Thursday, March 27, 2008

Retreat from Reason

President George W. Bush, speaking before a military audience at the Air Force Museum in Dayton, Ohio this week, once again took his critics to task for suggesting it’s time to rethink the US occupation of Iraq. "No matter what shortcomings these critics diagnose, their prescription is always the same: retreat," Bush said.

In an exclusive interview with Vice President Dick Cheney, also this week, ABC’s Martha Raddatz pointed out that two-thirds of the American people feel the cost of the war in Iraq is “not worth it.” Cheney responded, “So?”

So Messrs. Bush and Cheney, on Monday, March 24th, we reached the dubious milestone of 4000 dead US Armed Forces men and women. And for every soldier killed, it is estimated that 15 are wounded. Here again, the government cooks the books. The Pentagon claims only about 30,000 US troops wounded in action. But another 30,000 or so have been injured in non-combat related incidents, such as vehicle accidents and suicides (suicides among active-duty soldiers are at their highest levels since the Army began keeping such records in 1980). Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) doesn’t count at all. The number of Iraqi dead is orders of magnitude greater, but essentially unknowable.

Over 90% of American deaths have come after Mr. Bush’s 2003 “Mission Accomplished” speech aboard the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln, in which he declared, “major combat operations in Iraq have ended.” And multitudes more after Mr. Cheney’s pronouncement in 2005 that the insurgency in Iraq “was in its last throes, if you will.” These deaths may be an abstraction for Messrs. Bush and Cheney, but for the families of the dead and wounded men and women they are all too real – flesh and blood, if you will.

It should come as no surprise that an Administration that manufactured the reasons for going to war in Iraq, grossly underestimated its projected cost, assured the American people we would be greeted as “liberators,” and belittled and quashed dissent, now manufactures reasons for “staying the course,” and refers to reasoned calls for ending the occupation with pejorative terms like “cut and run,” and “retreat.” Secretive, deceitful, and arrogant, the Bush Administration simply tunes out reasoned arguments for a different approach to fighting terror, which after all, was the original intent.

I fear we are in for another nine months of mismanagement, mayhem, and massacre in Iraq. I only hope we aren’t in for another hundred years.

Wednesday, March 26, 2008

Here comes the sun


Here comes the sun, here comes the sun,
and I say it's all right

Little darling, it's been a long cold lonely winter
Little darling, it feels like years since it's been here
Here comes the sun, here comes the sun
and I say it's all right

Little darling, the smiles returning to the faces
Little darling, it seems like years since it's been here
Here comes the sun, here comes the sun
and I say it's all right

Sun, sun, sun, here it comes...
Sun, sun, sun, here it comes...
Sun, sun, sun, here it comes...
Sun, sun, sun, here it comes...
Sun, sun, sun, here it comes...

Little darling, I feel that ice is slowly melting
Little darling, it seems like years since it's been clear
Here comes the sun, here comes the sun,
and I say it's all right
It's all right

The Beatles

Saturday, March 15, 2008

Extraterrestrial Life

If They are there
If they are
Are they
In God’s image created?
Our God?

If we are here
Alone
Centered
In the immensity of the universe
Why?

A Darker Past

  Broadway & 6th, Los Angeles, 1956 Part I. GROWING UP IN LOS ANGELES I was born in Los Angeles in 1938. My dad, and mom, and brother an...