Counterspin has some advice for any honest conservative still supporting Bush:
My advice to those who are against violence and in favor of free speech…but still are in favor of the Bush administration’s policies…get your fucking asses in gear and stop these lunatics before something rally bad happens.
If you don’t…you’re condoning this shit, and, in my view, just as guilty as they are.
You are either part of the solution, or you’re a member of the Bush Fedayeen. So…put up, or SHUT up.
Emma, of Late night Thoughts is wondering why Americans squander their freedoms so quickly:
It is difficult to explain some of these things to Americans. To paraphrase one of my favorite writers, you have known nothing but freedom all your lives; do fish think about water? Most of you have never experienced first- hand the loss of those you love to a state’s security machine; you have never been humiliated and assaulted for your beliefs by a mob while those supposed to maintain law and order stood by and watched; you have never been arrested and convicted for something you didn’t do on the word of an unnamed informant; and you believe those things will never happen to you.
Maybe that is why so many of you hold your freedoms so lightly. You do, you know. You shout your pride about being an American, a citizen of the greatest country in the world. And it never occurs to you to ask what makes this country what it is. You call for the suppression of those who disagree with you “for the good of the country” and because we must “support our troops”. You advocate violence against those who do not think like you. You hound, harass and lie.
And with every suppressed voice and imprisoned innocent you chip away at the greatness until nothing will be left that can be called America.
RC3 on Al Jazeera:
My problem with the common dismissal of Al Jazeera as a propaganda network is that it betrays a lack of perspective that offends me utterly. I can deal with conservatives and liberals equally well, what I can’t deal with is people who can’t get beyond their own biases. For example, I’m amazed by people who think it’s perfectly fine for us to detain people captured in Afghanistan as “unlawful combatants” rather than as prisoners of war, but who howl with outrage when Iraqis don’t treat our captured soldiers properly under the Geneva Convention. Our soldiers should be accorded the rights of prisoners of war but so too should we honor the convention even when it doesn’t suit us.
The inability to step outside one’s own political outlook, or nationality, or race, or gender and look at the big picture from other perspectives is an intellectual flaw that I find to be fatal. Everyone comes at every issue with biases, I’m a liberal white male who grew up in a small town in Texas, and that background certainly colors my thoughts on pretty much everything. However, I pride myself on my ability to compensate for those factors and look at a situation from the perspective of other people, although I’m obviously far from perfect.
The Watch takes a look at what Agent Orange did to Vietnam:
The US government sprayed it, and they knew what they were doing. They promised to stop using chemical weapons, and they kept going. Millions of Vietnamese are already dead from this poison, over a million more are now seriously damaged by it. But there will probably never be a war crimes trial for any of the individuals responsible for poisoning the genome of so many Vietnamese, for saturating their best land and reservoirs with it. Because war crimes are only committed by other countries, or something like that.
And in a final fit of irony, the sick among the Vietnamese are less than ciphers to a US government that to this day continues to look for the bodies of dead Americans. Just as, immediately after the war, the starving there didn’t matter more than these dead Americans. And perversely, those dead Americans received more attention than the living American veterans who were sick and dying from being doused during their tours of duty. More attention than the sick or deformed children they had when they came home.
The US government wants marble monuments to the glory of the republic. The hallowed tombs of the heroic war dead. I guess a hydroencephalic child just doesn’t fit the image they’re going for. An ex-veteran that has the ill grace to waste away of cancer instead of being cut down in his idyllic prime by a hail of bullets doesn’t pass PR muster.
The dangers of depleted uranium today are still largely ignored or pooh-poohed. I wonder what we’ll be saying in twenty years time.