Rich In Nitrates

According to Bush, Arlington National Cemetery is "watered by silent tears."

Apparently, it is fertilized with shitty prose.

It wouldn't be so bad... composing pieces of profound lyricism has certainly not been an accusation frequently thrown at the sitting president. But he's still threatening to veto Jim Webb's GI Bill, even if the Senate GOP has gone rogue and decided that they can't realistically screw over returning troops and hope to get reelected. I guess Bush only feels we need to honor the dead troops. They're cheaper to manage.

On Responsibility

I just found this article. It's been out there a while now, and I'm sure I'm not the first blogger to point it out, but I hadn't discovered it before yesterday. If you haven't read it, you need to. It's long and it's difficult, but if you're an American, an occupation is occurring in your name, and you need to be aware of exactly what that implies.

I'll also say, before quoting any of the article, that the implications of it frighten me. I think it's far too easy to blame the soldiers. Individually, some of them are to blame... we're all responsible for our decisions. Still, I have a hard time blaming them. Most of them are still very young, and they've been sent to a place they have insufficient knowledge of, to serve a duty that will make them look like an occupying enemy to those they only want to help. It would make anyone bitter, I'm sure, and when you are trained to be detached from sympathy and empathy, the results are predictable.

The important lesson here is not about individual soldiers. It's about what it means to occupy a nation, and what occupation does to the occupied and those who occupy. It is about inevitability, and how that inevitability must be weighed when the decision is made to occupy. It is about failure on the part of this administration and its supporters to do so, both before the occupation and still today.

It was just soldiers being soldiers. You give them a lot of, too much, power that they never had before, and before you know it they're the ones kicking these guys while they're handcuffed. And then by you not catching [insurgents], when you do have someone say, 'Oh, this is a guy planting a roadside bomb'--and you don't even know if it's him or not--you just go in there and kick the shit out of him and take him in the back of a five-ton--take him to jail.
- Sgt. Jesus Bocanegra, 25

[U.S. soldiers] were the law. They were very mean, very mean-spirited to them. A lot of cursing at them. And I'm like, Dude, these people don't understand what you're saying.... They used to say a lot, 'Oh, they'll understand when the gun is in their face.
- Spc. Michael Harmon, 24

It's like very barren desert, so most of the people that live there, they're nomadic or they live in just little villages and have, like, camels and goats and stuff. There was then a little boy--I would say he was about 10 because we didn't see the accident; we responded to it with the investigative team--a little Iraqi boy and he was crossing the highway with his, with three donkeys. A military convoy, transportation convoy driving north, hit him and the donkeys and killed all of them. When we got there, there were the dead donkeys and there was a little boy on the side of the road.
- Sgt. Kelly Dougherty, 29

I just remember thinking to myself, I just brought terror to someone else under the American flag, and that's just not what I joined the Army to do.
- Staff Sgt. Timothy John Westphal, 31

That occupation can lead to stability and peace is a myth. If it were your home torn apart in the middle of the night, your face guns were pointed at by people who didn't understand your language, or your 10-year-old son killed by a convoy that didn't even slow down, would you ever be willing to find peace with those responsible? And yet Americans fly into a rage when it is implied that anyone in the Iraqi insurgency is justified in their reasoning. It is hypocrisy and hubris and dangerous in the extreme when we can so easily separate our own motives from those of others.

Michelle Malkin Hates American Troops

I'm sorry, but that's the only explanation I can find given her passion for spreading misinformation.

The right's most visable low-rent mouthpiece is pushing this video like crazy. According to her, it shows just how much John Kerry (and of course, by default, all Democrats that ever existed except Joe Lieberman) hates the troops.



Wow. That was a short video, huh? Not much to it. Just one statement removed from any context. What's up with that, Michelle? Can't you show a little more? Or would context completely blow your argument out of the water? Yeah, I thought so.

See, what Kerry was talking about the responsibility of the well-educated to stand up for the rights of the less educated. His point was that while his audience had succeeded, many who hadn't are paying the price in Iraq, while the current administration rakes in power and money from the corpses of the poor and undereducated. It's a pretty valid point about personal responsibility. Personal responsibility? Oh, it's this virtue that Republicans used to talk a lot about, before they lost their integrity. Don't worry, Michelle. I didn't expect you to recognize it.

Oh course, Michelle's squad of little green nutballs rants about it, as if this little snippet was an attack on the troops.

Contrary to Senator Kerry's foolish remark that the uneducated end up fighting in Iraq, a remark that reflects liberals ignorant prejudice about the military, military people are better educated than their civilian equivalents, not to mention better trained for their jobs. 94.4% of military members have a high school education or better, compared to 89% of their civilian equivalents. - Steve G., Malkin Blogger

Steve G. is falling right into Michelle's little trap. The Army isn't populated by those with the fewest options. It's full of people who had lots of potential. But... um... wait a minute. Does that mesh with anyone's experience? We all know people who've joined the military. Were they generally choosing between the Army and a Harvard law degree? Not in my experience. People who couldn't afford college and people who couldn't hack college made up 100% of all the people I knew who enlisted in the military. Don't get me wrong. These were good people. These were hard working people. Some of them were my close friends. But none of them had a lot of viable options out of high school. They were the others that John Kerry spoke about. They joined the military because they had nowhere else to go, and for that reason, the civilian leadership of this nation seems to feel it's okay to sacrifice them for monetary and political gain. Michelle, of course, is perfectly okay with this. That's why John Kerry's position offends her so much.

Steve gives some statistics that are completely irrelevant. Yes, a very high number of military recruits have a high school education, because until very recently, a high school education was required to join the military. What does that mean? More telling is the percentage of military recruits with college experience: 8.5% of all recruits, compared to 46.7% of civilians between the ages of 18 and 24. Those who can go to college without the help of the military tend to do so, no matter what Michelle Malkin and Steve G. might think.

There's nothing wrong with joining the military. I appreciate the sacrifices made by those who do. But it does no one any good to pretend that the military is the first choice for millions of young Americans. Why should it be? We send them overseas to occupy foreign nations with no plans or goals, only to come back and have their veterans funding cut by the same Republicans who sent them to get shot at. I wish we had a military system that attracted more people, and a civilian leadership who used the military responsibly, but we don't. American military men and women tend to come from less priveledged families and are trying to better themselves through service, and we abuse them to line the pockets of the rich. Michelle Malkin thinks that's just peachy. Michelle Malkin is an awful, awful human being.

Of course, all that said, this was a dumb thing for Kerry to say right now. The Republicans are working hard enough to fire up their base. Must we assist them?