Friday, March 17, 2006

Bombs Away, Baby


If this doesn't get your blood boiling, then you'd better check your pulse. And god, thank you again for bringing us Jon Stewart.

Now we return to the blander world of print media, where Newsweek is finally waving the $1 Trillion red flag that others of us have been raging about for roughly a year.

And this is for all you Pink Panther fans (no, not that one, the Peter Sellers Clouseau). "It is all a ploy." This is just another page out of the book of solipsistic diplomacy that Karl Rove and his buddies wrote. In plainer terms, it is called the tactical circle jerk: we will talk only to those we know are our friends; we will talk only to ourselves.

28 Eiffel Towers or 9 Buckingham Palaces—take your pick. Make up another Xmas song about it, to sing while you're walking the subway catching stray coins in a paper coffee cup.

But fear not—your tax dollars are hard at work. On bomb-sniffing butterflies. Yep, I'm not making it up.

Finally, this, from Navy pilot Joseph W. DuRocher, who returned his wings and bars to his commander-in-choke, er, chief, along with these words:

I return enclosed the symbols of my years of service: the shoulder boards of my rank and my Naval Aviator's wings on moral grounds…. Until your administration, I believed it was inconceivable that the United States would ever initiate an aggressive and preemptive war against a country that posed no threat to us. Until your administration, I thought it was impossible for our nation to take hundreds of persons into custody without provable charges of any kind, and to 'disappear' them into holes like Gitmo, Abu Ghraib and Bagram. Until your administration, in my wildest legal fantasy I could not imagine a US Attorney General seeking to justify torture or a President first stating his intent to veto an anti-torture law, and then adding a 'signing statement' that he intends to ignore such law as he sees fit. I do not want these things done in my name…. to remain silent is to let you think I approve or support your actions. I do not.

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