Saturday, August 06, 2005

King Solomon

And on the current state of cable TV "newscasting" check out this post.

Juan Cole speaks

One of the blogs I regularly visit is Juan Cole's. He's a college professer, shows up on liberal talks shows often. Here's a post that knowledgeably captures the current state of affairs in the oil game.

Beating a live horse

Okay, I've carped about this before, but on the sixtieth anniversary of the atom bombing of Hiroshima, it seems appropriate to reiterate a point about "terrorism."

The IRA, the German Baader Meinhof group, the Weather Underground, Osama bin Laden--these were hardly the first to use the death of civilians as a military/political tool. In just the last century -- not to mention the use of plague and disease as a weapon in previous times -- both the Allies and the Axis powers were "terrorists," as that term's being used now. The Nazis employed rockets, the V-1 and V-2, that were specifically designed to kill and frighten civilian Londoners to affect Britain's resolve to fight. We bombed Dresden, Tokyo and other cities that had no strategic value, precisely to break the will of our enemies to resist, and then, of course, there's Hiroshima and Nagasaki, cities without any military defense and no military value. We did so without warning, without at least trying to deploy the bomb on an unpopulated target to persuade the Japanese to cease fighting. We killed more civilians in our bombing of defenseless cities in 1944-45 than bin Laden can imagine.

Terrorism sucks, no doubt. But let's not forget its history.

Thursday, August 04, 2005

Blood and guts

During the first three days of August, 27 US military service persons have been killed. This doesn't include Iraqi soldiers and police or civilians.

And yet, not a peep from any news source or Democrat (except those who opposed the war to begin with) that we should pull our troops out immediately.

Not even an explanation to the American public why these people are dying. The war has settled into a meat grinding operation, just like those who opposed it predicted, and Bush has the temerity to say that the recent deaths are a "grim reminder" that we're still at war. Reminder? Had he forgotten? Had the American people? Had the media?

I'm angry beyond words. So I'll stop typing.