war in iraq

The lesser of three stooges?

I thank Annette Ekstrand for forwarding this to me on email. The photo was apparently created by Susan Cassidy, a friend of Annette’s, using Photoshop. Or it may have been created elsewhere. Who knows?

In any case, are these our choices for President of the USA? If I had to choose, I pick the one on the left. That’s at least the direction the country is moving in, albeit slowly, perhaps too slowly…… Like, when are we going to end the war in Iraq, when are we going to bring our troops home from around the world, when are we going to have universal health care, when are we going correct the imbalance between rich and poor, when are we going reinstall habeas corpus, when are we going to stop appointing political hacks to government jobs, when are we going to……you name it?

OK, back to politics. Charles Pierce has a wild way with words. Here’s his latest (last paragraph) from Eric Alterman’s Altercation:

That story this week about how the war in Iraq has fallen off the general radar is almost incomprehensibly sad, and not merely because it advantages The Saintly Straight-Talkin’ Maverick Dude, which it does. It’s sad because it’s of a piece with the whole effort by the Avignon Presidency to run everything about the response to the 9-11 attacks off the books. Go shopping. You don’t need to know why we’re going to war, and we’re going to lie to you about it anyway. Don’t photograph the coffins. Don’t count the dead. Keep the cost out of the federal budget and off television. If they didn’t need the children of ordinary people to die to get what they want, they might have been able to turn the whole thing into a gated community of the soul. And now, nobody’s paying attention, and nobody’s angry when the people who get paid to pay attention run around yelling about Eliot Spitzer’s banging hookers and the latest blurp from a crotchety old fool like Geraldine Ferraro. Also this week, the Pentagon went out of its way to bury the news that it’s own study has concluded that one of the primary casus belli — the Iraq-al Qaeda connection — was the moonshine that several previous studies said it was. The news dropped with a thud and life went on. The country was told, in a hundred different ways, not to care about this war — or, really, the one in Afghanistan, either — and it has learned the lesson all too well. I don’t know how I’d feel if I were a soldier, or the father of one. But this country is nowhere near as balls-out angry as it ought to be, and none of the contending candidates seem willing or able to become the vehicle of righteous democratic-small-d rage. I don’t want to come together with these people. I want them in irons until they tell me where my country went.

For an excellent discussion of the issues raised by Geraldine Ferraro, see this post by Brian Donohue.