Monday Morning Musings

I'm not sure when I started obsessing about life and how quickly it seems to pass as I get older. It has definitely been a bigger blip on my radar since I turned 40.

When you are 20, you feel immortal and the world awaits you. Yet, if you can manage to make it through four consecutive average cat life cycles from that point, you are indeed lucky.

The unfortunate event on March 1st when I broke a number of bones in my face, the resulting surgery a bit more than 2 weeks later, and then my 50th birthday a month later, have all had an impact on how I view life. It seems so much more fragile now than it ever has before. The reality is that any of our seemingly stable lives can be turned upside down in the blink of an eye. Moreover, it is inevitable. The older we get, the greater the odds that we are on the cusp of a shattering event.

This understanding, which bears down upon me without my approval, is truly maddening sometimes. I see other people carrying on with their happy lives in what appears to be blissful ignorance of reality. I wish I could be like them. But are they all really unaware? Do they just have a more effective method of dealing with it and suppressing the associated emotions and anxiety?

We spend our lives gathering stuff: material possessions, friendships, and memories. We stuff our brains full of music, films, books, travels, sports scores, work experiences, Excel spreadsheet functions, HTML code, user IDs, passwords, credit card numbers, and expiration dates.

Our closets are packed with clothing and boxes in which stuff was delivered. Most people can't even use their garages because they are overflowing with possessions. And this is a relatively new phenomenon. My mother still remembers a time when she only had what was truly needed. She remembers her father telling the story of the first time he ever saw a motor car. He was so frightened he hid in a ditch. Running water and electricity inside the home were new luxuries, and still out of reach for many.

In that short span of time we have evolved into a people who have been born into such luxuries and take them for granted. We no longer need to hunt and gather for survival. Millions of us sit in a chair each day, tapping our fingers on plastic to manipulate data. And millions of us are paid well for it. But not in cash.

Someone else is tapping their fingers on plastic buttons to transfer "money" from one place to another place. When my place receives this transfer, I can then tap my fingers to move it from my place to the place which owns my house. Never having to lay eyes upon currency is a luxury.

I buy my food by swiping a piece of plastic through a chunk of plastic. That's how I get my groceries, my housewares, and fuel for my car so I can drive around and buy all this stuff. Quite amazing.

I don't even need to leave my house for a lot of the stuff I get. Tap tap tap on the plastic, select something you desire on a screen, type in a few numbers which gives instructions to computers to transfer a bunch of numbers from one place to another, and voila! A few days later, stuff comes to your door in a brown truck. And all of this is achieved by data passing through the air, or wires, at the speed of light.

Even in my lifetime, I remember how labor-intensive it was to gather information. I actually had to get up, get in the car, and drive to another building which housed thousands of books. I had to flip through drawers packed with thousands of little cards that contained directions to find the book which would contain the information I needed. And that was all well and good as long as someone else hadn't borrowed the book. There was even a human there to help you, if you needed it. Free of charge!

Now it is possible to gather data on a little chunk of plastic that you can carry with you, and tap on, or so I've read on this big piece of plastic I'm staring at as I tap these thoughts on my plastic buttons -- soon to be available for reading by anyone in the world fortunate enough to have a similar plastic device and viewing screen. You can even do this while you are driving around, buying shit you don't need, and swiping plastic to pay for it. Amazing!

What a world we live in, however briefly against the longer timeline of existence.

In this world of wonder and achievement, I am truly baffled that I can be so depressed. I don't just see the beauty and the wonder; I see everything. While this world in which we live would be unrecognizable to my grandparents in their youth, a few things haven't changed at all. Things like greed.

If we were truly immortal, or even if we could live 500 years, or 300 years, I could understand the concept of greed more easily than I can from my perspective of life at 50.

I am truly aghast that greed remains as pervasive and unevolved as it is. Greed is what compels us to do absurd things like drilling a mile deep -- underwater -- for fuel to power these moving boxes of steel we need in order to drive to a bigger, fixed-position box and punch plastic all day so that we can acquire a bunch of other (much smaller) numbers which get shifted around in the ether. After accruing enough of these numbers we call our own, we can drive around and buy stuff.

Greed is what allowed us to come here, take this land, and call it ours. Greed made us establish arbitrary and artificial boundaries, staking poles in the ground, adorned with absolutely meaningless pieces of patterned cloth in order to have what is essentially a meaningless and hollow identity.

Now that we have that, greed is driving us to destroy it. And we're no longer content to take advantage of people from outside our artificial boundaries with identifies different from our own; we seem eager to screw the life out of anything and everything we get our hands on in order to get more personal numbers stacked in our favor, whether it's our neighbors, the fields which grow the food to keep us alive, the water we need to quench our thirst, or the air we breathe.

We seem to have become completely uninterested in the numbers of our brothers and sisters who have had their equally short and fragile lives ended sooner than necessary by greed.

If nothing else, life is about adjusting and adapting to changes. Life is about caring and understanding. Life is about overcoming selfishness and greed. Life is about understanding that we are of the world and not vice-versa, and behaving accordingly. Failure to comprehend these simple facts is criminal. And we seem to be a nation and a world of criminals.

I have my own issues with comprehension. I cannot comprehend how, in this wondrous short time of bounty and achievement, so many of us cannot be content and enjoy our own personal experiences. Instead, we feel a necessity to exploit and control others, and often to focus on the most asinine of restrictions, while allowing all manner of other profligate atrocities to run rampant. I cannot comprehend how this path of greed we have chosen can be sustained much longer, nor can I comprehend how those of us who never ponder the ramifications of our enormous footprint will deal with the reality when it finally does deliver the ultimate smackdown.

On this day, arbitrarily set aside by some authority, in which we are asked to remember those who have fallen (some of whom still were not even allowed to be open and honest about who they were), and as I also include those who gave up a portion of their life, perhaps the best portion of it (and in many cases, a limb or two, if not their entire life), in their gift of service to this relatively recent nation of artificial boundaries conceived of, and awash in, greed, I have to ask myself if it was a truly necessary and noble cause, or simply a more short-sighted exploitation to fulfill a craven lust before casting them aside like spent fuel rods.

Sorry. I know I can come across as a major downer sometimes. But I think a lot. And I will honor our veterans today by saying we need to do everything in our power to stop creating so many of them for unjust causes. Those numbers (a trillion or two) piled up in someone's account which were used to fund the recent and ongoing wars could have been better transferred elsewhere in our relentless pursuit of stuff.

Live and let live, gently, and with responsible awareness and compassion.

Honk 4 Ignernt Assholes

Oh, the irony!

You are not alone.

Just make sure you remember where "your country" came from and how you got it in the first place.

Conflicts generally known as "Indian Wars" broke out between American government and Native American societies. The Battle of Little Bighorn (1876) was one of the greatest Native American victories. Defeats included the Creek War of 1813-14, the Sioux Uprising of 1862, the Sand Creek Massacre (1864) and Wounded Knee in 1890.[68] These conflicts were catalysts to the decline of dominant Native American culture. By 1872, the U.S. Army pursued a policy to exterminate all Native Americans unless or until they agreed to surrender and live on reservations "where they could be taught Christianity and agriculture."

Of course. How the hell did the savages get by for 20,000 years, before whitey showed up, without knowing a damn thing about agriculture?

This land is your land, this land is my land
From California to the New York Island
From the Redwood Forest to the Gulf Stream waters
This land was made for you and me.

This land is my land, it is not your land
I've got a shotgun, and you don't got one
I'll blow your head off, if you don't get off
This land was made just for me.

You sure about that? Or do you just want the portion of it back that benefits you at the expense of others?

Election Day in Iraq

YAY! We have succeeded in bringing American-style democracy to Iraq: low voter turnout.

Photo credit: Michael Kamber for The New York Times

Bring the troops home.

War & Peace & Excess Emissions

Gotta love the irony of a war president accepting a peace prize.

Nine days after announcing a major escalation in the war in Afghanistan, President Obama arrived at Norway’s City Hall on Thursday to formally accept the Nobel Peace Prize, evoking the notion of a “just war” and robustly defending the use of military force “on humanitarian grounds” and to preserve peace.

At least he sees it.

“Still, we are at war,” he said, “ and I am responsible for the deployment of thousands of young Americans to battle in a distant land. Some will kill. Some will be killed. And so I come here with an acute sense of the cost of armed conflict — filled with difficult questions about the relationship between war and peace, and our effort to replace one with the other.”

So did a few others.

Across the street from the institute, a crowd chanted and held up a yellow banner, saying: “Obama You Won It, Now Earn It.”

Many Norwegians were annoyed that Obama's trip was so short, and that he skipped a few traditional formalities surrounding the event.

The president is scheduled to return to Washington on Friday.

Oh, but not for long. He'll be hopping back on Air Force One next week en route to Copenhagen.

The United States will have representation in Copenhagen throughout the negotiating process by State Department negotiators and Cabinet officials who will highlight the great strides we have made this year towards a clean energy economy.

Great green strides indeed! Like going 10 miles in a Hummer to pick up a can of tomato paste at the supermarket and returning home, and then an hour later going back out two miles beyond the supermarket to a post office to fetch a single stamp.

Nice carbon footprint!

Three

That's the number of top Obama advisors who favor sending more troops to Afghanistan, including Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton. I am just...numb.

Three of the options call for specific levels of additional troops. The low-end option would add 20,000 to 25,000 troops, a middle option calls for about 30,000, and another embraces Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal’s request for roughly 40,000 more troops. Administration officials said that a fourth option was added only in the past few days. They declined to identify any troop level attached to it.

Perhaps that fourth option should have a troop reduction level attached to it.

File under "Change you can['t] believe in."

Gas Wars

I noticed the other day that Condi Rice chipped in her two cents on the strategy being employed by Barack Obama in Afghanistan. Specifically she said “The last time we left Afghanistan, and we abandoned Pakistan," she said, "that territory became the very territory on which Al Qaeda trained and attacked us on September 11th. So our national security interests are very much tied up in not letting Afghanistan fail again and become a safe haven for terrorists. It's that simple," she declared, "if you want another terrorist attack in the U.S., abandon Afghanistan." Sounds pretty ominous. Stay and continue to fight in Afghanistan or be attacked. Scary stuff.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/09/22/condoleezza-rice-if-you-w_n_294755.html

We were told by W in 2001 that the Afghan invasion purpose was to find Osama Bin Laden, remove the Taliban from power, and bring freedom to the Afghan people. Like many times during the Baby Bush years, we were lied to. Unfortunately though the real reasons for the invasion, and the continued presence of the US in Afghanistan are based more on greed than some noble crusade to free the Afghan people and bring to justice the man who masterminded 9/11. Ask yourself, “ Why is it, long after Bin Laden stopped being hunted, and instead became Bush’s Emmanuel Goldstein, a scary underground enemy, occasionally issuing video taped threats, the Muslim boogeyman extraordinaire, that we continue to spend lives and money fighting in this country that for 2000 years no one has been able to conquer”? The very simple answer is natural gas, and lots of it.

There are vast reserves of natural gas in Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, countries north of Afghanistan on the Caspian Sea. Unocal, a huge oil and gas company that later was acquired by Chevron, wanted a way to get these massive reserves to market. The answer was to build a gas pipeline from the Caspian Sea, through Afghanistan, through Pakistan, to the Indian Ocean, and then transport it by tanker to their many gas hungry customers.

Unocal was good friends with the then US backed Taliban and there is speculation that they even helped finance the Taliban in their war with the Soviets. Up until 1999, Unocal were such great friends with the Taliban leaders that they hosted delegations of Taliban leaders to the USA; Texas to be exact (while W was governor), in 1997 and 1999. (http://www.historycommons.org/context.jsp?item=a120497texasvisit&scale=2). After Taliban guest in Afghanistan Osama Bin Laden attacked two US embassies in 1998, things started to go sour. Negotiations broke down for good as late as 2001, and as Toronto's Globe and Mail columnist Lawrence Martin put it, "Washington was furious, leading to speculation it might take out the Taliban. After 9/11, the Taliban, with good reason, were removed -- and pipeline planning continued with the Karzai government. U.S. forces installed bases near Kandahar, where the pipeline was to run. A key motivation for the pipeline was to block a competing bid involving Iran, a charter member of the 'axis of evil.'"

In April of 2008, Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India signed a Gas Pipeline Framework Agreement to build a U.S.-backed $7.6 billion pipeline. It would, of course, bypass Iran and new energy giant Russia, carrying Turkmeni natural gas and oil to Pakistan and India. Construction would, theoretically, begin in 2010. Put the emphasis on "theoretically," because the pipeline is, once again, to run straight through Kandahar and so directly into the heartland of the Taliban insurgency. Queue the renewed interest in the Afghan war. Queue the increase in troop levels, and subsequent increase in troop deaths. Sorry Condi, this war has nothing to do with preventing terror attacks, and you know it. It has everything to do with making a lot of money and being willing to sacrifice lives to do it. It has everything to do with building a fucking pipeline. And Barack Obama is far from innocent; he suggested increased troop levels in Afghanistan before the election, and will in all likelihood continue the escalation he has already begun. Like his predecessor he continues to lie about why we are still in Afghanistan.

Just a couple more facts to note: Condi Rice was a former employee of Chevron, who as you recall, acquired Unocal and are partners in the pipeline deal. She even, inexplicably, had an oil tanker named after her Marinucci, Carla (2001-05-05). "Chevron redubs ship named for Bush aide". San Francisco Chronicle. http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2001/05/05/MN223743.DTL., which soon after she became the Bush Secretary of State, was wisely re-named Altair Voyager. Afghan President Hamid Karzai, who was installed by the US as interim president and then “elected” by the Afghan people, is a former consultant for Unocal. The connections here are by no means tenuous.

There has been a flurry of reportage on the revived pipeline plan in Canada, where -- bizarrely enough -- journalists and columnists actually worry about such ephemeral possibilities as Canadian troops spending the next half century protecting Turkmeni energy. If you happen to live in the U.S., though, you would really have no way of knowing about such developments, no less their backstory, unless you were wandering the foreign press online. The BBC, the CBC, and English Al Jezeera are all good places to start.

Bring Back the Draft

It might be the only way

to end the insane wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Eight years into it and we're on the losing end. Time for a reality check.

In Memoriam

Yesterday was the worst day for American troops in Afghanistan in nearly a year as seven died in fighting.

Of seven United States soldiers killed Monday, said Capt. Jon Stock, an American military spokesman, four died along with two Afghan bystanders in a roadside bomb explosion in the northern Kunduz Province, and two American soldiers were killed in an explosion in southern Afghanistan.

One new president, two old wars, and no end in sight. Change we can believe in.

But in an uplifting sign of concern, tens of thousands turned out in Los Angeles today to pay their respects.

How sweet and fitting.

Memorial Day 2009

Borrowed from The Dark Wraith.

Top Five Countries

These five places make me glad I'm not in Obama's shoes right now.

Mexico

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton arrives in Mexico on Wednesday for what will be the first in a parade of visits by top administration officials, including President Obama himself next month, to try to head off a major foreign policy crisis close to home. They will find a country mired in a deepening slump, miffed by signs of protectionism in its largest trading partner, and torn apart by a drug war for which many in Mexico blame customers in the United States.

Pakistan

Now, as the Obama administration completes its review of strategy toward the region this week, his sudden ascent has raised an urgent question: Can Mr. Sharif, 59, a populist politician close to Islamic parties, be a reliable partner? Or will he use his popular support to blunt the military’s already fitful campaign against the insurgency of the Taliban and Al Qaeda?

Czech Republic

Transatlantic tension over the handling of the global economic crisis intensified Wednesday when the prime minister of the Czech Republic, which holds the European Union presidency, described the President Obama’s stimulus measures as the “way to hell.”

[...]

...Prime Minister Mirek Topolanek argued that the Obama administration’s fiscal package and financial bailout “will undermine the stability of the global financial market.”

Mr. Topolanek’s comments, only a day after he offered his government’s resignation following a no confidence vote, took European officials by surprise.

Whew! Feeling sick yet? We're not done!

Israel

Israel’s prime minister-designate, Benjamin Netanyahu, said Wednesday that the coalition he is forming would be a “partner for peace,” offering a pledge that seemed designed to reshape his reputation as a foe of the peace process with the Palestinians.

The promise brought a muted response from some Palestinians.

[...]

On Wednesday, Tzipi Livni, the foreign minister and leader of the centrist Kadima party, called the prospective coalition a government “conceived in sin,” according to The Associated Press.

United States

The Obama administration said Tuesday that it would move hundreds of federal agents to the country’s southern border to prevent a spillover of drug-related violence from Mexico, and that it would focus more efforts on stopping weapons and money from flowing south.

And...

Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner on Wednesday pressed the case for expanding the government’s ability to take over and restructure ailing institutions that threaten to the broader financial system.

There's five already and I haven't even mentioned Iraq, Afghanistan, China or Russia. Holy shit.

I Don't Always Disagree With Bush

The message at least. But coming from his lips, I can't help but gasp.

President Bush, little more than an hour after returning to Washington from the Olympics in Beijing, bluntly warned Russia that its military operations were damaging its reputation and were "unacceptable in the 21st century."

For fuck's sake! What is wrong with this asshole? Remember Iraq?

The good soul of Putin strikes again.

The good news is: Bush is home from the Olympics! Fuck yeah!

Enjoy the Olympics, Mr. Putin

And while I'm on the subject of assholes, I hope Putin was enjoying himself at the Olympic opening ceremonies in Beijing.

I'm not sure what Bush thought he saw when he looked into the eyes of Putin but it clearly wasn't a good soul.

Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin of Russia declared that “war has started,”...

Yes, it certainly has.

My Veteran's Memorial Day Tribute

5/27: Yes, I was rushed and not thinking. :-)

Sorry I'm late, but it did not escape my notice.

I Love a Man in Uniform

"I need an order.

Shoot! Shoot!"

4,000 Dots in 5 Years

Each dot represents the lost life of a soldier in Iraq. Each dot represents a name, a face, a family filled with sadness, a lost future, a sacrifice, and for what?

Each dot also represents at least 8 wounded in action, and that number is probably very low. It could easily be 16 or more. Many of those lives are forever changed as they learn to cope with lost senses we all take for granted -- the lost of vision, hearing, one or more limbs, or a plethora of mental health issues.

Each dot represents at least 300 Iraqis who have died as a result of the US invasion. Again, 300 names, faces and families destroyed for each dot.

Lastly, each dot represents $126 million dollars based on the most conservative Pentagon figures of the war's cost. If you believe as I do that the true cost of the war is already at $1 trillion if not on the verge of $2 trillion, then each dot represents about $250 million to $500 million -- that's half a billion dollars per dot for those of you more accustomed to dealing with three and four-digit sums of money on a routine basis.

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So? At least somebody is benefitting.

Have a nice Easter weekend, Mr. Cheney. And may you rot in Hell.

What's Missing On This Blog?

My ranting contribution to the March 19 Iraq War Blogswarm?

I'm not sure I have it in me. I've been angry about this war for 5 years already. I've blogged about my anger for about 22 months off and on. The American people have spoken -- once by electing that fucking asshole in the White House to a second term when he never deserved a first, and once by giving the Democrats a narrow control over Congress which by my estimation has accomplished not one damn thing. Sure, the people have been polled and they overwhelmingly are against the war but who gives a shit about poll numbers? Not the president. And not Dick.

And in just over 7 months we'll be going to the polls again to select the leader of our country for the next four years in what should be a landslide blowout against the Republicans, but may in fact be another tight race if current polls can be trusted.

Americans seem more concerned about the economy right now than they are about Iraq. I'm not saying that's wrong. We should be more concerned about the economy because Iraq should never have been an issue in the first place because the war never should have happened. And I've yet to hear very many Americans asking themselves how the cost of this war has impacted our economy, directly or indirectly.

Meanwhile, Bush just keeps pounding the same message to the same favorable audiences over and over, and nothing changes. No accountability, no impeachment, nothing.

“Five years into this battle, there is an understandable debate over whether the war was worth fighting, whether the fight is worth winning, and whether we can win it,” he said. “The answers are clear to me. Removing Saddam Hussein from power was the right decision, and this is a fight that America can and must win.”

This protest against the war and the appropriate level of anger should not be confined to the "liberal" bloggers. Honestly, I feel thoroughly pissed off that after five long fucking years of this insane bullshit, we're still the ones demanding an end to it. Five years into this with no end in sight, 4,000 soldiers dead, many tens of thousands more wounded, hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis dead or wounded with millions of lives disrupted and displaced, countless lies of the Bush administration, trillions of dollars squandered or slated to be, there should be tens of millions of Americans out in the streets in an uproar.

Frankly, I find myself in "shock and awe" at American apathy. We apparently cannot even comprehend the cost although we will without a doubt feel it, and soon.

Five years in, the Pentagon tags the cost of the Iraq war at roughly $600 billion and counting. Joseph E. Stiglitz, a Nobel Prize-winning economist and critic of the war, pegs the long-term cost at more than $4 trillion.

[...]

Congressional Democrats fiercely criticize the White House over war expenditures. But it is virtually certain that the Democrats will provide tens of billions more in a military spending bill next month. Some Democrats are even arguing against attaching strings, like a deadline for withdrawal, saying the tactic will fail as it has in the past.

Emphasis on "and counting." These spineless fucks are paid to represent us. When will we hold them accountable?

Time is ticking and every ten seconds of this insanity costs us the average income of an American for a year, give or take a few seconds. With that in mind, I'm not sure just what it takes to get the average American angry enough in large enough numbers to bring about some change.

Until then, I have a prayer.

Dear God, please damn this man for eternity.

That's not asking for much under the circumstances.

The War In Iraq Adds Up

Unless my math is wrong, in the time it will take you to read this sentence, the war in Iraq will have cost us $32,000. Or a bit under $1.5 million in the time it took me to prepare this post.

Trillions Squandered

It's primary day in Texas and I have an important decision to make: stick with the 3rd candidate I have supported during the primary season or switch to my 4th. Or switch back to my 2nd choice since he is on the ballot but out of the race.

Last week txrad told me he was leaning to Obama which I interpreted as a general direction of Texas in general. He and I have had many political conversations and for him to indicate an interest in throwing his support to Obama made me wonder just how many other Texans were contemplating the same in what is perceived to be a tight race.

Polls are open and I have not reached a decision. Call me the ultimate undecided voter. It's unlikely my vote choice will be swayed by any yard signs or billboards, nor will I be influenced by any radio or TV ads, positive or negative.

What did stir up a flurry of frustration for me with Hillary was Bob Herbert's op-ed piece in today's NY Times concerning the true cost of the war in Iraq. It's nothing I didn't already know, but it is something not widely reported in the MSM.

The war in Iraq will ultimately cost U.S. taxpayers not hundreds of billions of dollars, but an astonishing $2 trillion, and perhaps more. There has been very little in the way of public conversation, even in the presidential campaigns, about the consequences of these costs, which are like a cancer inside the American economy.

On Thursday, the Joint Economic Committee, chaired by Senator Chuck Schumer, conducted a public examination of the costs of the war. The witnesses included the Nobel Prize-winning economist, Joseph Stiglitz (who believes the overall costs of the war — not just the cost to taxpayers — will reach $3 trillion), and Robert Hormats, vice chairman of Goldman Sachs International.

I constantly fantasize about squandered money under the Bush administration and the plethora of ways the money could have been better spent to improve the lives of Americans. And when it comes to the cost of this war, the amount of money is staggering.

Both men talked about large opportunities lost because of the money poured into the war. “For a fraction of the cost of this war,” said Mr. Stiglitz, “we could have put Social Security on a sound footing for the next half-century or more.”

Mr. Hormats mentioned Social Security and Medicare, saying that both could have been put “on a more sustainable basis.” And he cited the committee’s own calculations from last fall that showed that the money spent on the war each day is enough to enroll an additional 58,000 children in Head Start for a year, or make a year of college affordable for 160,000 low-income students through Pell Grants, or pay the annual salaries of nearly 11,000 additional border patrol agents or 14,000 more police officers.

My disappointment in Hillary Clinton for voting to authorize this war has resurfaced with a vengeance. It would be different if I personally had held similar beliefs as her at the time she supported authorization. I could well argue that I had also been hoodwinked and we both made mistakes and we learn from them. But I was against the war from the beginning -- even before the beginning. I participated in a street march here in Austin in which thousands of protesters showed up to take a stand against what was then merely the potential for a war.

I'm not the type of person to be easily motivated to inconvenience myself unless I feel an injustice of inconceivable proportions is about to be unleashed. But txrad and I along with thousands of other did believe in our hearts this war was dead wrong. And we were right. And Hillary was wrong.

Now I have to decide whether to forgive someone for making such an obvious mistake and reward her with my vote, even as I am imperfect in my own personal affairs and decisions, and currently paying the price for my obvious mistakes.

I have a few more hours to mull it over. Meanwhile, this little widget that I've had on my blog sidebar almost since the beginning will probably be removed soon. It seems pretty meaningless at this point.

Get Ready For a War Party

I swear I feel as if I am living in a twilight zone. Up until the economy started tanking in 2007, the Iraq war was the single polarizing issue between the political parties. Now with economic concerns surpassing the war in most polls I suppose the Republicans sense this as their green light to jump on the pro-war bandwagon as the single most effective campaign issue for retaining the White House.

Frankly, I am annoyed when I read the poll numbers because the economy and the war are not entirely separate issues. I just hope most Americans realize the hundreds of billions of dollars we have poured into the war effort are connected to the economy. I will give them the benefit of the doubt and assume they do.

I can also hope these concerns about the economy signify a desire among voters to place more emphasis on issues here at home, in each of our 50 states, instead of a massive dump of resources into Iraq. The last thing we need right now is for 70% of our voters, or even 50%, to believe the war issue is in the back seat. It's certainly shaping up as the front-and-center issue for Republicans.

The War Party is starting to lock and load.

Offering a preview of the general election campaign, President Bush sought on Friday to unify the Republican Party behind its presumptive nominee and said the contest would present the country with a stark ideological choice at a time of war.

[...]

Beginning with Mitt Romney, who withdrew from the race on Thursday, warning that he would not abet “the surrender to terror,” Republicans, including Mr. McCain and Vice President Dick Cheney, have warned darkly that the Democrats were ill-suited and ill-equipped to protect the nation, the same theme that Mr. Bush struck in his successful 2004 re-election campaign.

As blantantly offensive as this is, I expect this will be the Republican issue for 2008. If and when the economy continues to falter during the course of the campaign leading into November, the choice on the ballot will boil down to either four more years of the Bush war, or an economic focus on America coupled with what absolutely has to be a concrete plan to end a war which cannot be won.

I can only hope the rest of the American voters will see and hear this rhetoric and experience the same gut-wrenching repulsion as I do. John McCain has become nothing but a mouthpiece for the war machine.

“I guarantee you this: If we had announced a date for withdrawal from Iraq and withdrawn troops the way that Senator Obama and Senator Clinton want to do, Al Qaeda would be celebrating that they had defeated the United States of America and that we surrendered,” Mr. McCain said at a rally in Wichita. “I will never surrender.”

If moderate and liberal voters aren't motivated enough at this point, the fact that Karl Rove is supporting McCain and contributing financially to his campaign should be enough to tip us over the brink.

As for myself, I am beyond angry or livid. I am outraged.



Crossposted at Big Brass Blog

Terrorism: It's All That Matters

I'm having trouble with this.

Asma Jahangir, a leading human rights lawyer, reported in an e-mail that she had been ordered to stay confined to her home for 90 days. She said it was ironic that Musharraf "had to clamp down on the press and the judiciary to curb terrorism," adding, "Those he has arrested are progressive, secular minded people while the terrorists are offered negotiations and ceasefires."

But this really concerns me.

The Bush administration signaled Sunday that it would probably keep billions of dollars flowing to Pakistan’s military, despite the detention of human rights advocates and leaders of the political opposition by Gen. Pervez Musharraf, the country’s president.

[...]

“They would rather have a stable Pakistan — albeit with some restrictive norms — than have more democracy prone to fall in the hands of extremists,” said Tariq Azim Khan, the minister of state for information. “Given the choice, I know what our friends would choose.”

So much for "spreading democracy."

Mr. Gates said the United States had begun “reviewing all of our assistance programs” to Pakistan. But, he noted, “We are mindful not to do anything that would undermine ongoing counter-terrorism efforts.”

I am disgusted. And pissed off.