Not sad but not excited by the death of a terrorist

When something is thrown upwards, there is a point at which the object’s upward momentum and the force of gravity are equal. For some time period — even if it is incredibly small — when the object hangs suspended. That is the emotional space I have occupied since learning about Osama bin Laden’s death. Any relief/closure/positive emotion has been tempered by my normal instinct that death is bad and deaths, even of bad people, are not meant to be celebrated.

Now, I should confess a few things. I grew up on Long Island and live in Washington, DC. My emotional location vis-à-vis 9/11 had been a strange place. It remains one of the worst days of my life and few things would make me happier than seeing the towers built back exactly the way there were and despite knowing New York as well as I know any place on earth, I still get lost in lower Manhattan sometimes because I still look for the WTC when I get out of the subway. Growing up, that was my compass in the city. It may always be. These are the reasons, my liberal friends tell me my opinion of anything 9/11 related is less valid because I am too close to it.

At the same time, I will never think we should do to ourselves what the terrorists could not; destroy out way of life and take away our belief in the ideals that inspired our republic. Racial intolerance cannot be mistaken for vigilance against terrorism. We cannot convince anyone outside of the US  to believe that we believe in the importance of the rule of law if we do not apply it uniformly within the US. And the Bill of Rights is as important today as it was on 9/10/2001. These are the reasons my conservative friends tell me my opinions on this subject are less valid because I “do not understand the impact 9/11 had on America.”

You can see the paradox. One might think these opinions would give me more reason to hate Osama bin Laden but I don’t. I can’t. He doesn’t deserve that. The closest thing I have had to “joy” at seeing him be killed was when I laughed at a photo of President Obama that had the caption “I am sorry it took me so long to get you my birth certificate, I was busy killing Osama bin Laden.”

At the end of the day though, if I were to become the kind of person who celebrates any loss of life — even of someone as reprehensible as this mass killer — I just become more like them and I don’t want that.

Dubya was right! OMG!

We have finally been greeted as liberators in Iraq!

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-shoe15-2008dec15,0,1930513.story

 

That is, if you mean have liberated them from their shoes…

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Don’t look now but things are about to go from worse to hellish

Much like Chicken Little I feel I have spent a lot of time of late talking about all the ways we are killing ourselves.  There’s global warming, infectious diseases, global warming’s impact on infectious diseases, the ‘war against terror,’ and now it looks very much like we are about to go to war with Iran.  If you think Iraq is a mess, just wait for Act II (Afghanistan was just a prologue).

 

Ever since we invaded Iraq there has been talk about going after Iran next.  The general scuttlebutt around DC has been that the war plans for such a move have been written and the only thing stopping Dubya et al from doing it have been the mess that had been Iraq.  Now that the situation there seems to be better – I do think the very belated surge has achieved at least a partial military success there that makes our withdrawal from there even more important – the administration can focus more on Iran.  They clearly feel we are threatening them as their recent threats to “strike back if attacked” (http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/07/09/asia/10iran.php)  that were closely followed by nuclear weapons testing.  If Dubya’s plan is to poke the bear, he is doing a bang-up job.

 

Lest anyone think we should invade another sovereign country:

 

A Democratic senator told me that, late last year, in an off-the-record lunch meeting, Secretary of Defense Gates met with the Democratic caucus in the Senate. (Such meetings are held regularly.) Gates warned of the consequences if the Bush Administration staged a preëmptive strike on Iran, saying, as the senator recalled, “We’ll create generations of jihadists, and our grandchildren will be battling our enemies here in America.” Gates’s comments stunned the Democrats at the lunch, and another senator asked whether Gates was speaking for Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney. Gates’s answer, the senator told me, was “Let’s just say that I’m here speaking for myself.”  The New Yorker, http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/07/07/080707fa_fact_hersh

 

It is even more worrisome that Senator McCain supports the White House on this issue because with Dubya & Cheney wanting to invade Iran and the McCain candidacy looking shaky, it would not surprise me one bit if a preemptive war with Iran would be to avoid a loss in November.  If McCain picks Joe Lieberman I think we can count the days until our troops go in.  This, by the way, is because Lieberman is a defense hawk and not because he is Jewish. I do not want hate mail about that.  This would be one October surprise we cannot afford.  

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Barack Obama makes reasonable comment on Iraq, media freaks out

Maybe it is because of the Bataan death march quality of the 2008 Democratic primary process (seriously, over a year of it?  WTF?) that lulled our press into just expecting political news to fall into their laps but now they have gone back to their really lazy ways.  Yes, the national press corps are lazy.  Their job is both 'glamorous' and crappy at the same time.  Political reporters are herded around from campaign event to campaign event where they cover the same speech until they can repeat it themselves.  Back in Washington, DC (and elsewhere) pundits, spoiled from the primary, need to drum up controversy to attract viewers and make themselves feel relevant. 

 

When Senator Obama said he was going to bring the troops home as soon as he got in and put the timetable out there I think most people with a brain understood that the specifics of the timetable were never written in stone.  Any president is going to have some leeway in terms of how to end a war.  Remember the two most dangerous points of any armed conflict are getting in and getting out.  The big deal about Obama's position is his commitment to getting out or Iraq. To harp on the date we get misses the point.

 

Our media are there to keep our government honest and should call a candidate, or elected official, out when they go back on a promise but this is not that.  Our press today prefers the horserace to substance and recent coverage just proves that point.

 

Thank god for the Daily Show and Jon Stewart.

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Why it matters

Why it matters

 

NBC has been running these more obnoxious than words can describe ads about why they cover the presidential campaign as much as they do.  The gist is that it matters therefore they cover it.  While I find the ads repugnant and reminiscent of a John Stewart joke where they showed CNN using real wildfires to promo an interview with an actress from the movie Things we lost in the fire, this year’s contest matters.  It matters for reasons that transcend what color, gender the candidates are.  Seven years ago we put someone into the White House whose experience was less than minimal.  He failed at the several businesses he ran, traded Sammy Sosa and seemed to do very little as governor of Texas.  People who know more than I about the Texas system have said that this position doesn’t have a lot of power.  One area in which they do have some authority is in reviewing death row cases and pardon or commute the sentence of anyone deemed worthy.  Texas executes more people than any other state.  Ok, they are a large state and a viable defense in a murder case is “he needed killin’” but Dubya’s one contribution to the state was to reduce the amount of time the governor spends reviewing such cases to 15 minutes.  It’s only a matter of life and death, whatever.

 

So we let this guy into 1600 PA Ave and gave him the proverbial keys to the kingdom and hoped for the best.  We didn’t get it.  Unbeknownst to me, and most of the US, Dubya and his dad don’t get along well.  That sucks because a, I thought that at the very least we may not like Dubya but he would lean on dad when things got rough (was not a supporter of Bush 1 but the man is intelligent and has a lot of foreign policy experience) and b, when we were about to invade Iraq the one person on Earth with experience doing that very thing was shut out.  One issue 43 had against 41 was the way he handled Iraq.  So, for reasons only he knows, he surrounded himself with very intelligent people, though most were stuck in a world that didn’t exist anymore – the Cold War days.  Look where we are today.  In a war we cannot end, the dollar and my cat’s poop are worth about the same and the economy is just going to get worse before it gets better.  We are stuck between a rock and hard place with China, who owns most of our country yet isn’t on great terms with human rights.  I can only imagine what will happen this summer when all the tourists and Tibet protesters descend on that country.  Bloodbath comes to mind but can they be that stupid?  Can they?

 

So back in the States we have a presidential election to deal with.  On the Democratic side we have two people who are basically the same when it comes to their positions on, well, everything.  .

 

On the other side of the aisle we have John McCain, a well respected veteran who is known for speaking his mind but while equally important, people seem to be ignoring the fact that he is insane.  I don’t like to think I am ageist but the joke about bombing our enemies (the now saintly Reagan said that while checking his microphone, his exact comments were something like “the bombing of Russia will commence in five minutes) was never funny.  McCain entered an event singing (to the tune of some Beach Boys’ song, I think) “Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran.”  Not funny.  It’s scary because I don’t think he was kidding.  Worse, the man who has made his experience on the international scene the cornerstone of his campaign got the Sunnis and Shia confused.  A BIG blunder for someone like him.  He claimed al Qaeda is getting training in Iran (from the government). They are not and any al Qaeda that is in Iraq went there AFTER we invaded.

 

So we have a lot to think about.  Oh and lest you really think this has been a good idea, 97 percent of the American military deaths in Iraq has happened after the infamous “Mission Accomplished” banner incident.  Great.

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