five cars for the 100-lapper and there will also be a demolition derby.

She said this weekend, leading into the Fourth of July, is "usually our biggest weekend. We get a lot of out-of-towners. Last year, we must have had 2,000 people."

Peterson said it has been a good year for the speedway despite four rain-outs.

"We've been getting 45 to 50 cars every weekend," said Peterson.

Points racing will continue until Labor Day.

Yo Dershowitz

How you like THIS Civilian Continuum?!

by Ward Churchill

[I]f what the combat teams did to the WTC and the Pentagon can be understood as acts of war – and they can – then the same is true of every US "overflight' of Iraqi territory since day one. The first acts of war during the current millennium thus occurred on its very first day, and were carried out by U.S. aviators acting under orders from their then-commander-in-chief, Bill Clinton. The most that can honestly be said of those involved on September 11 is that they finally responded in kind to some of what this country has dispensed to their people as a matter of course.

That they waited so long to do so is, notwithstanding the 1993 action at the WTC, more than anything a testament to their patience and restraint.

They did not license themselves to "target innocent civilians."

There is simply no argument to be made that the Pentagon personnel killed on September 11 fill that bill. The building and those inside comprised military targets, pure and simple.

As for those in the World Trade Center, well, really, let's get a grip here, shall we? True enough, they were civilians of a sort. But innocent? Gimme a break. They formed a technocratic corps at the very heart of America's global financial empire, the "mighty engine of profit" to which the military dimension of U.S. policy has always been enslaved and they did so both willingly and knowingly

Daily Beef

Just to let folks know, I changed my name from Karl Hungus (a Big Lebowski reference, just for those who think I am trying to boast about something) to SkinnyGreenMan so as to offer a more apt description of myself. Onto things that matter...

From Frank Rich's column "The Passion of the Embrio's" in today's New York Times

HOW time flies when democracy is on the march in the Middle East! Five whole years have passed since ominous Qaeda chatter reached its pre-9/11 fever pitch, culminating in the President’s Daily Brief of Aug. 6, 2001: “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.”

History has since condemned President Bush for ignoring that intelligence. But to say that he did nothing that summer is a bum rap. Just three days later, on Aug. 9, he took a break from clearing brush in Crawford to reveal the real priority of his presidency, which had nothing to do with a nuisance like terrorism. His first prime-time address after more than six months in office was devoted to embryonic stem-cell research instead. Placing his profound religious convictions above the pagan narcissism of Americans hoping for cures to diseases like Parkinson’s and diabetes, he decreed restrictions to shackle the advance of medical science.

Whatever else is to be said about the Decider, he’s consistent. Having dallied again this summer while terrorism upends the world, he has once more roused himself to take action — on stem cells. His first presidential veto may be bad news for the critically ill, but it was a twofer for the White House. It not only flattered the president’s base. It also drowned out some awkward news: the prime minister he installed in Baghdad, Nuri al-Maliki, and the fractious Parliament of Iraq’s marvelous new democracy had called a brief timeout from their civil war to endorse the sole cause that unites them, the condemnation of Israel.

The news is not all dire, however. While Mr. Bush’s Iraq project threatens to deliver the entire region to Iran’s ayatollahs, this month may also be remembered as a turning point in America’s own religious wars. The president’s politically self-destructive stem-cell veto and the simultaneous undoing of the religious right’s former golden boy, Ralph Reed, in a Republican primary for lieutenant governor in Georgia are landmark defeats for the faith-based politics enshrined by Mr. Bush’s presidency. If we can’t beat the ayatollahs over there, maybe we’re at least starting to rout them here.

One can do nothing but hope, I suppose. Articles like the following, however, seem to dash hope like an egg on a rock. Today in the LA Times, Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz asserts

there is a vast difference — both moral and legal — between a 2-year-old who is killed by an enemy rocket and a 30-year-old civilian who has allowed his house to be used to store Katyusha rockets. Both are technically civilians, but the former is far more innocent than the latter. There is also a difference between a civilian who merely favors or even votes for a terrorist group and one who provides financial or other material support for terrorism.
The Israeli army has given well-publicized notice to civilians to leave those areas of southern Lebanon that have been turned into war zones. Those who voluntarily remain behind have become complicit. Some — those who cannot leave on their own — should be counted among the innocent victims.

He continues on, concluding the term "civilian" is an "increasingly meaningless word." It's bad enough that one of the top three newspapers in our country could allow this man a stump to stand on, bad enough such thought is accepted at the top university of the world, but as I pointed out in an earlier post the US Ambassador to the United Nations, John Bolton, shares this view.
In response, Kevin Drum, of Washington Monthly countered Dershowitz's thoughts by writing:

Excepting the lame and the sick, then, anyone who declines to leave their home despite Israeli orders to do so is, ipso facto, complicit with terrorism and presumably fair game once the Israeli invasion gets under way. How they get totted up after the killing is over depends on where they fall on Dershowitz's nebulous "continuum."
This is very clever. Alan Dershowitz, after all, is nothing if not very clever. But I wonder how he'd respond to a similarly clever and nuanced definition of the word "terrorist"? (as quoted from Raw Story)

Good Toons

Death via Fed Ex

"The Bush administration is rushing a delivery of precision-guided bombs to Israel, which requested the expedited shipment last week after beginning its air campaign against Hezbollah targets in Lebanon, American officials said Friday..."

New York Times, July 22nd

Later in this article, Secretary of State Bombs Away Condi is quoted "I have no interest in diplomacy for the sake of returning Lebanon and Israel to the status quo ante,” Ms. Rice said Friday. “I could have gotten on a plane and rushed over and started shuttling around, and it wouldn’t have been clear what I was shuttling to do.”

Maybe you could have "shuttled" around some of these

Billmon the Quote Master

This guy is Wicked, Wicked smaht. www.billmon.org Some quotes he put together...

Band-Aids

The official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said U.S. ideas for ending the Middle East conflict are still evolving but Washington does intend to contribute humanitarian aid to Lebanese people displaced by fighting between Israel and the militant Islamic group Hizbollah.

Reuters
July 21, 2006


It was the way we had over here of living with ourselves. We'd cut them in half with a machine gun and give them a Band-Aid. It was a lie, and the more I saw of them, the more I hated lies. Those boys were never going to look at me the same way again. But I felt I knew one or two things about Kurtz that weren't in the dossier.

Apocalypse Now
1979


Posted by billmon at 03:02 PM
The Hirohito Effect

It has not helped the neoconservative case, perhaps, that the occupation of Iraq has not gone as smoothly as some had predicted.

Washington Post
Conservative Anger Grows
Over Bush's Foreign Policy
July 19, 2006


"Despite the best that has been done by everyone . . . the war situation has developed not necessarily to our advantage."

Emperor Hirohito
Radio Broadcast Announcing Japan's Surrender
August 15, 1945

Old Folks & The Internet

Daily Beef

Yesterday's Fresh Air show on NPR had an extended interview with Julia Choucair on the possibility of political reform in the Arab world. She had some very interesting things to say about Hezbollah, notably that it was virtually impossible to defeat such an enemy militarily.

Ted Koppel has an interesting piece discussing the benefits Iran has garnered out of both Iraq and the current fighting between Israel and Hezbollah according to a Jordanian intelligence official. The official concludes our only chance at making peace in the middle east is to commit to Iraq for the long term...yikes.

The NeoCons R Us were dealt a significant legal setback this week when a California judge ruled against the administrations invocation of States Secrets in the case of AT&T and others suing over the NSA wiretapping. The States Secrets privledge has NEVER been question in the history of this country, but it seems rather than shield, Cheney and his crew are using it as a sword to defeat any and all questioning of their tactics. Damn good news.

Daily Show: Stem Cells

Cuts into this "value of life" idea a bit

So much hatred, so little time!

Billmon is spitting Hot Fire today.

"Let's see. We've got: Israeli Jews fighting Lebanese Shi'a and Palestinian Sunnis; Palestinian Fatah militants who've stopped fighting Hamas militants, but only because they're both fighting the Israelis; Saudi Sunni fundamentalists issuing fatwas against Hezbollah Shi'a fundamentalists; Egyptian Sunni fundamentalists backing those same Hezbollah Shi'a fundamentalists; Iraqi Sunnis killing Iraqi Shi'a and vice versa; Iraqi Shi'a (the Mahdi Army) jousting with Iraqi Shi'a (the Badr Brigade); Iraqi Kurds trying to push Sunni Arabs and both Sunni and Shi'a Turkomen out of Kirkuk; Turks threatening to invade Kurdistan; Iranians allegedly shelling Kurdistan, Syrian Kurds rebelling against Syrian Allawites who are despised by Syria's Sunni majority but allied with the Lebanese Shi'a who are hated and feared by the House of Saud and its Sunni fundamentalist minions. Oh, and American and Israeli neocons threatening to bomb both Syria and Iran.

Have I left anybody out? Probably. It's starting to remind me of the old ditty about the Kilkenny Cats:

There once were two cats in Kilkenny,
Who thought there was one cat too many;
So they quarrelled and fit
They scratched and they bit,
Till, excepting their nails, And the tips of their tails,
Instead of two cats, there wasn't any.

Except instead of two cats there are many -- multiplying even as they fight.

What all this doesn't remind me of is Democracy Boy's lofty vision for the Middle East, back in the days before Mission Accomplished was unaccomplished:

Old patterns of conflict in the Middle East can be broken, if all concerned will let go of bitterness, hatred, and violence, and get on with the serious work of economic development, and political reform, and reconciliation.

Ah yes, "if" -- the saddest two-letter word in the English language. Shrub should have remembered the line from Kipling's poem: "If you can dream -- and not make dreams your master . . ""


The above is an excerpt from a very busy day in the life of billmon. Much more at his website, linked on the right side of this page.

A Taste of Maine

Post-Enlightenment Politics

I just do not understand how a president, after going five years without using a veto, could take it upon himself to do this. 70% of America approves of this research, almost 20 republicans voted for it, Nancy Freakin Regan wants it yet Bush smugly stands before the country insisting he is "protecting life." How about the lives of the millions this research could help? And as he kills the first bi-partisan decision to come out of congress in who knows how long, how do we let him stump on this "protection of life" as he waits patiently for Israel to drop enough bombs to make themselves feel better? I am convinced that this decision, along with Iraq, will define this administration as the first to actively pull America backwards. Marvin said it best...

What`s Going On?

Traffic Stopper

... here's some news hot off the press from New Zealand:

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,20867,19703683-29677,00.html

Iran's Hizbollah says ready to attack US, Israel

This doesn't sound good:

"If America wants to ignite World War Three ... we welcome it"



read more | digg story

Top 10 Mac Applications For Students

Karl,

You said you might be getting a new puder sometime soon so I thought this article might be of use to you. I'm not accusing you of being a smelly student or an hush puppied academic but if this blog of yours is a sign of things to come, who know what your future holds.

"If a student could only have ten application installed for academic work, these are what they should have."

read more | digg story

The Big Lebowski - F_cking Short Version

Another obligatory Lebowski post

Blood in the streets

According to the U.N., there have been 14,000 civilian deaths in Iraq so far in 2006

for a more comprehensive number check out iraqbodycount.org

Just to confirm

This sheds light directly on what is behind rhetoric such as "terrorist" and "collateral damage." Asked to comment on civilian deaths occuring in Israel and Lebanon, the US Ambasador to the United Nations replied

"I think it would be a mistake to ascribe moral equivalence to civilians who die as the direct result of malicious terrorist acts" to civilian deaths caused by Israeli's bombs. "It's simply not the same thing to say that it's the same act to deliberately target innocent civilians, to desire their deaths, to fire rockets and use explosive devices or kidnapping versus the sad and highly unfortunate consequences of self-defense."

Comments, anyone?

www.billmon.org

please read billmon

an excerpt to prove why you should.

"The bottom line is that like any fading rock group, Al Qaeda badly needs a hit to avoid being permanently supplanted in the public eye by its Shi'a rival, which is setting the charts ablaze, so to speak. If the original band or its various spin offs have any ambitious projects on the drawing boards, now might be the opportune time to put them into production. Which means it's at least possible that the silent party won't remain silent much longer."

May the term "Collateral Damage" burn in hell, along with all those who use it.

Still learning...

If you click on either of the skinny rectangles above my last post, you can view the picture I meant to include. Seems Uli has a better handle on my blog than I do! And may I remind EVERYONE that they are welcome to post on this blog...all you need is to request an invitation from me and you can rant right along with us! Common! we're lonely (sniff, sniff)

Since politics are so depressing...

Everyone drink milk!