The U.S. military has done almost nothing but lie about the death of Pat Tillman in Afghanistan, and it's difficult to believe that new investigations will give his parents the knowledge, and maybe the peace, they deserve. This story in the New York Times, a followup to work done in other media -- the Washington Post and LA Times in particular (but, sorry to say, not the San Jose Mercury News, which is being beaten again and again on a story that it should own) -- is a litany of government venality and parental stubbornness.
Will they ever learn the truth?
Last Sunday on CBS's Face The Nation, during the interview Dick Cheney, claimed:
CHENEY: Well, I made sure both in 2000 and 2004 that the president had other options. I mean, I didn't ask for this job. I didn't campaign for it. I got drafted.
Yet another rewrite of history by the Bush/Cheney team. In case you have forgotten, Cheney picked himself.
Ironically, Cheney was the man Bush had tapped to lead his vice presidential search efforts.
Didn't look very far did he?
Mike Hedblom
It'S a mistake to underestimate the human capacity for self-delusion.
-- Robert Park, a physics professor at the University of Maryland
The left, it seems, are whispering in the ear of public consciousness. Sleep they say. It has merely been a bad dream. There is no need of further earth shaking action. Return to your 9/10 dreams while we return to our triumphal 1968 purple haze.
Never mind that the events of 9/11 were the culmination of more than 20 years of steadily escalating provocation.
Pay no attention to the steady slide of Europe into dhimmitude.
No, they say, only the right could bring such evils to our shores. We have freedom of the press and freedom of religion to defend us from such enemies abroad.
WAKE
UP
Besides being flat wrong on their facts and “reasoning”, and lacking any useful context, they direct our attention to events well and truly behind us which will now be judged by history. What matters now is the path forward.
I cannot improve upon Christopher Hitchen’s conclusion, so I instead reproduce it:
Well, if everyone else is allowed to rewind the tape and replay it, so can I. We could have been living in a different world, and so could the people of Iraq, and I shall go on keeping score about this until the last phony pacifist has been strangled with the entrails of the last suicide-murderer.
Arianna Huffington wants George Clooney. But George, bless him, is a busy man trying to keep the marriage of his friends (Brat Pitt and Angelina Jolie) in a small quiet place in Italy. Arianna Huffington wants George Clooney to become a blogger - perhaps even a Citizen Journalist.
So she cobbles together a blog entry made up of George’s old droppings and sends it to George’s PR lady - but somehow it ends up with the charlady (the cleaning lady). “Oh yes dear.” Says she. “That looks wonderful.”
I’ve read it. You can too. No wonder George is pissed - and so should you be.
Other “professional journalism” sites do it, hack up a blog entry and put some cleb’s name to it, but that the Huff does it is disappointing - I expected better things. Read the rest of this entry »
Abu Ghraib officer fights reprimand. A senior staffer to a Republican congressman revealed Thursday that he has been formally reprimanded by the Army for his role in the Abu Ghraib detainee abuse scandal — and that he is fighting the disciplinary move. He says that higher-ups were responsible for the treatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib.
Higher-ups, maybe, like the notorious Major Gen. Geoffrey Miller? He’s the man who’s letting the rank-and-file take the heat for what happened while he takes the military equivalent of the Fifth Amendment against self-incrimination in what little investigation is still happening into America’s shameful actions?
So let’s sum up: Low-ranking folks go on trial, then to jail. The well-connected captain (aide to Republican representative) gets a reprimand. The general, standing up only for himself, heads toward a lucrative retirement unless the Army summons up the integrity to delay it.