Compare:
A) Democrats Drop Troop Pullout Dates From Iraq Bill

B) Chart of Enemy Attacks in Iraq, which shows that the civil war has progressively intensified since 2003 and that the “surge” hasn’t helped much.

Questions: Why the fuck are American troops still there? Why do Bush and the Republican drones ignore the evidence that the troop presence is not helping, but only allowing the deaths of more Iraqis and US soldiers? Why are the Democrats being cowards? Or rather, are the Democrats playing politics here, i.e., what is their strategy?

(from insanereagan.com) How many thousands of US soldiers (and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis) have died since Bush proclaimed “Mission Accomplished”?

I can’t believe that Bush will veto the Iraq Bill tonight! He will have to suffer the media highlighting for the American public how ironic it is that he is extending the “mission” on the day exactly four years after he said the mission was over. Juan Cole does a thorough job of rebutting each of Bush’s claims in the speech he gave May 1, 2003 from the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln.

Media Matters recalls, Mission Accomplished: A look back at the media’s fawning coverage of Bush’s premature declaration of victory in Iraq. (On a related note, such shitty reporting done by right-wing media pundits should give us pause (and make us pissed off) when considering that today NewsCorp, owner of Fox, has made a bid to expand its media empire to include DowJones, publishers of the Wall Street Journal.)

You bought it.

With democrats in charge we are starting to get new coverage of some of the rather egregious lies to come out of this war.

Pat Tillman, Jessica Lynch. People who I think really are admirable people who were lionized with lies to sell the public on the war. I think Jessica Lynch is even more of a hero for coming out and telling the truth. She could have gone with the flow, pretended the story was true and gone on a right wing speaking tour. But she decided to tell the truth instead.

via tbogg.

CNN today has been hammering the story of the Blue Angels today. It would seem a Blue Angles jet crashed on Saturday, killing the pilot. Now it is a tragic accident and I am sure very said for those who knew the pilot. According to the Department of Defense six American service people died on active duty in Iraq on Saturday alone. Why is CNN doing the Blue Angels full on scattered with a dash of Virginia Tech? Because it makes good tv. It’s new and interesting. Read the rest of this entry »

Harry Reid finally came out and says what everyone already knows: the war is lost. Of course a crazy story like this VT shooting is more resonant to Americans than the constant stream of horror that comes out of Iraq. Exceptional things happening to everyday people is what makes good fiction and its what makes interesting news. The story is complex, we will never really understand why he did what he did. It makes for great television. (I say this with all respect for the people who died and those survived this tragedy)

On the the other hand the hundreds of men, women and children dying every in Iraq isn’t a good story. A good story has a mystery. It has suspense. The story in Iraq is predictable and tragically explicable. The only outstanding question about this war is how much longer and how many more people need to die. Forty innocent people die every day in Iraq as a direct result of this predictable and avoidable tragedy. The worst thing is that we can say for certain, even if we leave tomorrow, is that thousands more will die.

How should we respond to today’s tragedy at Virginia Tech? One response that seems to make sense to me: pass legislation for much stricter gun control in Virginia and nationwide.
From the NYT story:

Virginia imposes few restrictions on the purchase of handguns and no requirement for any kind of licensing or training. The state does limit handgun purchases to one per month to discourage bulk buying and resale, state officials said. Once a person had passed the required background check, state law requires that law enforcement officers issue a concealed carry permit to anyone who applies. However, no regulations and no background checks are required for purchase of weapons at a Virginia gun show.
“Virginia’s gun laws are some of the weakest state laws in the country,” said Josh Horwitz, executive director of the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence. “And where there have been attempts to make some changes, a backdoor always opens to get around the changes, like the easy access at gun shows.” He demanded a thorough investigation into the provenance of the weapon or weapons used in Monday’s rampage.

A more extreme response is to draw links between this violence and that occurring in Iraq. Recall that the previously most deadly mass shooting in America took place during the Vietnam War (the Charles Whitman murders at Texas A&M).

I won’t dwell here on the possible connections one could draw between domestic and foreign violence (e.g., with Michael Moore’s movie, “Bowling for Columbine,” when he notes the ominous presence of missile manufacturers in Columbine). But I do hope that this tragedy will lead people to reflect on the fact that more than this many people have been killed in Iraq almost everyday for several years now. Just last Saturday, it has been estimated that 289 Iraqis were killed or wounded. Will this tragedy on our own soil lead us to expand our circle of compassion? It certainly will not on its own, but rather depends on how we frame it. By ‘we’ I mean the media. I will be interested to see how many, if any, media outlets frame the story in relation to the violence in Iraq, as opposed to repeating Bush’s quasi-religious framing of a violation of the “sanctuary of learning.”

This afternoon I read this rather pointless article on fox news. Evidently Mr. Ray Robison took issue with a story in time magazine that Robison says claimed “America’s army is broken”. Now, I also read this article, which does not claim that the army is broken. The headline was “America’s Broken-Down Army” which is clearly not the same as broken (defined by Robison as “incapable, demoralized and poorly trained”). If you read the article you will find that the central thesis of the article is that Read the rest of this entry »