"With Trembling Fingers" by Hal Crowther - Hang on to your hat!

[dogtag]

"If a spotted hyena stepped out of Air Force One wearing a baby-blue necktie, most Americans would salute and sing 'Hail to the Chief.'"

snip>

Since the defining moment of the Bush presidency, the preposterous flight-suit, Fox News-produced photo-op on the USS Abraham Lincoln in front of the banner that read "Mission Accomplished," the shaming truth is that everything has gone wrong. Just as it was bound to go wrong, as many of us predicted it would go wrong -- if anything, more hopelessly wrong than any of us would have dared to prophesy. Iraq is an epic trainwreck, and there's not a single American citizen who's going to walk away unscathed.

The shame of this truth, of such a failure and so much deceit exposed, would have brought on mass resignations or votes of no confidence in any free country in the world. In Japan not long ago, there would have been ritual suicides, shamed officials disemboweling themselves with samurai swords. Yet up to this point -- at least to the point where we see grinning soldiers taking pictures of each other over piles of naked Iraqis -- neither the president, the vice president nor any of the individuals who urged and designed this debacle have resigned or been terminated -- or even apologized. They have betrayed no familiarity with the concept of shame. <snip


A few samuri swords are indeed in order, if you ask me. Much more, and it's a doozey!



http://www.populist.com/04.10.crowther.html

[yardwork]

1. Hi there dogtag! Hal Crowther is a local boy around my neck of the woods

[dogtag]

3. Yo, yardwork! I'd be proud to have Hal in my neck of the woods.

BTW, I'm watching Noam Chomsky on C=SPAN 2 right now. Care to join me?

[NMDemDist2]

2. kicking it as a must read n/t

:kick:

[teach1st]

4. Damn! This article needs to be enshrined!

Kick!

[Pluvious]

5. I keep hoping...

... I'll wake up, on the couch, with this half-remembered dream caused from some bad Made for TV Movie blaring at me.

________________
"We know that dictators are quick to choose aggression, while free nations strive to resolve differences in peace."
-Bush to United Nations, Sept. 2004

[dand]

6. Crowther is telling it like it is.

The irreducible truth is that the invasion of Iraq was the worst blunder, the most staggering miscarriage of judgment, the most fateful, egregious, deceitful abuse of power in the history of American foreign policy.

We need to articulate this message, morning, noon and night.

Thanks for a great read.

[Wright Patman]

7. You must not remember Vietnam

Iraq still has a ways to go to match that blunder. Give it about five more years and then I'll probably agree with you. But how are they going to find the bodies to sustain this for five more years absent a draft?

[dand]

8. I stand corrected, Wright Patman, I was in the USMC (1961-1966),

stateside, and I think that the blunder in this quagmire is compounded by the failure to learn a fucking thing from the first quagmire, or from the Romans or the British or the Germans or all the other quagmires.
Of course our Dear Leader converses with an invisible cloud being, we must be good Germans,(oops), Americans.