(“The Right Thing’)
TPJ leads today by honoring the men and women who serve our country.
Junkie’s father, as hundreds of thousands of other young Americans, surrendered their youth to defeating Hitler’s tyranny and genocide. His service in Europe, from D-Day +3 to the German surrender, was common to that of millions of young men and women.
At the end of his life, as he lay dying, his last request was to be buried in his service uniform. Amazed that this would be a final wish; the question was “why?” He responded, “It was the greatest thing I ever did in my life.” In death, his uniform still fit.
Shakespeare immortalized this bond of service and honor in Henry IV:
We few, we
happy few, we band of brothers;
For he today that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother.
TPJ’s webmaster is a vet. He writes with moral clarity:
I, as a Vet, desire to see those men and women who DO give up a great portion of their youth to defend these United States honored. What I do hate is those who feel that they have the right to cruelly and selfishly use those men and women to their own objective.
We are there to defend your freedom, our freedom, and our sons and daughters freedom as well as those that come after us. I am extremely proud to be an American, but I am saddened that there are those who think differently. I am concerned that there are others who have been victimized by the war and their stories haven't been heard. I am concerned that there have been those who have been injured and are not receiving care and I am deeply concerned that there will be still more that will hear the call and then they won't be heard.
Still, I am proud to have served in the USMC and I would do it again. I echo your statement about your father. You wrote: "At the end of his life, as he lay dying, his last request was to be buried in his service uniform. Amazed that this would be a final wish; the question was "why?" He responded, "It was the greatest thing I ever did in my life." In death, his uniform still fit."
. . . It WAS the greatest thing that I have ever done in my life! And I hope that my uniform still fits when I go home.
America finally honored WWII vets with a beautiful memorial. Long over due as about 1,000 WWII vets die each day as “the greatest generation” passes.
The political tempest surrounding Bush’s war in Iraq cannot and should not denigrate the bond of service. Bush has done much to dishonor our vets; slashing benefits and especially access to health care.
Eric Blumbrich, perhaps the foremost “video bloggers” on the internet, has produced a thought provoking video of Public Bush – Private Tumbleweed’s policy toward veterans. If your computer has high graphic capability, click on the hyperlink below for a powerful presentation.
Much of the hard reality of Bush’s policy will be lost in the parades and memorials over the holiday. For the sake of those who have served our nation, the Democrat Party should not forget the right thing next year.
JUNKIE EDITOR MICHAEL
CARMICHAEL
“Cascade into chaos”
Over the past month, world events have inundated the Bush-Cheney campaign with a relentless cascade of malignant evidence.
Iraq is spinning violently out of American control.
US credibility has been truncheoned by the photographic record of torture at Abu Ghraib. Testimony from military sources confirms the systematic use of rape, murder and many other sorts of perverted abominations perpetrated by American soldiers and mercenaries against Iraqi civilians. This stream of pornographic torture and unadulterated ultra-violence has pilloried Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld-Sanchez and their minions and hurled them into an inescapable abyss of utter contempt.
One thing is certain. America is not welcome in Iraq. Another thing has become painfully obvious. There is no plan for an exit strategy. A third factor has been apparent from the beginning of this ill-starred adventure. There is little international sympathy or cooperation anywhere in sight.
Given these facts, it is no wonder that Bush is falling behind his Democratic rival well before the Democratic Party makes its nomination official. Kerry is opening up a gap in several red states that will spell doom to Bush if present trends continue.
More! The damaging chain of negative evidence is not about to stop. The situation in Iraq is melting down.
The reputation of their hand-picked Prime Minister-in-waiting, Ahmed Chalabi, has been blown to bits by the revelation that he is not making enough money from his American handlers at the Pentagon. To supplement his meagre salary of $4 million per year, he has been selling intelligence to Iran’s secret intelligence service. In other words, he is a double agent, or a triple agent or whatever you call a man who betrays his nation, consorts with both of its major enemies and exerts himself strenuously to bring about the invasion of his homeland by a multinational force of oil-hungry religious crusaders who collectively wish to destroy the culture, the government and the economy of his forefathers. There is much more to the twisted story of Ahmed Chalabi than has been made public to date and the remaining bits and pieces of his biography will not comfort his erstwhile backers: Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, Douglas Feith, Paul Wolfowitz and George Bush.
At home, John Kerry has begun to fight back. He has pummelled Bush with a savage attack on Bush’s massive foreign policy failures. Kerry has deconstructed Bush’s foreign policy, and the Republicans have fought back with their pitiful ploy of arresting Abu Hamza, a one-eyed, one-handed Muslim supporter of Al Qaida who has less following in the world than Lyndon Larouche – far less. The high profile arrest of Abu Hamza, replete with the pompous John Ashcroft in his full glory at a disgusting New York press conference proves that the Republicans are desperate to shift the limelight away from John Kerry and the cascade of bad news flooding them out of their offices. The arrest of Abu Hamza is nothing more than the penultimate act of desperation of a police state on the brink of collapse, when it rounds up the usual suspects for parading before the increasingly hostile public in a show trial that is less than meaningless – except for the fact that it demonstrates their sheer desperation, their deepening depression and their abject panic at the latest reports from their pollsters.
Their final act of desperation this month came with Ashcroft’s announcement that Al Qaida was planning new attacks on America. Who said what about the boy that was always crying, “Wolf!” Ashcroft’s warning was little more than a thinly disguised challenge and a hopeful hint to Al Qaida to do something to warrant a huge American backlash. Given the results of the last election in Spain, I would not be so certain that a new attack on American soil would benefit the Bush administration. It would belie their arguments that they are winning the war on terror, and it would sweep them out of office in a tidal wave of protest – in any honest election.
Another symptom of the Republican loss of faith is the fact that they are attempting to get several portions of the hated Patriot Act renewed fully eighteen months in advance of their expiration. This tactic indicates that somebody in the Republican political machine has done some calculations indicating that they would lose the renewal votes in December 2005. Clearly, they are running scared, and their fears are deepening into cruder and more distorted forms of political madness.
Next month, Bush will make a whirlwind series of international manoeuvres in order to attempt to salvage something of the rapidly vanishing credibility of his hated regime. He will travel to Rome to parade in full pomp with his strongest continental ally, Silvio Berlusconi, the plutocratic autocrat of Italy – who is hated by a growing proportion of his own population. Yesterday, Berlusconi’s minions sent a warning shot to Washington, telling Bush that they feared for his safety in Rome as the Italian public is mounting massive demonstrations of protest in anticipation of his arrival.
Later in the month, Bush will fly to Ankara, the capitol of Turkey, in order to persuade NATO that they should step in to replace American troops in what is becoming a futile attempt to stabilize the war torn nation. There will be protests in Turkey, but not as public as in Rome. There will be meetings, conferences and many public demonstrations of protest at Bush’s Greater Middle East Initiative – which is the failed model for the conquest of Iraq – a fundamentally flawed plan that would leave Turkey exposed to the disintegration and violence of anti-American terror that has already struck in Istanbul with bombs planted in synagogues and western institutions.
The Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld-Rice-Wolfowitz plan for Iraq has failed. That fact is becoming ever more painfully apparent to those who eagerly foisted it upon the American public. They promised America that the Iraqis hated Saddam. They promised America that the Iraqis would welcome the US-led invasion with open arms, garlands of flowers and to prove their gratitude palm fronds would be placed in front of the tanks as they rolled into Baghdad. When the destruction of the bronze statue of Saddam was staged by Marines in Firdaus Square, the neocons thrilled to the visual proof that they had been vindicated. They believed the lies told to them by their lying eyes. Now, over one year later, Moqtada al Sadr, founder and commander of the militant anti-American Mahdi Army reigns as the most powerful political force in post-Saddam Iraq.
Last week, America capitulated to Sadr. They had demanded his arrest and the disarmament and the dissolution of his army. They got neither. He demanded the US withdrawal from the holy shrines of Najaf and Kerbala. He got exactly what he demanded. Sadr has his freedom and his army. His army still has its arms. America has withdrawn from the shrines of Imam Ali in Najaf and Kerbala, leaving behind the evidence that American guns shattered the walls of the most sacred mosques in Iraq.
To end the month on a low note, the American-appointed Iraqi Governing Council appointed a new Prime Minister-in-waiting. Ayad Allawi is a long-serving informant and collaborator with both the CIA and MI6, Her Majesty’s Secret Service. He has a long history with Ahmet Chalabi, the now disgraced American collaborator who stole all of the files from Saddam’s secret intelligence service, and who will be implicated in other major crimes. Ayad Allawi is a political pawn, just as Chalabi is a pawn as Abu Hamza is a pawn. The game is getting monotonous, and the major pieces available to Bush are diminishing.
In 2004, May was a cruel month for the neoconservatives who have keenly urged onward and propelled the Bush-Cheney juggernaut to the brink of the chasm. The trends converging upon them have become a cascade into chaos.
Last Update: 03/23/2006