My Grandma G is fond of telling this here story, though I'm sure she'll write me later and provide some more details:
She and her Dad, that's my Great-Grandpa Flip, were attending a board meeting at the little resort town that was one of my childhood summer spots, and they were debating the future of the lake there and how to get something-or-other done with it. So Flip stood up and nominated his daughter to be on the case because, by god, you need a woman to get anything done at all.
I really wish I had more of that story. But Flip did have a point.
Check out my girl Cindy Sheehan. All she did was say fuggit and set up camp, and now all of a sudden we've got a focal point. She's amazing, and I, for one, am rooting for her. But let me make one thing clear: Cindy Sheehan doesn't want to ask Bush for an immediate pullout, like the media's trying to have you believe. According to Sheehan, she went to Texas because she heard Bush refer to troop deaths in terms of service to a "noble cause." Her mission is simply to ask him to define, exactly, what the noble cause IS. And you can bet dollars to doughnuts that he's ducking because he's, uh, got nothin'.
Because if there is a noble cause, why is the Post reporting that the administration is lowering its expectations? Quoth, Post, 8/14/05: "The United States no longer expects to see a model new democracy, a self-supporting oil industry or a society in which the majority of people are free from serious security or economic challenges, U.S. officials say." The story anonymously quotes another U.S. official as saying that they started out hoping to establish a democracy, but are slowly realizing they'll have an Islamic republic.
What I extrapolate from this is that the only success we've drawn from our incursion into Iraq has been to upset the apple cart, and we did that in the first six weeks with 137 American casualties. Since that point, the United States has suffered persistently trashed justifications for war, mounting American casualties, additional terrorist attacks for our allies, occassional videotaped nose-thumbing from UBL and his crew, and, just recently, reportedly lowered expectations of mission and a constitutional process mired over, among other issues, the most basic question of whether to have a strong central government or instituted factionalism.
If you can macrame me a noble cause out of that, I'll give you a nickel.
1 comment:
A. Couldn't we agree that Cindy could be crazy and...dare I say...RIGHT to ask the President of his own insanity?
B. So, let me get this straight. A woman uses her first amendment rights to ASK and PROTEST a war that is probably immoral and definitley without reason, and she's crazy?
C. What the hell do I care about her divorce? That's so outside of the point that it's like worrying about Terry Schivo's brain.
D. Umm...let's see...thousands of years of fighting amongst nomad-like people, we come to Iraq, get a whole bunch of soldiers dead, and suddenly no more civil war? Ohhh. I see. Because without us, civil war would definitely ensue and this would be our problem because...? Oh, oil! That's what our problem would be. So, are you really concerned about civil wars, or are you more concerned about what the right is telling you to believe about the war?
E. Since when have we given a flying f. about any 'civil wars'. We make our prescense known, and then we leave. Unless its commie Civil War, and then America gets its hackles up.
F. It's not my problem. The American taxpayer should not be paying three billion dollars a month to support this 'war' on a noun. Spend it on a hydrogen engine that everyone could afford. Get the hell out of the M.E.
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