Owning up

Shakespeare's Sister talks about the current GOP malaise with Captain Codpiece:

Conservatives love to talk about The Ownership Society, but they refuse to own its spokesman.

…Bush was your Golden Boy—a corporate shill with the demeanor of a country bumpkin, who could hold together the unholy alliance between Big Money and Big Religion, standing at the altar and giving the blessing to the crackpot marriage between the business interests who sought to get rich off the stupid sods who marched in lockstep if only someone would protect the children from radical feminists and kissing boys. He didn’t just give good speech on Neocon dreams and working class nightmares; he believed that shit. And with a GOP-led Congress and a neverending stream of media mouthpieces willing to demonize anyone who dared to dissent, he tumbled headfirst into fulfilling every last one of your wishes, like a demented genie pulled out of a bottle in oil-soaked Texas.

He wrapped himself in the flag and told America to follow him down the Yellow Brick Road. He went to war, and he made you rich. And you cheered him all the way, over every last golden cobblestone. Then America got to Oz, and started getting itchy—and now you want to pretend you never knew what was there. Why, we had no idea there was just some shriveled old man behind the curtain! Please.

He's all yours, kiddies, flightsuit, "Mission Accomplished" banner, and all. Why the abandon ship mentality? Well, here's a clue:

Dear Leader’s approval ratings are down to a new record low, 36%
via Pandagon

(no subject)

I had to share this piece by Tristero over at Hullabaloo:

Scenes of real violence never look like a Terminator movie, or even much like Spielberg's "Munich." Real violence comes in blurred, random images poorly framed, without slo-mo, without artfully symmetrical splatter patterns and goosed soundtracks with shrieking bird-like fiddles. A movie of real violence isn't a Peckinpah or Hitchcock movie, but a cheap, fourth-generation video with bad sound, showing a reporter getting his head sliced off. Or it shows those insignificant little things falling off the burning skyscraper, things which happen to be real people, with real children, real friends, real enemies, real thoughts, real fears, and real lives that are about to end. For real.

And when real violence gets reported in words, it's with one or two inadequate adjectives standing in for the ghastly, reeking smells and the unspeakable textures and sounds of mass murder. And since I have a very active imagination, reports of real violence never fail to revolt me. I know how many countless tragedies - many still to come - are created by each death, and then compounded:

"Police found at least 65 bodies in Baghdad in the past 24 hours, including 15 men bound and shot in an abandoned minibus, in a gruesome wave of apparent sectarian reprisal attacks, officials said Tuesday.

The timing of the killings appeared related to the car bomb and mortar attacks in the Shiite slum of Sadr City in east Baghdad on Sunday in which 58 people died and more than 200 were wounded.

The sectarian violence marked the second wave of mass killings in Iraq since Feb. 22, when bombers destroyed an important Shiite Muslim shrine in Samarra, north of the capital.

The minibus was found on the main road between two mostly Sunni neighborhoods in west Baghdad, not far from where another minibus containing 18 bodies was discovered last week.

The bodies of at least 50 more men were found discarded in various parts of the capital, police said. All had been shot and many also had their hands and feet tied."

It is only moral - since after all our tax dollars helped create the State of Nature in which these murders happened - to ask each of us to sit quietly and imagine the last 2 or 3 minutes of these people's lives. And what their mothers, and their children, and their husbands and wives were thinking about, perhaps wondering where they were, if they were just late, or playing with friends... Not that any of these dead are innocent heroes. They are just people -good, bad, and indifferent - who were killed as the result of the dreadful violence unleashed in Iraq on America's watch. And for which all of America will be blamed.

And with the images of their deaths, and the images of their living loved ones and friends in our mind, it's time to ask a few questions:

Anyone care to defend anymore the ridiculous proposition that the Bush/Iraq war was a good idea? Or the corollary absurdity that this level of horror could have been avoided simply by 25,000 or 50,000 troops, or "better planning"?

This catastrophe was predictable. The people who refused to listen have blood, not ketchup, on their hands.