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Steve Gilliard, over at the Daily Kos, cheers you up:

Good morning, today is tax day, where your money leaves your wallet and goes to make the wealthiest one percent that much richer. Remember that as working class Americans dodge car bombs in our new possession of Baghdad, rich Americans are dodging millions in taxes with Bermuda shell companies. Just another day in Bush’s America. Can’t you smell Operation Iraqi Freedom in the air as yet another Baghdad cultural institution is looted and burns to the ground? Yesterday the library, today who knows?

I rarely quote entire posts, but Democratic Veteran
post was too good not to quote in full:

Journalists who buy the farm in combat

I read over the weekend that right-wingnut writers are beginning the B-I-G lie that Mike Kelly is a “combat casualty”. No. He was killed in a traffic accident. In a combat zone. He was a civilian. That does not make him a combat casualty, not even remotely a combat casualty. Ernie Pyle was a combat casualty, he spent his career with the troops on the front line and was killed by a sniper. He, like Kelly, knew combat was dangerous but accepted the risks to tell the story. He was a civilian (although likely better known and loved by the troops he covered than Kelly) who died in the war, and I doubt he would have wanted a big deal to have been made of his passing. I would like to think the same of Kelly. It has even been suggested by some female (one?) “writers” that he be interred at Arlington. No, not happening, never. To do that would completely dishonor the men and women buried there now and those to be interred there in the future.

To the female wing-nut who made this suggestion: an old military saying for you — wish in one hand and shit in the other and see which one fills up first.

Okay you stared me down long enough, it was Nooner who made the suggestion

Michael Kelly went at great peril to be with U.S. troops, and he fell among US troops, while trying to tell the story of U.S. troops. So perhaps his final rest should be with U.S. troops, in Arlington, where we put so many heroes

but you probably guessed by now anyhow. I thought he went for the money, another chance to write about Clinton’s Penis (as it related to Iraqi politics or something) and a book deal to be announced. The “he fell among US troops” is a little over the top for anyone but Nooner…doncha think? Sounds like he was in a huge firefight with elite units of the Republican Guard, not a Hummer accident.

A Hummer Accident. And they say irony is dead.

Body and Soul on perceptions of
war news:

Yesterday, I linked to several intriguing posts over at Silver Rights, about the media’s obsession with the story of Jessica Lynch, and the relative lack of attention paid to minority soldiers — men and women both. I’m not sure J. is right, although I must say that I had found myself wondering, too, if the situations were reversed and Lori Piestewa, the Hopi woman who was killed in Iraq, had been rescued, and Jessica Lynch had died, if we would not now be seeing the tragic death as more important than the rescue. If we wouldn’t be thinking, yes, thank God that one woman was rescued, but we must not forget the brave, blonde girl who died at the hands of evil men, and fight all the harder in her memory. The word “wondering” is the key there. I’m aware of how often the issues and concerns of anyone who isn’t white, male or middle class (preferably all three) get shoved to the margins, and when something like this happens, it’s pretty hard not to notice that the media is obsessed with one particular woman, and that her pigmentation is different from that of the majority of women in the military. Does that “prove” that the media is biased? Of course not. But it’s part of a pattern that, at the very least, makes the issue worth raising. The obsession with “Jessica” (the oddness of using her first name has already been thoroughly analyzed by a large number of the blogs I read) feels an awful lot like previous media obsessions with kidnapped or missing girls and young women, and if you’ve noticed in the past that that mania doesn’t seem to take hold when the missing and murdered children are poor and black, it’s impossible not to feel like the same thing is happening in a different arena.

[…]

I think that’s a stick that’s used to beat up women and minorities all too often: you’re letting your own personal obsessions get in the way of seeing what everyone else sees. As if not to see what the majority sees were mere obstinacy. As if “everyone else” weren’t equally influenced by personal experiences, and even eccentricities. The difference, of course, is that white, male, middle-class experiences are defined as the norm. We’re all supposed to look through that lens.

Blogorrhoea on the Fall of Baghdad(tm):

So anyway – a Marine fashioned a hood for the condemned statue out of a large Stars’n’Stripes. You could hear a subtle change in tone emanating from the baying hundreds assembled, and a lieutenant must’ve remembered the fuss about that flag at Basra, because back up went the Marine to remove the flag. Eventually an Iraqi flag was found, and up the Marine went again. The flag wasn’t big enough (perhaps the US just make their flags bigger than anyone else makes theirs) and the Marine was obliged to afix the flag in the manner of a tie before climbing back down to safety. I could almost here the officer shouting “Ya sure ya wanna drape Saddam in the nation’s colours, Chuck? Ya sure ya wanna be seen by about a billion people tearing down the Iraqi flag with a US demolition vehicle, Chuck? Ya sure ya wanna be court-martialled, Chuck?” So up went Chuck again. And off came the flag. Then Saddam hung on grimly for a bit. Then he fell. And then the baying hundreds were upon him.

It’s always nice to see a bastard symbolically undone (no matter how much you doubt the intentions and wisdom of the conquerer; no matter how much you fear for the future) and I do remember thinking it’d be nice to be there to feel the moment. Then I remember thinking, gee, a few hundred isn’t a big crowd for a city of five million at such a time, is it? Still, the Grand Toppling was taking place in an area inhabited by the well- connected and the wealthy, and many suburbs remain ensnared in the grip of war, so I’ll reserve my judgement as to what the decisive sentiment in Baghdad will show itself to be over the coming weeks (I remain most dismarrhoeaic about the months and the years).

Hullabaloo on the lessons of Afghanistan:

I don’t want to hear another word about how the US is on a humanitarian mission to bring peace and freedom to the world. Even the neocons, who supposedly really truly believe in spreading the American love, are obviously full of shit. If they really cared about the people in the countries we are “liberating” this would not be happening in Afghanistan.

We’ve spent the huge sum of 13 million dollars to help the lives of average Afghan people. Meanwhile, the Taliban are still around terrorizing the population, Pakistan is more radicalized than it was before 9/11 and is blatantly harboring Taliban and al Qaeda. Afghans are again living under the rule of fractious warlords and remain in deep, deep poverty. In other words, the Afghan campaign succeeded in sending the terrorists to another sympathetic country that happens to have nuclear weapons while leaving the people of Afghanistan living in anarchy. Victory.

Clearly, the Afghanistan campaign was just a way of letting off some of that post 9/11 steam, and letting Rummy experiment with his newfangled military doctrine, while we laid the groundwork for Iraq. And they knew nobody would care. The minute they sent Ashleigh Banfield home to cover the Elizabeth Smart kidnapping we knew the “story? had ended. Whatever happens now is a ?new? story, unrelated to the story of how the Americans gloriously liberated the Afghans from the Taliban and destroyed the foundation of al Qaeda.