blue girl

Makes Me Sick

Blue Wren, a blogging buddy and a female veteran who served in the Air Force during peacetime, writes:

John McCain, a Vietnam war veteran and POW who has supported Bush Administration cuts in VA health care funding and service for veterans in the past, has a new bright idea about how to save America money.

"Republican presidential candidate John McCain’s call to "concentrate veterans’ health care on those with combat injuries" is raising questions about the Arizona senator’s commitment to funding the ailing VA system."

Rep. Bob Filner, D-Calif., said a system that treats combat veterans and non-combat veterans differently is inherently unfair. “We can care for both combat veterans and non-combat veterans if we just decide it is an important thing to do,” Filner said Thursday, one day after McCain talked at a Dover, N.H., town hall meeting about the need to concentrate veterans’ health care on people with injuries that 'are a direct result of combat.'"

It's infuriating that people like Bush and McCain would even consider trying to economize by refusing or delaying health care to veterans who've served their country honorably and in good faith while at the same time spending billions on a war that was started through dishonesty, hubris and greed.

Count me in among those who responded to this news with an emphatic "You've got to be shitting me."

Read the rest of Blue Wren's post, McCain would ration VA medical care.  Make sure you read the comments, too.

I'm not going to be able to tolerate listening to these guys talk about their sick version of Supporting the Troops until November.  At all! 

I can hear the voices of the thirty percenters rationalizing this scheme in my head as I type this.

Trapped

Robert Stein on George W. Bush:

With every passing day, he is looking more like the deluded character in "Arsenic and Old Lace" who thinks he's Teddy Roosevelt and keeps running up the stairs with a saber, yelling "Charge!" and the rest of us feel trapped in his bad movie praying for the lights to come back on.

Read the rest of his post here.

More Flags

Why we all need to remember that there's a war going on.

Utter Disaster

Now wars and disaster responses are so fully privatized that they are themselves the new market; there is no need to wait until after the war for the boom -- the medium is the message.

One distinct advantage of this postmodern approach is that in market terms, it cannot fail. As a market analyst remarked of a particularly good quarter for the earnings of the energy company Halliburton, "Iraq was better than expected." That was in October 2006, then the most violent month of the war on record, with 3,709 Iraqi civilian casualties. Still, a few shareholders could fail to be impressed by a war that had generated $20 billion in revenues for this one company.

The Shock Doctrine, The Rise of Disaster Capitalism
-- Naomi Klein

Hell, and Those Who Benefit from It

I came downstairs last night around 11:30 and Blue Kid was lying on the couch watching TV. I walked over to the love seat and said, "Where's my book?" I flipped up the blanket at the one end and there it was.

I settled in and started reading.

"Mom, what are you reading?"

"It's called The Shock Doctrine."

"Where'd you get it?"

"Nana got it for me."

"What's it about?"

"It's about Disaster Capitalism. Meaning, there are powerful people that either take advantage of natural disasters -- like hurricane Katrina -- by going in as soon as possible after the disaster has struck to make as much money on the situation as possible. Or, they create disasters -- like the war in Iraq -- so they can go in and make as much money as possible."

The microwave dinged, indicating that something Blue Kid was heating up was done. He got up and walked towards to kitchen, "Well, this is one of those times that I hope there's a hell. And that people like that will burn in it."

My first reaction was to correct him. But I kept silent. I was only 39 pages into the book and from what I had read so far, Blue Kid had hit the nail on the head.

Wow

Just read this over at Shakesville:

Bomb Iran, majority of Americans says in new poll:

The Zogby International survey shows 52 percent of Americans would support a strike on Iran, while 53 percent expect President Bush to launch such an attack before the end of his second term. Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton is voters' No. 1 choice to deal with Iran, with 21 percent saying they would like to see her take on Tehran from the White House. Republican Rudy Giuliani was voters' second choice, with 15 percent.

Just 29 percent of Americans think the US should not attack Iran, with one in five people unsure about military action. Of those who would support a strike, 28 percent believe military action should wait until the next president is in office, while 23 percent want to see Bush let lose US missiles against Iran.

Also, from Shakes, last week:

"I've told people that if you're interested in avoiding World War III, it seems like you ought to be interested in preventing [Iran] from have the knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon."—President Bush, today, at a press conference.

"This is inane. World War III? Against Iran? Really? Because Iran seems a lot like a medium-sized middle income country with few military capabilities rather than a near peer-competitor of the sort against which you might fight a world war."—Matt Yglesias

Yglesias also notes that Bush appears to have moved the goalposts from "preventing Iran from having a nuclear weapon" to "preventing Iran from having the knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon. I'm not sure what the significance of that switch is, but it seems significant."

Hmmm. Wow.

Your cause of sorrow must not be measured by his worth, for then it hath no end

Updated Below

A Death in the Family

Having volunteered for Iraq, Mark Daily was killed in January by an I.E.D. Dismayed to learn that his pro-war articles helped persuade Daily to enlist, the author measures his words against a family's grief and a young man's sacrifice.

by Christopher Hitchens, Vanity Fair, November 2007

***

I was having an oppressively normal morning a few months ago, flicking through the banality of quotidian e-mail traffic, when I idly clicked on a message from a friend headed "Seen This?" The attached item turned out to be a very well-written story by Teresa Watanabe of the Los Angeles Times. It described the death, in Mosul, Iraq, of a young soldier from Irvine, California, named Mark Jennings Daily, and the unusual degree of emotion that his community was undergoing as a consequence. The emotion derived from a very moving statement that the boy had left behind, stating his reasons for having become a volunteer and bravely facing the prospect that his words might have to be read posthumously. In a way, the story was almost too perfect: this handsome lad had been born on the Fourth of July, was a registered Democrat and self-described agnostic, a U.C.L.A. honors graduate, and during his college days had fairly decided reservations about the war in Iraq. I read on, and actually printed the story out, and was turning a page when I saw the following:

"Somewhere along the way, he changed his mind. His family says there was no epiphany. Writings by author and columnist Christopher Hitchens on the moral case for war deeply influenced him … "

I don't exaggerate by much when I say that I froze.

Second Lieutenant Mark Daily flanked by his wife, Janet, and his parents, Linda and John, at Fort Bliss, in Texas, October 30, 2006. (Caption and headline up top, from the link)

The entire piece is powerfully moving. Read the entire story here.

***

UPDATE:  almostinfamous left a link in the comment thread below.  After you read Hitchens' article, click here to read Dennis Perrin's take.

Then click for more Perrin:  One, Two and Three.

 

Reunion

Terri Gurrola comes back from Iraq and meets her daughter. She served in Iraq for 7 months.

h/t Patti at 37days, who found the photo here.

***

Patti stopped by with an update in the comments below....

...one of my readers learned that the mother was only home for a 2-week R&R and is on her way back to Iraq now. I can't imagine the leave-taking.

Me neither.

Stay safe Terri Gurrola.

The Opposite of Hope

Reality.

Stolen from Dennis Perrin.

A Hopeful Place

It was a chilly Tuesday morning, several months back.  I was walking alone and snapped a few photos of a makeshift memorial -- hundreds of tiles wired to a fence somewhere in lower Manhattan.


The large, white tile above reads...

Where were you on September 11?

We were here amidst the despair and darkened sky.  This was, in a way, a hopeful place.  Thousands of people flooded these streets -- coming to give blood, volunteers emerged -- everyday heroes who looked to help any way they could.  We thought many would be rescued, brought here & saved.  We waited as one.  We came to help.  This was a hopeful place.