Hard to get thrilled about Veterans Day when the Commander-in-Chief is such a nincompoop.
Veterans Day in the middle of an illegal US invasion of a foreign country might seem like a tough sell, but you wouldn’t know it to look at the American media. Except that they’re forced to keep reporting the bad news that we’re now losing more than a soldier a day, it’s been pretty jingoistic coverage. That’s less true of the newspapers since they don’t have TV’s ability to hype distortions or outright lies in the same fashion, but at this point I don’t think I’ll be satisfied until I see a New York Times banner headline that reads, “What the hell are we doing in Iraq?” splashed across the front page. The media has been terribly compliant in this whole thing, and if they’re not going discharge the duties of the Fourth Estate, well, then thank God you’ve got an Internet where backward yokels like yours truly can spout off and call a spade a spade.
I appreciate the service of US military men and women. I have a lot of respect for people willing to lay down their lives to defend the United States. If my country were ever threatened with invasion, I’d fight to defend it with every means available to me (which is why it should come as no surprise that some Iraqis are willing to do the same). It’s just that I lose a lot of that respect when soldiers go off on an unprovoked attack against a foreign nation. Wearing a uniform doesn’t make you a hero, and I don’t care who you are if you can’t tell right from wrong, moral from immoral, legal from illegal. The Bush doctrine of “strike first, ask questions later” equates to World War III as soon as other nations start following it. It would, however, be a lot less effective if soldiers didn’t salute blindly and march to war.
I predict that we will ultimately cut-and-run from Iraq just as we have from Afganistan. In both cases, our foes will reconstitute their forces, and the world will be a far more dangerous place than it was when we started (as it is already). It will remain such as long as our Commander-in-Chief is George Bush.
Erin, Jonah, Liz, and I went up to Portland this morning to help Bret move. Since he’s moving between apartments in the same complex, we faced a limited ordeal. Hauling his sofa compared, I’m sure, with lugging a beached whale, but the four us managed to do it with a borrowed truck and Jonah’s applause. Bret’s new place is a 2BR (versus his old one bedroom) so that coupled with a six-month lease should keep us from having deal with the sofa again in the near future. Glad we could help out, though.
We lunched at Burgerville followed by a shopping trip to Babies R Us. Liz bought Jonah a rug for his room, something I probably wouldn’t bring up normally except that it has that same blue/white/gold plus stars/clouds/moon theme going and so perfectly compliments his nursery that it deserves mention. Thanks, Liz!