<>Ask the kid in the ICU burn unit whether the securement of 380,000 pounds of conventional explosives in the first moments of the Iraq War was really unimportant in the grand scheme of things. Consider carefully, though. The question may be answered the long way round. Because with anything else, and as every world leader has said about the Iraq conflict, it’s just not that simple. The answers just aren’t in black and white.

Specialist Dixon was the All-American kid in the middle of the best years of his life. A football star with a prom queen girlfriend, a good job back home and the plan to get out and go to college for five years, become an architect, and design multiple-family homes that people could afford in the tight housing market of Boulder, Colorado, Dixon knew that he was in the Army to not only do his part, but to do the job he signed up for.

The morning he and his buddy rolled into the center of Baghdad on a mission to escort a convoy of supplies, the same day that George W. Bush put a supplemental budget request for over $87 billion dollars to “supply our troops with what they need”, a bomb went off in the street. Five gallons of gasoline, mixed with dish detergent got detonated by a cellular phone in a roadside bomb with a pound of HMX as the main explosive device. Steel ball bearings, chunks of rebar concrete, and nuts and bolts were packed into the crude device, designed to blow outwards to a thin-skinned Humvee.

Dixon doesn’t remember it. All he remembers is seeing his best friend, Jay, who enlisted with him right out of high school; assigned to the same company, and his brother in arms suddenly missing most of his face. He doesn’t remember the chunk of shrapnel carried on a wave of homemade napalm searing his lower stomach muscles, or the body of the Humvee collapsing from the blast. He doesn’t remember the medic vomiting as he held the charred intestines of the blue-eyed blonde All-American boy with the picture of the pretty girl in his wallet – now soaked in chemicals and blood.

Specialist Dixon was a great, natural leader. Even as his medics hurried him to the helicopter, he argued with them to take his friend Jay first, since “Jay was pretty messed up, and that’s all I could think of.” He didn’t think of the pain that would come, dancing throughout his spine in rictus waves. He didn’t know he’d never taste Mom’s chili again, or that his face was splintered by small shreds of metal, or that a small bolt was still lodged in his skull – neatly installed, like a picture screw at the frame shop he worked at through high school to help pay for his sister’s private school tuition.

None of these things Dixon really thinks about now. Dixon fully admits to being an alcoholic and a morphine addict – because when you’re in the hospital and there’s nothing to take the edge off of the pain, morphine sounds really good. And the alcohol is the one drug he can take himself. His nurse gets it for him on prescription precisely because if he doesn’t have at least three beers a day, he gets the delirium tremens. It’s the good stuff – Sierra Nevada Bigfoot Barleywine, with a 10% alcohol content. Most of it seeps out of his upper intestine and into a small plastic container, cloudy with bile and stomach acid, but what he can get out of it

Specialist Dixon is missing his lower intestine – the small, curly bits of gut that process the rest of his food. His liver is gone; kidneys nearly failed, and the diaphragm that allows him to inhale and exhale on his own power is gone. His mother has quit her job to fly to take care of him, to hold his hand at his bedside. His face is still blistered with purple and red. He jokingly refers to himself as “The Human Pizza”.

Two months ago the love of his life told him she could not be with him any longer – and it was only after he had told her it was his fault that she moved on with her life. She had an abortion during his absence – after discussion that neither of them could be a parent, with him in Iraq and she going to community college and working during the day.

Four days later Specialist Dixon was coated in homemade napalm, and saw his best friend’s jugular spray-paint the inside of the vehicle.

It is ironic, Dixon tells me, that Jay and Dixon told each other that they would die to protect each other. Even after Jay said he worried he wouldn’t make it through, they forged a bond and slept together in the same tent, ate together, and did everything they could throughout the day as a team. Jay wrote to his wife that the pair of them were almost married, they did so many things together – from watching DVDs in the barracks to joining George W. Bush for Thanksgiving in Iraq. They watched each others’ backs. They talked a lot about politics and why they were there. And the both of them agreed that it was well worth it – worth the money they spent on their own body armor, worth the accessories, worth the new boots, the time away from family,

Then there was fire and red hot bolts searing through the cab of their Humvee, and without ever thinking about it, Jay held true to his word – he flung himself across the line of fire to protect his friend Dix, collecting over six hundred foreign objects in his government-issued body armor – without the ceramic plates that may have saved his life had they been issued to all soldiers before they were deployed.

Officially, Jay died from massive blood loss and fourth-degree burns, but unofficially, Dixon remembers cradling his friend’s hand and knowing that he was dead – not least because Jay’s hand was no longer attached at the wrist to the rest of Jay’s body.

Some of that might be nightmares – the delirium tremens hits Dixon every now and again, and combined with the Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome, Dixon has nightmares. He sometimes doesn’t know what’s real and what’s not. But then he will reach down to the cavity of his stomach, where the muscle grafts from the backs of his thighs were taken to remake his belly. He feels the warm plastic of the catheters and the intravenous drips against his skin and sometimes they burn, and he screams, and his nursing team helps him remember he’s in the states, in a burn unit in San Antonio, Texas, recovering what he has left of his life.

Dixon’s mother told me she was preparing to bury her son. Not in the next month, or in the next two months, but in the next year, because that’s how much time her blue-eyed baby boy has to live. The doctors have been explicit about life expectancy. She started saving for a funeral, and has already bought a neat plot. She is a former project manager for a small firm, and she knows how to do things correctly. She is holding on, a small, tightly-wound person with wiry gray hair shorn in a sensible short cut, with a small, simple gold wedding band. This is her only son.

I only know Dixon and his mom because I write letters – letters that say, “I know that you are angry. I know you’re hurting. I know that nothing I say can bring you any peace – indeed, nothing that your leader did, or is doing, currently makes any sense or difference to what you’re going through.

I know that the last thing you want to hear is platitudes about how to win the peace or the war or the fight against terror. The only thing I know is that even though the government is ignoring you, and the body politik has swept you under the rug, you are not forgotten.”

Dixon and Jay are two casualties of the Iraq war. Jay is listed as a United States Marine Corps casualty on the Department of Defense’s website. If he dies, Dixon will never mark on that wall – because he came home.

But they are two of the lambs sacrificed on the altar of one man’s ego. They know it – their parents know it. They gave their lives because they believed in the greatness of America – not that Saddam had to be removed. They went and they fought believing their leader, George W. Bush, would make good on the promises that he would give them everything they needed to win. He believed so strongly in the promises of his commander-in-chief that everything would be okay for the military – from the supplies they needed to the bullets they had to ration out during engagements - that Dixon took out a Humvee they knew wouldn’t stand up to small arms fire, let alone a homemade incendiary bomb made from one pound of HMX explosive, four pounds of scrap metal, one container of Tide, and five gallons of American-taxpayer subsidized gasoline.

<>Dixon doesn’t blame George W. Bush for the lack of armor on his Humvee, or that his buddy’s body was the only shield between him and the bomb blast. Between hits of the morphine that get him in and out of painful coherence, he explains to his mother that Bush wasn’t there; couldn’t have seen the bomb. <>

But this morning when she turns on the news, she’ll see that over 380,000 pounds of explosive – including the HMX that shortened her son’s life expectancy from sixty years to eighteen months – vanished from an Iraqi munitions depot in the first few moments of the war. And she knows she’ll be alive long after she receives a folded triangular flag.

Specialist Dixon’s mother isn’t saying anything while her son seeps his food into a plastic bag, and the bedding is slowly stained by pinkish fluids so that she must call a nurse to change the sheets every four hours. She doesn’t say anything while her still-handsome son’s eyes glaze over as the television images from Iraq flow over them. She, a lifelong teetotaler, doesn’t say a word when her twenty-two year old son gropes for a smooth glass of strong beer and drinks it down in one go.

But she has said to me in a private email of her own, that she is simply waiting until she knows her voice will no longer destroy what little life her son has left. She said, simply, that she is waiting for her son to die, as she waited for his father to die, and then she will be free to tell the world exactly what she thinks of George. W. Bush.

“Try the Hot Pockets, they’re breathtaking.”

I finally figured out who Donald Rumsfeld reminds me of. It’s Dr. Evil, from the Austin Powers movie. He’s a bent sex symbol in many ways – from the pouty lips to the ice-blue eyes and the funky skin; the scars on his face and the growly look. It’s just that Mike Myers does the humor of it much better. And at least the Mike Myers character is nefarious and witless on purpose. The hissy fits of “Oh, now, come on people, you have to tell me these things, I’ve been frozen for thirty freaking years, you know,” fits better with Dr. Evil than Mr. Rumsfeld’s, “Well, that was the information we had at the time, which was the same information everyone else had.”

Never mind that all fifteen challengers of the Afghanistan presidential election announced a full boycott of the election – Rumsfeld said, ``Not withstanding all the comments in the media -- that it was a quagmire, that this wouldn't work and that was going to go bad, and that everything was terrible -- the fact is they just had an election. It's breathtaking!''

Never mind that multiple voting fraud occurred; never mind that Karzai is connected by financial and business relationships to the Bush administration; never mind that the Taliban still controls large sections of the Afghanistan countryside; never mind that human rights abuses have increased since the fall of the Taliban; never mind that drug production, especially of high-quality opium and heroin, have skyrocketed since the Taliban fell; the election is “breathtaking” and that’s that – the eagle has landed, democracy’s on the march, and Afghanistan is now counted in a member country in the “Coalition of the Willing” currently working in Iraq.

Fascinating. ``I recognize that the media will fly-speck that election and say that this wasn't perfect, or that happened, or some ink came off, but it was an enormous accomplishment,'' Rumsfeld told a news conference during a brief visit to Macedonia.

When all fifteen presidential candidates other than your baby boy drop out, saying the election is illegitimate due to the manipulation of the polls, that’s hardly fly-specking. Nor is it remotely “perfect”. Of course, if you’re going to go ahead and install a puppet regime, it doesn’t do to let the rest of the world know you’re doing it on the sly, and on the cheap. When your adored lean-and-mean military fails to nail the SOB that hit the World Trade Centers on September 11, 2001, it’s often better to just announce that you’ve succeeded – even as your own CIA and oil contacts are fed at the trough of the Afghani people.

Pass the hookah, Rummy – I need to get a hit of what you’re smoking. Maybe then I can accept that Bush is a legitimate president, duly elected by the people of the United States. Maybe then I can accept that Iraq was a legal invasion.

Seriously, you get this stuff where? In Afghanistan?

Hold on, I’m going to go stare at my hands in the corner for a while. You go ahead and do whatever you’re going to do – I just want to hang out with the president over here and watch the pretty colors go by for a while.

Boom. There goes Washington, DC. Boom. There goes New York City. Boom. There goes Los Angeles. Suddenly the entire United States is on alert – all the major cities rush to find shelter from the fallout, and the war has begun. Nuclear war’s beginning is starting right now – and it’s starting with the Bush administration’s neglect of the nuclear nonproliferation treaty.

It’s not going to be the large nations that begin the world war – it’s the rogue states and the terrorist factions whose dearest wish is to kill themselves in a holy expurgement of extremism. Fundamentalism and nuclear warheads – welcome to the new land of terror. Your backyard.

The problem, as I have seen it, is that there has been no focus on the threat of states like North Korea and Iran in developing nuclear arms. No serious focus, at any rate. John Kerry’s not focusing on Iran, nor North Korea. We know the quality and depth of Bush’s focus – in the foreign policy department, any state or terrorism group that has a Q in the name must be the most important.

Most Americans are spooked as hell by the Middles East, and instability. But, in my opinion, if North Korea and Iran come out of the closet wearing garter belts of nukes, that’s going to take us all one step closer to nuclear war.

Not even nuclear war. Nuclear terrorism. See, North Korea is dead broke, and are willing to sell opium and heroin using state-owned cargo ships throughout the world. The current regime in Pyongyang is funded almost solely through means that other nations would cry foul at.

North Korean ships routinely smuggle drugs from out in the open ocean to the shores of Australia, bound for the major cities of the continent and to the Western states. It’s not unlikely that a North Korean regime with enough nukes to keep itself xenophobically safe would find it convenient to sell cash on the barrelhead, one nuclear warhead, ten million United States dollars, and free of charge, here’s an instruction manual on how to rig it to explode outside of a missile for free. Now, go tell your friends, and remember, as long as you use it against the evil of the Western democracies, you’re good to go.

How hard would it be for a terrorist cell, then, to gather enough cash to fund themselves one nuclear weapon?

Iran, on the other hand, will merely be a belligerent. Its neighbors, India and Pakistan, and its religious and ethnic enemy, Israel, all have nukes – and the technology for delivering them. Why wouldn’t Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Turkey, and even South Africa try to protect themselves from the nuclear threat by developing their own nukes? There goes Bush’s much-touted “nuclear nonproliferation” – right out the window.

Second – when North Korea has nukes, then Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Malaysia, Australia, and any other nation remotely within the range of the NK guns will scramble to pick up some technology. And for good reason – the North Koreas are about as stable as nitroglycerin.

The Bush “war of preemption” did nothing to contain the threat of Iran or North Korea. Iraq was far too impoverished to build a serious nuclear weapons program – the country’s funding primarily went to a vain man who wrote bad romance novels as a hobby. Instead, it encouraged Iran to demand from Britain, France, and Russia that in order to work with Iran on its nuclear capabilities and limit the proliferation, the Brits have to provide a security guarantee against nuke attack by Israel. In addition, Iran is demanding dual use nuclear technology, conventional weapons, and more nuclear warheads. Basically, it’s saying, “We’re going to have nukes, and if you want us to think about being nice, you’ll help us get them. Otherwise, once we get them, we won’t be very nice.”

But the point is still made – Iran will encourage nuclear proliferation. North Korea – more so, because North Korea will not be choosy about whom it sells weapons to, as long as the sales prop up the corrupt regime.

In times like these, we don’t need leaders who refuse to pay attention to the wolves raiding the henhouse while off killing the foxes. We need someone who’ll pay attention to what’s happening – and actually WORK with the countries to ensure that two generations from now, children don’t ask their grandparents why they only have two eyes. If they are able to ask that question at all.

Mutation aside, I’d prefer an earth that doesn’t undergo a nuclear winter. I’d prefer not having to make a choice, or living through the days of holocaust.

In the words of Earth Abides, because something has never happened does not mean it will never happen. Because a terrorist faction has not exploded an atomic bomb in the cities of the United States does not mean it will never happen. The madness of jihad – whether it be Christian or Islam, crusade or “martyred war” – is such that the most deaths of the unholy will equal the highest praise.

It’s the reality. Letting North Korea, Iran, and any other little state looking for a slice of power have a nuclear weapon will fuel the market. We need no weapons of mass destruction – it’s a pity the Bush administration has been failing to keep any of the ones that count from entering the hands of terrorists.

I wrote something about a draft across the United States back in September. It was…slightly off-putting for me to read it again. I still can’t quite understand some of the issues that Democratic Representatives Rangel and others have chosen to make about the issue of the draft.

According to Rangel, the draft would conscript from all walks of life, from the highborn to the lowest of the low. And Rangel only began this conversation after a high proportion of lower-class Americans began dying in the Iraq conflict.

Issues of the draft aside, I keep pondering Rangel’s timing. His motives, his reasoning. After all, we are talking about a war that cost $500 billion dollars so far in real economic terms…in combination with George W. Bush’s tax cuts, Cheney’s overdrafts on the treasury, and Halliburton’s gouging the American taxpayer for $85,000 trucks abandoned in Iraq to looters for want of a spare tire, add all this up and pretty soon you’re talking about real money.
I have a credit card with Capital One that’s at $550. I’m slowly paying that down. Imagine, though, that my share of the Iraq war is over $2,500. Imagine that my share of debt to the United States treasury for the actions of George W. Bush exceeds what I allowed him to do.

What’s fair about that?

Well, nothing. Nothing at all. Bush’s compensation package is higher than most Presidents’. His benefits and his perks are high. For his environmental consciousness equates to installing multi-million dollar environmentally sound watering systems at his ranch in Crawford while still saying, “A Salmon is a Salmon”, and applying that to his policy of “protecting” salmon streams in the Northwest. According to him, as long as we have salmon, whether it be Chinook, North Atlantic, Alaskan, King Salmon, Steelhead or Brown Trout, it’s still a fish, and a damn tasty one at that. Who cares if the streams are low? Who cares if the fish have no water to live in? John Denver took care of all that before he plowed the ultra light into the ground, didn’t he? And when George talks of sacrifice, he doesn’t talk of sacrifice for himself, his compatriots, or his favorite fundraising friends, the “Haves, and Have Mores.”

That’s the best reason I could think of for having a draft.

But. As W, Donald Rumsfeld, Cheney and many other chicken hawks in the current administration proved, a young man with political connections, the son of a well-funded family doesn’t need to sully his hands with unnecessary combat. John Kerry, of course, never did. Nor did John F. Kennedy, John McCain, or the Kennedys that never made it back from World War II.

Nor did Phoenix Cardinals running back Pat Tillman need to go to war. But go they did. Even though JFK could have applied for a deferment. McCain could have sought a transfer to a less dangerous spot. They could have even attempted to join the Air National Guard in the time of  “once a month, and most of the time you’re drinking anyway” National Guard service, as many privileged kids did to stay out of harms’ way.

So the argument that the country’s elite (or those who have never worked in a fast-food restaurant, flipping burgers, pulling chicken out of deep fryers, or rolling burritos) would send their children to war seems a little preposterous. Even in the times of the Crusades, a parent could always have their sons stay at home by paying for someone to fight in their place.
The reality these days is that the tax burden in the United States, as well as the body count burden, has always rested solely on the shoulders of those whose finances deem their lives and their flesh expendable. When Pat Tillman chose to serve in the Armed Forces for $19,000 a year, plus expenses, rather than fulfill a multi-million dollar professional football player’s contract, he converted his physical worth into that of cannon fodder for the United States government. He chose to place himself in danger – by simple virtue of placing himself in the field of combat.

In the terms of direct finance, the U.S. Army really would hate to lose any soldier. With four years of training, equipping, educating, and moving its forces around the world, each fallen soldier in combat is easily worth $250,000, if not more. Insurance policies on each soldier would perhaps be wise for the government to recoup some of their losses, but the life insurance paid per soldier is often a mere $50,000 to the widows and orphans.

Would the rich place such a price tag on their children? After all, if you make $10 million a year, chances are your kids are inherently worth more to you. You spend more on them. Give them better educations. Why would you spend hundreds of thousands on your children only to see them mown down by friendly combatant fire, an improvised bomb, or beheaded in a back alley by militants and terrorists? No, you spend just a little more money to keep your investment safe, even if your child insists on putting themselves in harm’s way.
What parent wouldn’t spend an extra $1,000 to keep their child alive? Or $10,000? Or $100,000? Parents in Iraq are desperately trying to keep kidnappers from taking their children and holding them hostage for $20K or more.

In the United States, in an involuntary draft system, a small envelope of bills left under a seat or a long lunch at an expensive restaurant, a golf membership at a club, and suddenly the people at the top of the list for good excuses becomes the bottom of the list through a franchised draft board member. It has happened before; it’ll happen again. Somehow, the President went from the back of the line for 1970’s Air National Guard to the front, and chances are it wasn’t due to his sparkling Yale academic record and demonstrated commitment to civic virtue on his permanent police record..

So the case that an involuntary draft in the United States would be fair and equal is wrong – because on the surface, yes. In reality, the wealthy have methods equaling Caligula’s for obtainment of their desires – even if those desires are simply to keep their children from being shot in the throat in a desert in the middle of nowhere, “serving one’s country”.

True, males (note within this revision of the draft, no female has been mentioned. Fair and equal? Perhaps when combat uniforms have armored breast cups) who join the Army when they’d rather be going to school to become a lawyer often find themselves in a kill zone. Two recent deaths in Iraq included a would-be restaraunteur with two children he chose to support by enlisting; the other, a 2nd lieutenant who had barely held onto his bachelor’s degree in science long enough to crinkle the paper. Neither of these young men chose the military as a career; they chose the military in the first place to help them build a better life. At the least, the sons of rich men only need join to make a name for themselves, an honor ticket, an ability to say, “I too served in the military.” For a poor kid from the Bronx whose mother had no money to buy milk for cereal, the military with three squares a day might well seem the fastest way out of a grinding poverty.

But the idea of a drafted military does one very important thing – it takes men away from the places and things they chose. For instance, the poor kid from the Bronx may not have the opportunity to volunteer in the military, because the draft board managed to pull kids from every walk of life away from the schools and jobs they chose, filling all the available positions. The net result: the kid from the Bronx still eats cold cereal without milk, and a kid from the Upper West Side has to leave his job tutoring inner-city youth to fulfill a job he never chose. The net effect of the draft is to deny opportunities of an all-volunteer military to people who have few or no other possible life choices, while destroying the lives of the kids who never wanted to hold a gun.

Then we also have the underground railroads running North to the Canadian border of kids who fear the draft. The FBI opens a new division solely to track down border escapees. The prodigal sons of the United States become the illegal immigrants of Canada. And citizens who believe in the freedom to be from fear, or from draft

So how come, if the current system is so unfair, we keep bringing up the idea of hauling kids from college, from jobs, from families and opportunities. Excuse me. Men. That old adage above the Air Force Academy gates, “Bring Me Men” still holds true – if it can speak in a baritone, bass, or tenor, fine; soprano and alto, you can stay in a dress and wait for your man to come home. Either way, you’re pulling kids from the opportunities they created themselves and putting them in the way of someone else’s grand opportunity to make something out of their lives.

And you’ve got not just one, but two people who are not working in a job they’ve chosen, with no real expectations of quality service. It’s hard to establish a work ethic when you’re conscripted to do a job you never signed up for. And the quality suffers greatly.

An interesting side note: if the U.S. Military drafts, that also means that the soldiers’ bonuses go away. Training increases. No re-enlistments are necessary, because once you’re out of the service, you’re out, and you don’t need to come back. The military just doesn’t need that many boots on the ground in any case. Especially not if there’s only one Iraq or Afghanistan at a time. The world is simply not in the space of needing enormous military resources. Even China, with its vast army, could easily be defeated by conventional weapons and the removal of supply lines. A number for everyone just isn’t necessary, and it’s really less necessary for me to think that my child could be sent to war. A draft simply means that the Pentagon gets more warm bodies to put in camouflage at cut-rate prices. Cut-rate for everyone except the kids doing the dying. Is that fair? We draft tens of thousands of young men and pay them a pittance to die for the honor of the United States.

And yet – some part of me wonders. In the July 26 New Yorker, Karen Schaler quotes Donald Rumsfeld as saying, “We’re perfectly capable of increasing the incentives and the inducements to attract people into the armed services.” Apparently, that now applies to botox, face lifts, and breast augmentations. It’s not The Swan, but it’s pretty damned close.

“Anyone wearing a uniform is eligible,” Dr. Bob Lyons, the chief of plastic surgery at Brooke Army Medical Center, said recently, in his office in San Antonio. It is true: personnel in all four branches of the military and members of their immediate families can get face-lifts, nose jobs, breast enlargements, liposuction, or any other kind of elective cosmetic alteration, at taxpayer expense. There is no limit on the number of cosmetic surgeries one soldier can have, although, Lyons said, “we don’t do extreme makeovers in the military.” The commanding officer has to approve the time off for any soldier who is having surgery. For most procedures, there’s at least a ten-day recovery period, and while soldiers are recuperating they’re on paid medical leave rather than vacation.

A Defense Department spokeswoman confirmed the existence of the plastic-surgery benefit. According to the Army, between 2000 and 2003 its doctors performed four hundred and ninety-six breast enlargements and a thousand three hundred and sixty-one liposuction surgeries on soldiers and their dependents. In the first three months of 2004, it performed sixty breast enhancements and two hundred and thirty-one liposuctions.

Mario Moncada, an Army private who was recently treated for losing the vision in one eye in Iraq, said that he knows several female soldiers who have received free breast enlargements: “We’re out there risking our lives. We deserve benefits like that.”

The benefits from having your office pool specialist with a 44DD instead of her petite 34B? Possibly that might improve morale, but only among male soldiers, and only if we’re not being asked to refrain from gawking. Or if the new female uniforms have a V-neck instead of a button-up collar. I comprehend the need for many people to have surgery done – my father’s own rock-climbing accident at the age of 18 could have physically scarred him for life if it had not been for a brilliant facial reconstruction surgeon – trained in the Korean war. But his facial reconstruction, far from being paid for by the government came directly from the pocket of my grandfather. And – it was due to an accident in the mountains, not a perceived accident in the gene pool.

Janis Garcia, a former lieutenant commander and jag attorney in the Navy, who is married to a retired Navy fighter pilot, says she grew up hating the way she looked. “I wouldn’t even smile in my own wedding pictures.” She checked in to the Naval Medical Center in San Diego for a nose job, a chin realignment, and a jaw reconstruction, free of charge. She also had her teeth straightened. “It changed my appearance drastically, and I became a more confident person,” she said. “It literally changed the direction of my life.” The doctors told her the work she had done would have cost her nearly a hundred thousand dollars. And yet I still ponder why I am being asked to pay, out of pocket, for a FORMER lieutenant commander and attorney to feel good about the way she looks. Or she can whore herself in public like The Swan contestants to feel beautiful.

I don't think that matters anyway - regardless of the way she looks now, in ten years she'll need a refit just to keep from looking like she had major surgery. Humans were meant to be ugly. Look at our genitals. You can't tell me that a penis or a vagina is inherently a thing of beauty. It's contextual, and only within sexual boundaries. It's like a baby turtle or a sea anemone. They ain't pretty on their own, but in the right setting, it's the most wonderous thing you've ever seen.

The point is, some folks are just ugly, and what happens when you kids turn out ugly too? Plastic surgery for them, as well? In the U.S. Military, apparently yes. Thousands of military brats can have their mommies and daddies help them to a better nose / teeth / cheekbones / breast size / penis shape just by serving God and Country in a uniform.

Look, if she’s a lawyer, she can damned well afford her own plastic surgery, even if she does it in a blue suit with shiny gold thingies on it. She's hardly on the front lines. Me, I’d prefer it if that money went to buy a few extra bulletproof vests for soldiers in Iraq than to pay to implant a poor, simple-chested private with enough silicone to run my PDA. Some people say “But gosh, they’re keeping us safe from harm!”

I hardly think that the average Army Ranger gives two bullets shot in the air what his face looks like when it’s pressed against the sand. The individuals receiving this benefit are either those who require it as a result of wounds received in action or those who pay for it. I should never pay for a colonel’s daughter’s breast implants, nor a private’s wife’s nostril reduction. And frankly, if a lieutenant is too damned fat for his self-esteem, then he’s too damn fat for the service. From what I remember, there’s such a thing as EXERCISE – a refresher visit to boot camp might help strip the pork rinds from the Fatkins service members and women – not a liposuction on the taxpayer’s dime.

Of course, the theory that having someone to practice on is always good for a few more heartstring pulls. And yet…I wonder. With all the outsourcing that the military seems to be doing today, from the transportation of their equipment down to the food runs for the soldiers in Iraq, it hasn’t once crossed anyone’s minds to hire civilian hospitals to perform the extensive reconstructive surgeries incurred in battle? Perhaps at a cheaper cost – and allowing both the civilians and the military to have their boob jobs done off-base? Dr. Shaun Parson, a prominent cosmetic surgeon in Arizona, says that cosmetic surgery and reconstructive surgery are two separate specialties. “If the Army is doing breast augmentations, it’s doing it to practice breast augmentations, period.” Not reconstruction from a legitimate wound – an augmentation. Stuffing the bra, as it were.

Big boobs in the office pool or not, I don’t WANT a conscript defending his homeland, or fighting in an unjust war. I want someone who has joined of their own volition, who firmly believes that the republic for whom he or she fights is a just and noble cause. Patriots fight better than conscripts or mercenaries. Just ask the British navy, whose ranks were filled with gallows bait, debtors, and pressed men from the land.

During Vietnam, the columnist Nicholas von Hoffman wrote, "Draft old men's money, not young men's bodies." His point was that in America, when you want more of something -- even soldiers -- the way to get more is to pay more. Unfortunately, we are currently led by people who prefer it the other way around – draft young men’s money AND their bodies. To say nothing of the wives, girlfriends and sisters who could also fight and pay with them. Of course, we’d never want a woman to be in harm’s way, nor should we expect her to give her life for the freedom that a man would.

There is no democratic method for going to war in the United States. With the blank check Congress issued George W. Bush to fight with the Patriot Act and the approval to war in Afghanistan, nothing can stop Bush except the next election. Regardless of whether a draft is necessary or not, Bush is the person with whom this abuse of authority, this reckless slaughter of Iraqi and Afghani civilians, and the deaths of over 1,000 U.S. soldiers has resided.
The best thing that could happen for the United States is simply this: Bush fails to be elected. Kerry steps into power. The U.S. Military is brought to heel. Some self-respect returns to Americans. The dead of the twin towers finally stop turning in their graves at the travesties enacted in their names. We return to some form of world peace; peace that would never have been broken had a man of “All Hat, No Cows” swaggered into a Presidency wearing a diaper and a severe case of attention deficit disorder.

So today, in the USA Today paper (generally speaking the most widely-read newspaper in the United States), Lawrence Di Rita, principal deputy assistant secretary of Defense for public affairs in Washington D.C accused USA Today of misleading its readers with the front-page story “RUMSFELD OK’D HARSH TREATMENT” – which gave great detail as to the specific torture limits approved by the Secretary of Defense in the Iraqi prison system.

If you recall, the photographic evidence from the Abu Ghairib prison showed that this included, but wasn’t limited to: stripping prisoners of their clothing, threatening them with dogs, placing “live wires” on hooded prisoners. Embarrassing positions, “stress positions”, including on boxes, threatening with physical violence, hitting prisoners. Putting leashes on them. Writing on their skin. Forcing them to look upon each other.

Rumsfeld’s approval was tacit and complicit in the scandal. And as of yet he’s still running around in a Teflon suit. Calls for his resignation have been ignored, even as he and Cheney continue to assert that their jobs required a certain “step-up” – even if the “stepup” involved violated the Geneva Conventions both in spirit and actuality.

DiRita’s letter accused USA Today of seriously misleading the reader because:

1. “…(the) article failed to mention that these techniques were never used – a fact essential to any straightforward account.”

So in essence, the picture of a detainee cowering while two US soldiers restrain their dogs, both slavering to attack the detainee, is staged, according to DiRita. Of course the reader was misled. The dogs were perhaps simply aggravated that the prisoner had stolen their MilkBones. And the pictures of prisoners in piles, with Lynndie England and Granier posing with cigarettes, grins, and thumbs-up signs show (in right-wing looney pundit Rush Limbaugh’s words) just some soldiers “blowing off steam”. Of course.

2. “Second, the article says that these techniques were authorized for nearly five months -- from December 2002 to April 2003. In fact, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld rescinded his approval of the techniques after about six weeks, when he learned that some not involved in the approval process questioned that process. Again, this was a critical fact, and it is hard to believe that its absence from the article was merely oversight.”

Six weeks or five months – it does not matter. If a murder spree occurs for five months, with over 500 victims, but is later rescinded to the “not quite as bad” numbers of six weeks and only 150 victims, the courts still condemn the violence and punish the guilty party. There is no scalable method for Rumsfeld’s complicity in the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghairib prison. If Rumsfeld approved torture methods, regardless of whether they were used, Rumsfeld approved torture methods.

This is similar to a child molester saying, “I was falsely accused of molesting three hundred children! I only molested 75!” Either way, the crime is reprehensible, and we remove that person from any position of power over children, contact with children, or even polite, civilized society. So it must be with politicians who approve of torture or violence against prisoners IN WRITING OR VERBAL APPROVAL. It is certain Rumsfeld approved of torture, regardless of the timeframe. He committed a crime against humanity, against the United States, and against the prisoners in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba and Iraq. He, and his accomplices or superiors, MUST be held to account for his actions.

3. “Third, the article misrepresents the techniques as they appeared in the original December 2002 memorandum, suggesting that stripping inmates naked or threatening them directly with dogs was under consideration. The language actually used, though imprecise, was never meant to permit such acts. Again, this nuance belonged in the story.”

Perhaps it is a moot point to explain to DiRita that when you see literally THOUSANDS of images violating the “nuances” of his boss’ memo, it’s a little hard to give a shit about whether the soldiers who were given these orders understood the “nuances” of their job in interrogating the prisoners. It is more likely, as Army Reserve privates, sergeants, PFCs, and buck privates, that their job experiences as pizza delivery drivers, fast-food workers, low-income students, and fired prison guards precluded their understanding of “nuance” when it came to the interrogation of a prisoner purported to be an Al-Qaeda or an insurgent.

4. “Fourth, no mention was made of the fact that the use of any of the techniques was to have safeguards: They must have been part of an approved interrogation plan and have had the permission of higher-ups.”

Hence, as the techniques were used, by DiRita’s own statement, that means someone who was “higher up” MUST have approved these techniques. It is difficult to imagine that in such an issue, especially one signed and approved by the Secretary of Defense himself, the permissions were continually challenged by the chain of command. Rather, it’s easy to see a commanding officer obtaining the memo and using the information contained within as his operating standards. Permission was inherent in the memo. Permission from the highest echelon of the Pentagon.

It is indeed unfortunate that DiRita doesn’t seem to understand the overall picture. The forest is burning, and yet DiRita takes umbrage against the article written by USA Today. Were DiRita less concerned about the image of his boss, and less concerned about spinning the media to be the bad guys of the American side of this scandal, he might actually wake up and understand why so many people don’t trust Bush or his cronies any longer.
DiRita may be a public servant, but when he writes, “by printing such a distorted and misleading account of this vitally important series of events, USA TODAY has done its readers a grave disservice,” his own words, spinning the truth, or attempting to excuse even a partial amount of personal responsibility for his boss’ actions and approvals, smacks of a betrayal – not just of his office, but also of the American people’s right to know what their officials are doing in their name.

Especially if their officials are torturing the people whom they swear they’ve “liberated”.

Looking through the last few weeks’ news, I keep wondering two things.

One, why anyone believes a word out of the Bush administration’s mouths. Two: why his poll numbers continue to hover in the upper 40s. It’s obvious at this point that the Bush administration is guilty of most of the most egregious transgressions on American and international freedom. The two leaked memos – one from White House counsel Alberto Gonzales, the other to Rummy show a White House determined to prove its case against the “evildoers” at all cost.

Both memos, including Rummy’s now infamous “I stand eight hours a day, how is this torture?” memo specifically restate the Bush administration’s case – we say so, therefore it is so. It’s an unchecked power grab by the most powerful and it’s obfuscated by the amount of spin spun by the architects of the Iraq war.

The torture and the rape rooms did close down, but opened only a few weeks later under new management. It’s ironic to me that the new United States military uniforms are no longer issuing full-color flag insignia – they’re being issued under black and gray , the better to blend in with the uniforms and cease making viable targets for “enemies”.

Yet so far, what’s been accomplished by the torture of the Iraqi population? We’ve heard Rush Limbaugh (drug addict extraordinaire) saying he supported the torture chambers of the American troops. Well, that’s not a big surprise, nor was the Oklahoma senator’s exclamation that he was more upset by the backlash against the troops. This is not a fraternity prank, and it’s not limited to the seven soldiers who took photographs of it.

The Bush doctrine is, and always has been, about power and money – grabbing more and giving less. The war in Iraq was never fought for humanitarian reasons. It was fought because Bush wanted a war. He wanted to look confident. He wanted some distractions from his illegal campaign maneuvers. He wanted the American people to remain silent.

We don’t just need a special prosecutor for this case. We need the Bushies to be hauled up by the short and curlies and thrown to the wall. We need prosecution of Donald Rumsfeld in a criminal court. Bush should be held liable. Condi Rice should be sued. Yes, even Colin Powell. This administration is filled with corruption, and the seeds of it are most evident in Dick Cheney, Wolfowitz, Ashcroft, and their subordinates. There has never been a greater “Great Satan” in the western world than the ones currently controlling the most powerful nation.

The memos and the behavior should show anyone willing to pay a smidgen of attention a group of people who consider themselves and their actions as above the law. The president has to only declare wartime, and according to the Bushies, the rest of the nation should simply hand over the keys to the treasury and let them do as they please.

At a June 10 news conference, George W. Bush said he instructed US troops to adhere to the law, and "that ought to comfort you." But he refused to say whether he understood that the law bans torture. And he says he "can't remember" whether he read the memos that argue "the law" doesn't bind him as Commander in Chief. That's not the kind of memo you read and "can't remember." His Administration meanwhile has come up with yet another defense--blame it on the little guy; protect higher-ups. That one doesn't appear in the memos. Suffice to say, the buck doesn’t stop anywhere. It’s an administration with a clueless git at the head of it, yet somebody’s talking to Bush, even if he’s not listening.

This is a tyranny. It’s a despicable state of tyranny and there’s nothing else for it. Bush is a grade A bastion, no two ways about it. And frankly I don’t care how he’s removed from office any more. If he lies, cheats, or steals the election, he’s gotta go. He’s got to be out. He’s a traitor to the flag, and to those who serve it.

And somehow he wants four more years.

One of the worst things someone ever has to do is to tell someone they love dearly they can't stay where you live when they come visit. God that fucking sucks ass. Friendship should trump all other things, but...god, when you have to live with someone else 345 days out of the year, the needs out the house sometimes have to take precedence over what you want.

I feel like shit, but I also fucking HATE being put in this position.

And in other news, randomness is very cute.

On that note, I'm watching Looney Tunes now.

Money money money by the pound!

I keep hearing the song from Disney’s movie “Pete’s Dragon” run in my head. In that movie, a flim-flam man and his inept assistant run from town to town selling quack cures to people. In the first description, both the good doctor and his assistant ride a wagon into the middle of the town square – to a less than chilly reception. “Oh, no, I think they remember us. Oh NO, I think I remember them! Quick! Get us out of here!”

Of course, they stay, they perform a song and dance routine, dress up willing participants in new clothing and get them to say how wonderful the new medicines are, and suddenly every formerly angry townsperson (from the man whose hair turned pink to the woman who took the weight loss “miracle cure” and ballooned to roughly the size and shape of a young killer whale) are buying more and more medicines from the good doctor and his assistant.

And when they find out there’s a dragon in town, their eyes light up with glee – a dragon can be made into thousands of deliciously monetary objects. The dragon can be used to cure warts – and all of a sudden, their dreams of wealth and prosperity can finally be achieved.

Then there’s the southern boxing drama “Diggstown” with Louis Gooding, Oliver Platt, and the immortal James Woods. The idea being that two con artists face off in a boxing match that both are trying their very hardest to fix in their favor from the get-go. The good old southern boy who owns all the town’s deeds and properties gets taken by the smooth-talking Yankee. The opportunities mount until the very last – and the con turns deadly for more than one participant.

The movies never really tell you what happens to the loser on the con – or the person who can’t make the medicine sell. The Dickensian novels are filled with examples of ne’er do wells languishing in debtor’s prison for running up huge debts they could never repay – only to be pulled from the prison and sent to different portions of the globe by their families, off to do something else to keep them occupied for the time being.

Never do they return from the exile and run for an elected seat – and most especially not if their parents are politically well-connected. It’s unfortunate. Paul Krugman made the connection for me with the young Bush president, even as his father revels in his freedom as an 80-year old ex-president by jumping out of airplanes with the Golden Knights – even as Bush spends more “catchup” money on the Iraq conflict, and threatens to tar Congressional lawmakers with failing to support the troops.

It sounds very much like to me that Bush the younger is guilty as hell of the very thing he accuses anyone who doesn’t agree with his policies – from the beginning of the Iraq conflict to the present day. He’s never supported the troops; never given them the proper equipment, never the proper number of comrades, never provided the logistical support, never fed them the right way, never kept them out of unnecessary harm’s way.

The Iraq war was supposed to be an in-and-out operation – we catch Saddam, everyone throws flowers, and miracle of miracles, the Iraqi people dance the happy dance of democracy and the United States gets cheap oil. It all works out so well in the mind’s eye. Hell, a year ago I thought I’d be paying $1.25 per gallon of gasoline because of the oil exportation. I didn’t like the idea at the time and I still don’t, but it would certainly make my weekly tank for my Honda a little cheaper.

And why did I think so? Because the occupation of Iraq was supposed to last a week, maximum. According to Wolfowitz and Rummy, we’d do it on the cheap and the gratitude would be such that oil would flow in a cornucopia of gasoline, driving the American prices so far down, it’d never be an issue again.

The funny thing is, every time that one of the deceptive matchstick men from the movies or the novels tells someone their money will go to buy beachfront property in Florida, or that they’ll have huge returns on medicines, the sucker is always the one who winds up paying for it, in the end. Bush and his lackeys have finally hit on the magic slot machine – tell someone they’re not supporting servicemen and women in a time of crisis – even though your own policies have placed the servicemen and women in that position – and you get money. Gobs. Stacks. Money by the pound.

Of course, we shouldn’t be surprised – this is the same group of con artists that demanded the wildlife refuge in Alaska be opened to drilling. Never mind that the costs of raping a pristine wilderness area for the crude oil contained within would easily come to more than $3.50 per gallon of gasoline – the demands of the American consumer was paramount. A “wise energy policy” would be more important than preserving a bunch of critters.

It’s the same con artistry that tried to get the salmon on the West Coast off the endangered list because the North Atlantic salmon being farmed had begun to swoop in, and as one White House spokesman said, “Salmon is salmon.”

In a novel from the 19th century, this behavior would almost immediately be smacked down and the perpetrators languishing in prison, only to escape and find their way to cause more mischief and devilment to their family. In the early 20th century, the escapades would be

The parallels are astounding between art and reality, though. Every so often a youngling comes along. The Bush dynasty for presidency is nearly complete; it is almost too much to hope that Jeb the younger won’t make it through to his father and brother’s seats, and will remain a more anonymous footnote to history when it is written that under his watch, an election was rigged to give the Florida election to his older brother.

George Bush’s early career was started and funded by his family connections. Every single powerful, wealthy member of the Bush cabal has helped him along his path – from his escape from the Air Guard in Texas to the horrible management of the baseball team the Texas Rangers, every time a foot’s been out of place, someone’s been there to pay the check. Never has Bush had to write one himself; suck it up, take the heat, fall from grace. He’s not the All-American success story he tries to portray – he’s a Texas oilman with exponentially more money than brains, and the worst sense of business acumen in the world. >From paying a $255 million contract to Alex Rodriguez to failing to secure body armor for American troops, Bush has made more bad decisions for the America shareholder than any other CEO.

And we’re still putting up with him. There’s no reputation to uphold here, no career that could be smirched because of his actions – he’s shown his true mettle time and time again. He’s flip-flopped on economic, environmental, and education reforms more often than a dolphin in his brother’s private aquarium.

The budgets for last year’s spending have easily exceeded what anyone was willing to pay for this. Had the administration came forward and said “Shinseki’s right, this is going to run $300 billion, easily, and we have to put 400,000 troops on the ground in Iraq to make it work”, the American public would never have gone for it. The budgets submitted are like a child sneaking $10 out of their dad’s wallet when the old man’s not looking – and then saying, “I need some more cash to do this war game I’ve got going on.”

And Congress, the guy with the wallet, is going to give Bush the cash. They can’t do anything else for fear of being labeled unsupportive of the soldiers. Unfortunately, Congress isn’t the one who started an illegal war for illegal aims. Every time a Bushie screams, “We must stay the course”, the American public asks, “What course? Where are we going?”

Last year I dated a woman who was completely wrong for me – Christian conservative, whose entire approach to politics was that “They’re the government – I think they know what they’re doing, so I’ll support them.” Aside from putting zero work into a relationship, her political views ran exactly counter to mine. She was an ardent Bushie – I could never stand the man. And she allowed herself to be used by the administration, cheerfully acting the part of a “Yes Sir!” ditto head for every new program that came down the line.

I asked her once what we were doing in Iraq, and every answer she gave was a rote response from Rush Limbaugh or Bush’s press secretary. And that’s the scary part – they know that there is a portion of the American public stupid enough to be led around by the nose and sent willy-nilly into the breach to cover up the mistakes of the men in charge.

I really do hope Bush winds up being the one tarred and feathered. In fact, I hope he’s called out for a lawsuit.

It really is unfortunate, though. When a minister ran the treasury dry and screwed the country out of huge amounts of prosperity, three hundred years ago they’d simply lop off his head and call it a day. Now it’s like a CEO – no heads roll, but if they do, you get a glowing recommendation for the next company you start up.

So the song still runs through my head whenever I hear a Bushie explain that “we’re the good guys”, or that “Rumsfeld is going a good job, he doesn’t need to do this job at all”. I remember that every time Bush lost the con, someone was there with a net below him ready to stake him out for the next big thing he was going to run.

This time, the con’s hurt more than just himself. It’s hurt everyone around him. And there’s only a slight amount of hope that I have that says he’ll get tarred, feathered, and ridden out of town on a rail come November.

But it’s growing.

ADD Resources: Adult ADD Symptom Checklist

FUCK.

It's official.

I've been putting this off for a very long time.

Time for me to meet the shrink once again. Of course, after checking with Premera Blue Cross tomorrow morning to make sure my ass is covered for this.

Oh, the fun that is...hey, I think I'd like to get a Novara mountain cruiser bike.

ADD Resources: Adult ADD Symptom Checklist

FUCK.

It's official.

I've been putting this off for a very long time.

Time for me to meet the shrink once again. Of course, after checking with Premera Blue Cross tomorrow morning to make sure my ass is covered for this.

Oh, the fun that is...hey, I think I'd like to get a Novara mountain cruiser bike.

CNN.com - All apologies: OutKast

What’s the reason for an apology? What form does it really come from?
In one of the forums I participate in, we were discussing a theory of reasons.
The theory of reasons put forth by one Scott Maddix is that if asked to, say, watch a movie like Van Helsing, and I refuse, most times I will feel obligated to give a reason for my refusal. I could say that I heard the movie was slightly better than sticking my fingers into a wood chipper, or that I had to get up early the next morning, or that I was in the middle of writing a letter to the editor. Rarely will I ever say, “I just don’t want to see the movie, thanks,” and let it go at that. I need to give a reason for it.
Lots of people do this. It’s kind of like saying, “I don’t like fish”, and then explaining to the populace at large that it smells strange, that you never associated it with good food, that the flavor of tuna or the smell of the sea makes you nauseated, that you don’t like the number of bones, that it’s slightly creepy, and that at your friend’s Vietnamese wedding, the relatives at the next table picked the entire deep-fried fish (fried whole, mind you, head, eyeballs and all) down to the skull, and that particular image stuck with you through the entire week while the squid you DID eat danced the mambo on your intestines.
One of the people I most admire has the ability not to do this. He won’t say, “I don’t like the music” for a concert I want to attend, or “I’m gonna be wrecked that day”, or “I have political connections that won’t allow me to dance the boogaloo with you in public.” He just politely refuses, and if he feels in conversation that it’s pertinent to divulge the reasons, he brings them up. But never does he actually give a reason for his choice.
But nine times out of ten, someone WILL say, “I’m just not a big fan of music that’s country-western because it sounds too twangy to me.” Inevitably, someone will begin asking, “Well, what about Willie Nelson? What about alt-country? What about rockabilly? What about, what about, what about?”
We’re conditioned to ask about the preferences of others in order to explain and relate to each other. For instance, I know not to ask my friends who are vegan about the choices they have made for their food preferences, because their exact reasons are ridiculous to me, and therefore no real dialogue can occur.
As a side note: I detest it when people choose a “moral superiority” reason for their personal lifestyle choice. For some: sure, veganism is a way of life chosen for its ethical and aesthetical reasoning (body scent, personal choice to not harm animals, etc). However, things STILL die to provide your fat ass nutrition, from every stalk of wheat down to the carrot juice you pureed with some bananas for breakfast. Death and the cessation of life is a natural force; entropy, likewise, is a vital source of the experience. Simply by not choosing to consciously consume animal flesh doesn’t make you absent from it; nor does it make your life cruelty-free.
Saying that I choose to be a vegetarian because it’s pure and natural and socially responsible is completely inaccurate – organically-grown vegetables harvested using migrant labor are far from socially responsible, and it’s a hard sell to buy everything “naturally” grown, since the standards for labeling something organic have slipped so far.
Choosing to be a vegetarian for the sake of being a vegetarian, for health reasons, for personal reasons, is fine. But evangelicizing vegetarian or veganism lifestyles because it affords one a self-ascribed moral high ground is not – and nothing makes me want to break out the barbecue beef ribs and have a few platters of veal than some holier-than-thou idiot asking me if I truly know the suffering of my food.
It’s the same for me as being asked, “Don’t you know that Jesus loves you?” For my money, Jesus would demonstrate his love for me a whole lot more by banishing people who ask me of this routinely. My religion is my personal choice, and fits into my “lifestyle” category (due primarily to a discussion of dietary guidelines between myself and two adherents of religious dietary guidelines – a Judaic scholar and a Hindu devotee).
Likewise I think most apologies fall somewhat into the same category. If I truly feel remorse for bumping someone in the grocery store with my cart, then I’d probably say, “Are you all right? Would you like me to call a doctor?” as opposed to, “Sorry”. And I’d get eyed with a certain amount of suspicion. Normal people don’t fall over themselves to apologize for minor bumps and physical contact.
Social boundaries and personal spaces excluded, there’s not a lot to apologize for, socially. Minor gaffes are covered up or forgotten.
If I’ve caused damage to someone with malicious intent, or unintentionally, and I feel remorse for it, I apologize. If I am making a personal decision that affects me, such as seeing a movie I don’t want to see, I won’t apologize for it, because that’s a personal decision. For instance, I feel no remorse for breaking up with the people whom I have had relationships in the past, because there were legitimate reasons for that decision. I can empathize with the ex-girlfriends I’ve had when I do break up, because it’s an emotional decision, but I don’t feel I should apologize for my decision.
But when I am wrong, and clearly so, and people are hurt or injured due to my error, I MUST apologize – that’s a socially accepted norm. But in order for me to do so, I have to make the personal determination that I *am* wrong.
In the next few weeks, the soldiers convicted of abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison will apologize to the world for their misdeeds. Donald Rumsfeld and George Bush have done so – in a backhanded manner. THEIR apologists have begun saying things that lead the populace to sing the praises of the administration – if not for directly condoning this behavior, then excusing it by saying, “We must know what the terrorist knows at any cost.”
Bush and Rumsfeld said, in essence, “We’re sorry about the Abu Ghraib prison scandal”. The question is whether they’re sorry the circumstances for its occurrence were ever put in place, or whether they’re sorry a service member who actually understood what a code of honor is stood up against the inherent corruption in the American political system.
I understand backhanded apologies very well, having used them multiple times in the past. I’m sorry I didn’t dump someone’s sorry ass sooner. I’m sorry I’ve had to explain myself four times to someone who just didn’t understand me. I’m sorry many people have chosen not to be my friend – and I’m sorry that in some circumstances, I’ve been snide, rude, and obnoxious to people that deserved every bit of it and more. Most of all, I’m sorry that there are people who can’t see the tip of their own nose – and I’m very sorry that for some very, very deserving individuals, retroactive abortion is illegal.
I know the soldiers who committed the crimes at AG are sorry – apologies from a convicted felon are always tinged with regret and sorrow – for his deeds and at getting caught for his deeds.
What makes a true apology, though, is true remorse. True repentance. And truly changing one’s behavior to atone for the sins committed. Hammurabi’s code still applies – an eye for an eye. There’s only so much that can be done before forgiveness can be earned. For the U.S. MPs accused of torture, and their chain of command (all the way up to the President) – I would have been much more inclined to forgive the sins committed at Abu Ghraib prison if the story had been released by the government…
…and not broken on CBS news.
For that matter, CBS itself needs to apologize, because they knew about it in January, and they sat on the story. Fulfilling a journalistic creed, perhaps – but only to the truths that do not embarrass the United States.

The hilarious thing about John Kerry's daughter appearing in a see-through dress at the Cannes Film Festival is that not only are people screaming bloody murder (primarily about not voting for Kerry because of his daughter's choice of clothing) about a grown woman well above the age of consent (who makes her own choices about her clothing)...

...but that these same people were mysteriously silent during the drinking binges of Jenna and Barbara Bush, and also said Jeb Bush's own daughter (who's in prison for drug abuse, carrying on a fine familial tradition) was "on her own".

Apparently we're also not on speaking terms with Newt Gingrich's daughter, Dick Cheney's wife, or the Nixon daughters.

Admit it, you like the nipples. I like nipples. Hell, Cosmo, People, Newsweek, and thousands of other happy magazines show worse on the front cover. Sometimes the U.S. military even tries to lock down photos of naked Iraqi penises taken by corrupt, abusive prison guards.

Now shut the fuck up and find a better excuse.

Here’s my problem.

I am having the hardest time biting my tongue when I hear someone say in casual conversation, “We have to know what the terrorists know at any cost.”

Primarily because I work in a fairly conservative area, and my political opinions regarding this sort of workplace conversation are akin to the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” rule – don’t ask me what I think and I won’t tell you that your position violates every humanitarian ideal clung to.

The apologists for the Abu Gharaib prison abuses have already lined up for their President, stating boldly and without caution, that the people who were being tortured for information were “murderers, killers, thieves, terrorists, and bad guys”. What strikes me most about that particular argument is not that it’s a snap judgement on the individual (by simple virtue of being an Iraqi, the individual, unproven to be any of those things, is automatically subjected to the label of rapist or murderer). Nor is it the obvious racial attack based upon the ethnicity of the individual.

No, it’s that the due process of law applies not to every human being the United States comes across, but only the people who aren’t United States citizens.

The argument that the United States is at “war” doesn’t apply – with whom has a formal declaration of war been filed? Who has declared war on Saddam Hussein? Make no mistake – the United States never declared official war on Iraq, because Congress never officially declared it. George Bush chose to perform a “military action”.

Part of the problem I have is that I want to say there’s nothing – absolutely nothing similar from Pearl Harbor and World War Two here. There is no national sacrifice. There’s no rationing system. There’s no popularity for the war. Hell, we got a tax break out of it – one that not only has no effect on the finances of the American people, but served only to make the top 1% of American society richer.

Every time someone says, “Well, we have to do this to protect Americans,” I am reminded of every Hitlerian speech denouncing the Jews as the destroyers of the German people’s lives. It’s not a far stretch from there to here. I am reminded that each time I hear this, I hear blind faith in a leader who rose to power on money and the established grace of a small number of ravenously fanatic neo-conservatives.

Then I hear the apologists say, “But we have to know what they know at any cost.”

The cost was the America I know and love. She was whored out for a personal vendetta. She’s being whored out even further every time someone says the actions of the soldiers was justified in ANY way – which is the precise message sent to my ears every time someone says that information must be gathered at any cost.

Ursula K. LeGuin has a short story called the ones who walk away from Omelaas. In the story, an entire nation lives in a utopia, free and happy and gloriously robust. It’s powerful and warm and peaceful. Yet in the darkest cellars of the city, there is a person taken at random every year. The person is not taken because of a crime – if they have committed a crime, they may expect to go; if not, they may fight to be freed. They are fed little food. They cannot sleep for more than ten minutes at a time. They are kept naked. Never allowed to exercise. Every so often a guard comes and beats them, asking them questions they cannot answer, nor ever could answer. Humiliated. Poisoned. At the end of the year the person is killed, and another person is chosen.

Based solely upon that, the city thrives and lives and is healthy. The utopia is maintained. If ever the tradition was broken, the individual let out, or the beatings ceased, the city would fall to ruin; the peace and the harmony would be destroyed.

The story ends noting that some of the people who live in the city are taken every year to see this prisoner, and to have it explained to them. The people who walk away from Omelaas are the ones who can’t stand to see this or live in a society where brutal treatment of another human being – never by their own hands – is what makes their society function.

Evidence that 90% of the U.S. Military roundups collect people of zero intelligence value is commonplace. Over two-thirds of the people in Guantanamo Bay, according to Washington insiders, are innocent of any crime whatsoever. And yet we keep them locked up. We allow sadistic guards from our corrupted prison systems to watch over them. We force them to perform shameful acts. And then our leadership frantically tries to cover up the fact that it ordered this – maybe not deliberately. Maybe not immediately. But it built a fraternity order where racist policy is the norm – and the nebulous “protection” of Americans (a mission most unaccomplished) touted as the primary mission, with no stone (or couch cushion) unturned by the administration.

The apologist I have no sympathy for. I also have no time for them. The apologist will ask, “What about all the GOOD things Bush has done?” The No Child Left Behind Act is underfunded and overzealous – and cannot be mandated by the federal government unless the education changes are federally funded – as mandated by the Supreme Court. The tax cuts benefit the upper 1% of all Americans – a good thing if you make over $250,000 a year; bad if your $25 per hour Boeing job was slashed and you had to take two full-time $7 per hour jobs to make ends meet.

To the apologist, I will always say, there’s no farking excuse for this behavior. There’s no justification. There’s nothing one can say that makes me believe that trotting out “defense of our way of life” will ever make the sexual assault of a prisoner acceptable. There’s nothing that could make me believe the violation of civil rights, (regardless of nationality) is ever proper.

Go ahead and call me a closet liberal. I actually agree with a friend when she says on the standard party lines, I’m a Republican. I believe in less government interference in my daily life. I believe in free choice, free enterprise, and free will. I believe that programs that suck up tax dollars at the expense of standardized, core value services, such as education and national security should be prohibited. I’ve been told I’m un-American, unpatriotic, sympathetic to the enemy, and demoralizing our soldiers by protesting the president’s decisions.

None of which have any affect upon me, because I know that I’m not the one who locks the innocent in the dungeon, and kills them at the end of a year. I’m not the one at the giving end of a nightstick enema. I’m not the one who invades under false pretenses. I’m not the one who gave the order to ignore the Geneva conventions, and treat prisoners as subhuman in order to obtain information.

I’m still the man who’ll walk away from Omelaas.

I still love America. I love her dearly. I love the people of the heartland and the people who make up the cities. But George Bush’s Amerika is rapidly becoming Omelaas.

At some point, we have to ask ourselves why we make excuses for it – or even if we are.

Workin' on it.

I'm workin on it.

Updating infrequently.

Beer is nice to drink.

What a difference one year makes.

I am so mentally drained by the conflict in Iraq, and the evidence that says the current administration lied, cheated, bullied, distorted, stole, embezzled, and defrauded their way to war that I'm seriously debating just stopping all civilized discussion about it.

Because I've found that the people who might actually want to hear about corrupt governments and despotic regimes stare right past the All Hat and No Cows president and find themselves rooting blindly for the president.

And there's simply one brand of patriotism I cannot stand - bandwagon patriotism. The kind where you rush to wave a flag and "support the troops" when you've screamed for lower taxes and lower government spending. When you won't support higher education, even on the GI bill. When you ignore the fact that it's costing one BILLION REAL DOLLARS to fight in Iraq.

I'm more patriotic than Bush is. I haven't sold my country out for oil. I haven't sold out the retired to Enron. I haven't sold out the young to business interests. I haven't sold the Constitution down the river. I haven't caused an insurgency in a foreign country. I haven't single-handedly created 25 million anti-American demonstrators. I haven't asked, "Why do they hate us?" in a dewy-eyed fashion to my Secret Service.

I actually pay attention to the real world, and I'm not on mental leave of absence. I didn't take 220 days of vacation my first year on the job. I didn't botch Medicare. I didn't hose down the middle class to enrich Kenneth Lay.

And I didn't send 698 American soldiers to die for a personal vendetta.

I'm a patriot. I love my country. I hate the people that abuse it.

Your time is up, George. Off the bandwagon, and back to Texas. Go. Go NOW.

I am alive.

Further than that, I am still writing.

Somewhat.

It was an ugly two weeks.

Soon shall I blog again.

Bush in 30 Seconds

Yesterday, Spain’s newly elected prime minister indicated that he would remove the 1,300 Spanish troops from the Iraqi conflict, and remove Spain from Bush’s “Coalition of the Willing.” Within minutes, the conservative Americans began leaping to the attack on the Spanish, and President Bush himself this morning called the Spanish people “cowards” on national television. Pundits ranging from Bill O’Reilly to the Wall Street Journal have heaped the blame on Al’Qaeda for changing “the mind” of the Spanish people and the Spanish government so quickly.

But are Al’Qaeda really to blame here?

Prior to the election, the Spanish people were so rigidly against the war, it was unlikely that a pro-Iraq war government would be installed. The prime-minister elect of Spain, Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, actively campaigned on a promise to remove Spanish troops. Polls within the Spanish public were heavily opposed to the fawning approach of the current prime minister, Jose Maria Aznar. In most publications in Spain, public opinion was heavily against Bush, reflecting most European nations’ bias.

So when the bombs blew up 200 Spanish citizens and wounded thousands more – had the election occurred just a week earlier, the same response might have happened. And it is likely that Spain’s ruling government would not have blamed the Basque separatist movement – when it was fairly obvious from the beginning which group and which cause has blown up metropolitan arenas in such fashions.

It’s fascinating how people can change their tune so quickly, too. Instead of offering support and solace to the Spanish people, Bush called them a nation of cowards– one step away from Janitor Willie from The Simpsons screaming, “Bonjour, ya cheese-eating surrender monkeys!” to a nation who have not yet had the chance to bury the dead. And he wonders, each time that he travels to a nation NOT within the United States, why the rest of the world hates “us?”

The answer, of course, is that the rest of the world hates him, and thus Americans by proxy. The man who’s all hat and no cows has invited Canada’s prime minister to visit his Crawford ranch, and can’t quite understand why the Canadian won’t take him up on the offer. Well, that’s not much of a surprise – with the turbulence of the Canadian political arena and the general hatred of George Bush and Dick Cheney in our neighbor to the north, no Canadian politician is going to associate with a man whom 85% of the Canadian public think is a bad leader.

What amazes me is that American politicians still don’t get it. The United States does not set the tone for the rest of the world. In the 90s, the United States did things faster, cleaner, and better than most other nations. Now it’s a nation struggling not to get left behind. The War on Terror is perhaps the world’s biggest folly, perpetrated by one of the most ignorant administrations in the history of any country at any time, and THAT is what’s being reflected in the world view.

The bombings in Spain are the European version of September 11, 2001, and it’s astounding that the same sympathy that was extended to the United States has been brushed aside by the Bush administration as “weakness in the face of the terrorist threat.” And even as the Bush administration critiques Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry for saying that many world leaders desperately want Bush out of office, the realities of corruption, graft, greed, and spin from the Bush administration keep piliing up.

One cannot support education and shift the tax burden for its improvement to the state governments, then claim to have improved education for the citizens of the United States. One cannot declare a “War” without a specific target. One cannot feed the former friends in Texas indefinitely without getting a bite or two from the greedy dogs of Texan commerce.

What homeowner would keep a roofing contractor on the payroll when they KNOW he’s been overcharging on labor and materials – THEN add him to five more roofing contracts for friends, neighbors, and family? Apparently the Bush administration feels that Halliburton is just the type of contractor they like – and to hell with the evidence that Halliburton has been stealing from the American taxpayer. The reconstruction work in Iraq, expected to last well through the next four years, is being overbid by the Texas company, and the costs keep spiraling. The complaints from the troops in the field show a very different story – while a slick ad campaign intended to bolster Halliburton’s image at home shows cheeseburgers being fed to grateful troops in the field, the reality is, troops in Iraq are being fed the equivalent of gruel and expected to live in squalor – provided by Halliburton’s contractors and subcontractors. Kickbacks have been taken by employees totaling $6.2 million – initially denied by the company, then admitted.

A congratulations to the new prime minister of Spain won’t accomplish anything in the short or the long run. Kerry’s assertion that he’s the only real choice for the nation and for the rest of the world is being borne out by the events and actions of the Bush team. It’s corruption at the top level; and it’s growing exponentially by the day. Bush has to go – peacefully, or quietly, but the real regime change has to begin in the United States – in the removal of a man who’s literally all hat and no cows.