Volume 8, Number 52
September 30, 2007
September 30, 2007
|
|
"FRESH WITH YOUR COFFEE, EVERY SUNDAY MORNING"® SINCE 1999
|
|
"FRESH WITH YOUR COFFEE, EVERY SUNDAY MORNING"® SINCE 1999
|
|
Free at Last
We spread liberty so easily in Iraq that we're going to keep on spreading. (I'll take Iran for 7 trillion, Alex.) Messrs. Kyl & Lieberman won support for the first inklings of a war on Iran with what some are calling the amendment which resembled the "aluminum tubes" scare of 2002 or the legislation from 1998 which turned out to be the leverage to get Democrats on board the Iraq adventure. The elite Iranian forces have been branded agents of terrorism. (Look, over there, a yarmulke wearing, redneck bunny!) The juxtaposition of fresh warmongering with Eric Burns's PBS movie, "The War," is beyond irony. Beyond coincidence. Beyond serendipity! What this meticulous creation portrays so well is the difference between soldierly killing and just plain human killing. Have you never wondered why the "greatest generation" has always been so keen on the dictum that the end never justifies the means. Some guitar-slinging twenty year old going to make that case convincingly? We are learning that these are not abstract thoughts from the ivory tower, but the life lessons of a world gone haywire, speaking to us from the past. What the Chinese have called the 'ancestors.' The difference between necessity and desire should have been learned in childhood. Sadly, this is the age of the elastic meanings of words, when the stubborn youth of yesterday can muck things up for the rest of us. My point is that our armed forces are engaged in either soldierly killing or ordinary human killing based on the policies of George W. Bush, their superior officer. If the case for necessity were to disappear, the betrayal wouldn't need to rhyme with that shill of a general's surname. Do we really want to grant these people seven chances to give us the reason we waged war on Iraq? Because it's obvious you shut them down on this one or they start up another one. What else is Kyl-Lieberman about? In the name of what American value? Revenge? Dr. Martin Luther King said "free at last." Did you think he was talking about people of color, or mankind? Sorry, you're too late. It's either instinctive or the wrong answer. But you were correct that it was a cheap rhetorical trick. Someday, I hope to append that conclusion with "worthy of the other side," but I'm afraid my side uses these same rhetorical tricks to sell stuff. Only they're just so much worse at it.
|
|
|||
|
|||||