Tuesday, September 20, 2005

Further OCCUPATION for your weekend:
Why Iraq?

Robert Kagan at the Washington Post reminds us why it seemed like a good idea at the time. In fact, it had seemed like a good idea for a LONG time.

Some ex-presidents seem to have forgotten, though (scroll down to Uncharted Territory)-- especially the one who is most responsible for developing the notion that it was a really good idea in the first place. (Cue "The Arkansas Traveller" maestro.)
The doctor is...OUT.

It's off to the new/old digs in Newfoundland for about five days, where we take possession of the good doctor's (my husband's grandfather) old house and re-establish the family claim. No online service there as yet, so, true to Newfoundland, I'll be swathed in fog till next Monday.

If you lack entertainment, tune in to the Christopher Hitchens/George "Ad Hominem" Galloway debate [Be it resolved: The war in Iraq was both necessary and just] which took place in New York last Friday. A textbook study in demagogery, duplicity, diversionary tactics, rhetorical fallacy, name-calling, bloviating, and the Big Lie. [And that was just the audience....] Galloway swells to Hitlerian heights of volume, gesture, and wind velocity, while Hitchens undermines himself by finding contempt of his audience irresistible (for good reason).

Galloway had just returned from a photo-op suck-fest with Bashar Assad, and will soon join Cindy Sheehan at the anti-war counter rally in Washington D.C. this weekend-- thereby covering all his bases, as Hitchens so handily pointed out during the debate: offering Assad his congratulations on successful "operations" into Iraq, headwaters of the river of terrorists who killed Casey Sheehan; and then basking in the borrowed glow of Casey's mother's grief and anger.


Our team, wearing the white hats, will be meeting here and here -- wish I could join them. Semper Fi. (At least I'll be out in one of the last bastions of independent thinking in Canada-- and maybe the first to secede?!)