An awesome bunch of dead people

Bush gave his Memorial Day speech at Arlington today.

HE FEELS PROUD AT [SIC], BUT NOT AT ALL RESPONSIBLE FOR: “On this Memorial Day, I stand before you as the Commander-in-Chief and try to tell you how proud I am at the sacrifice and service of the men and women who wear our uniform.”


AWESOME, DUDE! “They’re an awesome bunch of people and the United States is blessed to have such citizens.”

He presented this awesome bunch of people as tin soldiers without recognizably human emotions: “Like the nation they serve, they do not glory in the devastation of war. They also do not flinch from combat when liberty and justice are embattled.” They may flinch every time a car backfires for the rest of their lives, but good luck getting help from the VA.

Then it was time to look all squinty and somber-like.

Inspection

George Bush has issued a proclamation of a – wait for it – prayer for permanent peace, for Memorial Day (turns out those words are in a 1950 law about Memorial Day). What else are we supposed to pray for Monday? “[T]hat our country may always prove worthy of the sacrifices they have made.” And “We pray for the members of our Armed Forces and their families, and we ask for God’s continued guidance of our country.” No fair putting the blame on God for the way this country’s been guided, George.

Today, George went to Fort Bragg to get himself some smoochies with a mother of one dead soldier,


and the widow of another.



How does the advance prep for this sort of event work? Does someone call her up and ask, “Say, would you come on out for the president to give you a posthumous medal and, oh, by the way, would you get all Cindy Sheehan if he also slobbered on you a bit? Would that be okay?”

Then (or possibly earlier), he went to inspect a barracks bathroom. No, really.


This is the bathroom – the very bathroom! – seen on YouTube last month with overflowing sewage. They’ve cleaned it up, so now the only visible piece of shit... well, you all know where I’m going with this.

(Update: lovely WaPo headline: “Bush Tours Once-Squalid Latrine.”)

Memorial Day: under attack and underestimated

Bush gave a Memorial Day speech at Arlington today. What a way to ruin a nice spring day. These speeches always piss me off, but today I’m thinking it’s a bit hypocritical to be pissed off only with Bush and not also just a little bit with the people who are taken in by his lies, even if they are dead war heroes, like Marine Sgt. Marc Golczynski, who Bush cited in his speech, who thought he was being a better father to his 8-year-old son Christian (“We are warriors, and as warriors have done before us we fight and sometimes die so our families do not have to”) by volunteering for a second tour in Iraq, where he was killed in March, than by helping him with his homework, giving him advice about girls (or whatever), cheering him at his high school graduation, etc. People like Bush told him he was, he believed it, and he was wrong. Also, while Bush twice quoted soldiers saying they were fighting so their children wouldn’t have to, we know that for Bush withdrawing from Iraq before Christian Golczynski reaches military age is just an artificial timetable.


Bush said, “As before in our history, Americans find ourselves under attack and underestimated. Our enemies long for our retreat. They question our moral purpose. They doubt our strength of will.” The sentence about questioning our moral purpose is kind of snuck in there, as one of the ways in which we are mis-under attack and misunderestimated: they simply don’t understand and don’t acknowledge that we are morally superior to them, and the sooner they get it through their thick skulls, the better.

As in all Bush Memorial Day speeches, he insisted that the best way to honor his war dead is to make more of them: “Our duty is to ensure that its outcome justifies the sacrifices made by those who fought and died in it.”

Then all that remained was to look all squinty and somber-like and not at all like he had anything to feel guilty or ashamed about.

Blind, prideful hatred

To kick off Memorial Day weekend, Bush went to the naval hospital in Bethesda yesterday to visit Marines injured in Iraq. This is Corp. Ryan Dion, who played soccer in high school.


This is Priv. Arturo Weber (football, decathlon), 20, shot in the abdomen and hand, requiring several operations. Chimpy seems to think he’s at a Quincinera or something.


And today, Cheney spoke to the West Point commencement. He told them, “As Army officers on duty in the war on terror, you will now face enemies who oppose and despise everything you know to be right, every notion of upright conduct and character, and every belief you consider worth fighting for and living for. Capture one of these killers, and he’ll be quick to demand the protections of the Geneva Convention and the Constitution of the United States.” And he won’t get them. Your point, Mr. Vice President?


He explained why the graduates will soon be enjoying the pleasures of an Iraqi summer: “America is fighting this enemy in Iraq because that is where they have gathered.” Gosh, I think there may be something faulty about that logic, but I just can’t put my finger on it...

Cheney explained that “to prevail in the long run, we must remove the conditions that inspire such blind, prideful hatred that drove 19 men to get onto airplanes and come to kill us on 9/11.” Dude, you’re against blind, prideful hatred now? You’re the guy who’s kept going only by blind, prideful hatred, the blood of newborn infants, and occasionally shooting somebody in the face.


Oh, if you’re wondering, the conditions that inspired that BPH against the US were evidently that we weren’t intervening militarily in the Middle East enough.

He said, “The war on terror does not have to be an endless war.” That prospect probably explains the dour expression on his face.


He told the graduates: “I give you this assurance on behalf of the President: you soldier for him, and he will soldier for you.” Unless there’s a game on, or some brush that needs clearing, of course.

False memorials

Near Kabul, a US convoy crashed into some cars while merging onto a highway after leaving Bagram, killing a few motorists and setting off a day of Road Rage Rioting. The interesting thing is how organized it seems to have been, with a demonstration in place to greet the convoy (and to be shot up in turn) as it reached its destination, which can’t have been more than 5 miles away.

There’s a new mass hunger strike at Guantanamo, dismissed by a Gitmo spokesmodel as an “attention-getting” move. So they did it on a holiday weekend? Commander Robert Durand, who is new to me, repeated the phrase of earlier Gitmo spokesmodels, that hunger striking is “consistent with al-Qaeda practice,” a phrase designed to smear without having to offer any proof of anything.

I might have left Memorial Day alone, except Bush used the day to hide (not for the first time) behind the corpses of American soldiers, to stand in front of ginormous flags,


to look all squinty and somber-like while standing next to men in uniform,


to look all squinty and somber-like while staring at flowers,



and to look all squinty and somber-like while staring at flowers and trying to figure out what to do with his fingers.


And then there’s the speech, dear God there’s the speech. After reading Haditha stories all week I’m not really in the mood to hear the dangerous fantasies about perfect saint-warriors that are the stock in trade of Memorial Day. Humans are complicated and messy, and it does them no honor to pretend to remember them by misrepresenting them as otherwise, to talk about how they all “answered the call to serve” (Greetings!) and how “All who are buried here understood their duty” and “understood that tyranny must be met with resolve” and “acted with principle and steadfast faith” (and automatic weapons) and whose deaths were all “sacrifices.” How do you mourn these figures of myth, when they’re not recognizably human? “On this Memorial Day, we look out on quiet hills, and rows of white headstones -- and we know that we are in the presence of greatness.” It is this sort of rhetoric that makes war seem clean and a worthy means of problem-solving, and which drives veterans who know that their actions and motives did not, because they are humans and not demi-gods, always match up to those ideals they are told they were supposed to have lived up to, to alcohol and violence and self-hatred and suicide.

Speaking of less-than-perfect humans, whoever transcribed the speech had it end, “May God Bless the Untied States of America.”

How much longer do I gotta stand here looking all squinty and somber-like?

Really, how much longer? I wanna ride my bike, and that brush won’t clear itself.

Memorial Day

For someone with my beliefs and political perspective, blogging about Memorial Day may be a no-win situation, and I’d have happily avoided it if I hadn’t read and been deeply repulsed by Bush’s speech at Arlington today, in which he exploited the deaths of servicepersons in the service of his own goals. He quoted the farewell letter of Sgt Michael Evans (which I think means not his last letter, but a letter written to be opened if he was killed): “My death will mean nothing if you stop now.” Bush adds, “And we must honor them by completing the mission for which they gave their lives”. I don’t resent the sentiment coming from Evans; in the mouth of George W. Bush it becomes an obscenity. He’s hiding behind the honored dead.

Here are some more high points from Bush’s speech: “Across the globe, our military is standing directly between our people and the worst dangers in the world... freedom is on the march... blah blah liberty blah”.

What does he mean by worst dangers in the world, by the way? Wouldn’t those be biological, chemical and nuclear weapons, the things Iraq did not have?

The precariousness in rising to protest that bilge is that while I stand in awe of the idealism of those who volunteer to risk their lives in the what they see as the cause of liberty and freedom, I consider them to have been flim-flammed. I do consider Michael Evans’s death to have meant not very much, at least not what he wanted it to mean, and what he had a right to have it mean, if he was going to be sent into harm’s way. There aren’t so many idealistic people in the world, even among the young (Evans was 22), that we can afford to have their idealism canalized into the wrong paths.

Under George Bush, 1,647 soldiers have died, 12,630 wounded.


No, Mr. President, the pretty flowers are not for you.

An outrageous abuse of power

Bush, on his talk with the Danish prime minister: “I told the Prime Minister that our government and our coalition will transfer full sovereignty, complete and full sovereignty to an Iraqi government that will be picked by Mr. Brahimi of the United Nations. He said, do you mean full sovereignty? I said, I mean full sovereignty.”

Vaudeville without the laughs. Does anyone really believe the conversation took place in the Abbott & Costello way Bush describes it?

Bush prefaced this with his Mr. Rogers imitation: “It's always good to be with a friend. Friends are candid with each other, friends are open, and friends are constructive -- and that's the kind of conversation we've just and we'll continue to have.”

The NYT (but not the Post) had a story about Richard Perle, James Woolsey and others storming into Condi Rice’s office to demand that the CIA stop telling the truth about Chalabi. Richard Perle, Richard Fucking Perle mind you, called it “an outrageous abuse of power.” As opposed to invading a country in order to install Chalabi in power. God, wouldn’t you love to have been a fly on that wall.

I assume that means Perle et al will start leaking heavily against “Kapowie” Allawi.

So the military knew last November that most of the Abu Ghraib prisoners had done nothing wrong. The very next day, they got the Red Cross report about torture and sexual humiliation at Abu Ghraib.

I’m sorry, John Kerry started a...cookie company? Why didn’t I know this?

The BBC said it, the Indy says it: Wowie Kazowie Allawi has started to form his government. Again, wasn’t that supposed to be Lakhdar Brahimi’s job? I’m telling you, the CIA has naked pictures of him. In a three-way with a goat and a chicken.

No, honestly, I still can’t tell what happened. CIA coup? IGC coup? Allawi coup? Bremer coup? I just know that what was supposed to be the process has been short-circuited. And in more ways than one. It isn’t just that the UN (or its representative, the Algerian with the Italian name) got cut out of the process, but that although this is supposed to be an interim government only, Allawi is clearly going for the whole ball of wax.

I was right about Allawi spying on Iraqi students, according to The New Republic.

Israel is furious at the BBC for having successfully interviewed Mordechai Vanunu. Israel accused the BBC of using “tricks” to do the interview and then sneak the tapes out of the country one step ahead of Shin Bet. Would that be “tricks” like the ones your female whore/agent turned in the honey trap that lured Vanunu to where he could be kidnapped?

At the World War II memorial, Bush talked about how freedom had prevailed. The ceremonies had heavy security and SWAT teams prepared to blow away any terrorists.

WaPo: “SPRINGFIELD, Mass. -- Springfield will no longer offer health benefits to the unmarried domestic partners of city employees now that same-sex couples are legally allowed to marry in Massachusetts. Mayor Charles Ryan said couples have 90 days to marry and retain insurance coverage.” Shotgun gay marriages, just like the Christian Right always predicted!