The following words were delivered last night by Sen. Gordon Smith (a Republican from Oregon), a 10-year veteran of the Senate: I, for one, am at the end of my rope when it comes to supporting a policy that has our soldiers patrolling the same streets in the same way,…
Take a look at the front page of today’s St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
You can see the photo of an Iraqi man grieving over the body of his three-year-old daughter outside of the Baghdad hospital. According to the paper, “the girl was killed and three other family members injured when they were caught in crossfire as clashes erupted between gunmen and US forces.”
The lead story starts with this assertion:
The situation in Iraq is grave and deteriorating. The current approach is not working, and the ability of the United States to influence events is diminishing.
This story line and this photograph clearly impugn the integrity of the United States. Publishing such information is unpatriotic. Or, at least, those are the sorts of things we’ve been told, until recently.
It was always OK to publish pictures of our proud soldiers and our high-tech missiles taking off, of course. It was up to Al Jazeera and the Europeans to publish pictures of what happened when those missiles exploded on the ground, however. And when those non-American media sources published those photos of Iraqi civilian carnage, it infuriated “America.” It’s not that American soldiers weren’t also credible witnesses to the civilian killings on the ground. The evidence was there to be published, if anyone cared to know.
For most of the past 3 1/2 years, the Post-Dispatch (along with most mainstream newspapers across the United States) did not publish pictures like this, certainly not in prominent places. It simply wasn’t deemed news …
A short and sobering post on Huffpo by Thomas De Zengotita.
I saw a bumper sticker the other day. “Caution: Christian On Board”
I thought, yeah, I’ll be careful. These days christians can be dangerous.
What follows may be a bit on the intolerant side, but I’m sometimes convinced our condemnation of intolerance makes us too unwilling to be simply impatient. We “tolerate” a lot of nonsense because we don’t want to be accused of intolerance.
Rumsfeld is gone now, and I’ve been thinking about unanswered questions, assumptions made on our behalf which led to a holy mess. I remember when Abu Ghraib broke. I’m thinking about the obscenities from Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. People expressed shock, outrage. The president, Rumsfeld, the generals, they were all duly unhinged. They did not approve this. They did not order it or condone it. Congress has them answering questions now as to how such things could happen.
Frankly, the wrong questions were and are being asked. Senators wanted to know who to blame for either condoning it or for “allowing it to happen”–a phrase I find ludicrous in practical terms. It’s like the phrase you hear lawyers and legislators use, you know the one “You failed to do such and such.” Every time I hear that phrase I think “No he didn’t. He didn’t fail. To fail implies that at some point an attempt was made to do something. The attempt failed. He didn’t fail to tell the truth–he simply didn’t do it. He succeeded in not doing it. Failure was entirely part …
I got riled up while reading the latest Utne Reader by an article by Keith Goetzman entitled “Houston, We Have a Problem“. He eloquently argues that we should stop wasting money on space research and spend it solving problems here on Earth.
Let’s look at the numbers. What fraction of a percent of our national budget is spent on space? NASA got about $16B in 2005 (including military allocations) out of $2,200B Federal revenues. That’s 0.72%, leaving only a paltry 99.28% to deal with problems here on Earth. I’m ignoring the record-high deficit spending that makes the NASA fraction even smaller. Look the numbers up yourselves. Check my assertions.
We could spend that little fraction on some other issues here at home. But how will we solve problems such as the next major asteroid impact? Yes, it will happen; we just won’t know when. How will we solve the problem of running out of {pick your resource}? Anything we need down here (or a reasonable substitute) can be found up there. After we build a space elevator, it would be cheaper to get it from up there than to dig it up here now! But, this project would necessarily be a crash program about as expensive as — and probably longer lasting than — a war in the middle east and it’s aftermath. Of course, the space elevator would employ a comparable number of people in a third world location that a hypothetical war on Iraq would kill …