“The collapse of the administration’s rationales for war, which became apparent months after our invasion, should never have come as such a surprise. . . . In this case, the ‘liberal media’ didn’t live up to its reputation. If it had, the country would have been better served.”

No argument from me. Despite the conservative wails about the media being a mass of liberalism, the 21st century has proven quite the opposite: The New York Times (as it has admitted) uncritically printing Judith Miller’s what-the-administration-says stories about the war; Phil Donahue being fired from MSNBC for airing anti-war views on his show (according to an internal memo) despite having the network’s highest ratings (and higher than his replacement, Michael Savage); White House correspondent Elizabeth Bumillier admitting she found it too intimidating to actually question the president about the rationale for war. and Jessica Yellin, a CNN correspondent, saying this week that network executives put pressure on their staffs to make sure stories had a pro-war slant.

A number of journalists have responded to this argument, now and in the past, by asserting that they were harsh, aggressive critics of administration statements. Unfortunately for them, the Internet makes it simple to check their past statements and find out how full of crap this defense is (the same applies to the claims by many non-pundit Iraq War supporters that they were never Iraq War supporters). Check out Glenn Greenwald’s salon blog for some discussion of this.

One good example of a flimsy justification, courtesy of Greenwald, is David Ignatius’ 2007 statement in the Washington Post that “In a sense, the media were victims of their own professionalism. Because there was little criticism of the war from prominent Democrats and foreign policy analysts, journalistic rules meant we shouldn’t create a debate on our own.”

If “creating a debate” means “rush out and find someone who opposes the war just so we can get dissent,” then Ignatius would have a point. Well, he would have a point if he was right—as Greenwald points out, there were several Democrats who spoke out, at length, against the war (and as I recall, Howard Dean’s statement that capturing Saddam hadn’t made us safer didn’t trigger any in-depth reporting, just laughs about how wrong Dean was).

But investigating and analyzing government statements isn’t “creating a debate,” it’s part of the job. I admit I’m far from a perfect reporter, but even I manage to do that occasionally, and I’m just one person. A national news organization has researchers, investigators and staffers the Destin Log can only dream about, and could certainly dig deeper into the administration’s false and inaccurate justifications about the war. Of course, they’d have taken flak for it, but that’s part of the job too.

OK, certainly Obama was inaccurate, but it’s hard to see this as some diabolical lie rather than a dumb error.

Which doesn’t stop right-wing pundit Ron Hart in Saturday’s column from managing to make it sound even worse by simply omitting the Buchenwald detail, so that it sounds like Obama made the story up out of whole cloth, and pointing out that Obama doesn’t have an uncle (as someone who had great aunts on my mother’s side but no aunts, I can attest to having called them “Auntie,” not “Great auntie”).

Of course, McCain has consistently referred to al-Qaida in Iraq as “al-Qaida” (they’re two separate groups) but Hart is apparently quite comfortable with that. After all, it’s not like McCain is a liberal or a Democrat or anything objectionable.

As a vegetarian for 15-plus years, I should have known better … the soup turned out to have lots and lots of meat in it (ENTIRELY my fault, let me add, I should have had sense to ask). OK, maybe it wasn’t lots, but it sure seemed that way as I picked around the sausage to get to the pasta and kidney beans.

The soup tasted great, though the meat juice seems to linger in mouth longer than any of the other flavors. That may be imagination.

But my chocolate chip cookie, as always, was fabulous.

“Here lie officers and men of all colors. Rich men and poor men together. Here are Protestants, Catholics, Jews — all together. Here no man prefers another because of his faith, or despises a man because of his color. Here there are no quotas: how many of each group are admitted or allowed. Among these men there is no discrimination. No prejudice. No hatred. Theirs is the highest and purest democracy.
“Any among us, the living, who fail to understand that, will thereby betray those who lie here. Whoever lifts a hand in hate against a brother, or thinks himself superior to those who happen to be in a minority, makes of their sacrifice an empty and hollow mockery. Thus, do we consecrate ourselves, the living, to carry on the struggle that they began. Too much blood has gone into this soil for us to let it lie barren.”—Roland Gittelsohn, Iwo Jima memorial sermon (I’ve posted this before, but it’s still awesome).

“A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things they have always done. If a story seems moral, do not believe it. If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie. There is no rectitude whatsoever. There is no virtue. As a first rule of thumb, therefore, you can tell a true war story by its absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil.”—Tim O’Brien, Vietnam veteran turned author.

“We found also that, all too often, American men were dying in those rice paddies for want of support from their allies. We saw first hand how monies from American taxes were used for a corrupt dictatorial regime. We saw that many people in this country had a one-sided idea of who was kept free by the flag, and blacks provided the highest percentage of casualties. We saw Vietnam ravaged equally by American bombs and search-and-destroy missions as well as by Viet Cong terrorism, - and yet we listened while this country tried to blame all of the havoc on the Viet Cong.
We rationalized destroying villages in order to save them. We saw America lose her sense of morality as she accepted very coolly a My Lai, and refused to give up the image of American soldiers who hand out chocolate bars and chewing gum.
We learned the meaning of free-fire zones—shooting anything that moves—and we watched while America placed a cheapness on the lives of orientals.
We are asking Americans to think about that, because how do you ask a man to be the last man to die in Vietnam? How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake? We are here in Washington to say that the problem of this war is not just a question of war and diplomacy. It is part and parcel of everything that we are trying, as human beings, to communicate to people in this country—the question of racism, which is rampant in the military, and so many other questions, such as the use of weapons: the hypocrisy in our taking umbrage at the Geneva Conventions and using that as justification for a continuation of this war, when we are more guilty than any other body of violations of those Geneva Conventions; in the use of free-fire zones; harassment-interdiction fire, search-and-destroy missions; the bombings; the torture of prisoners; all accepted policy by many units in South Vietnam. That is what we are trying to say. It is part and parcel of everything.
We are here to ask, and we are here to ask vehemently, where are the leaders of our country? Where is the leadership? We’re here to ask where are McNamara, Rostow, Bundy, Gilpatrick, and so many others? Where are they now that we, the men they sent off to war, have returned? These are the commanders who have deserted their troops. And there is no more serious crime in the laws of war. The Army says they never leave their wounded. The Marines say they never even leave their dead. These men have left all the casualties and retreated behind a pious shield of public rectitude. They’ve left the real stuff of their reputations bleaching behind them in the sun in this country….
We wish that a merciful God could wipe away our own memories of that service as easily as this administration has wiped away their memories of us. But all that they have done, and all that they can do by this denial, is to make more clear than ever our own determination to undertake one last mission: To search out and destroy the last vestige of this barbaric war; to pacify our own hearts; to conquer the hate and fear that have driven this country these last ten years and more. And more. And so, when, thirty years from now, our brothers go down the street without a leg, without an arm, or a face, and small boys ask why, we will be able to say “Vietnam” and not mean a desert, not a filthy obscene memory, but mean instead where America finally turned, and where soldiers like us helped it in the turning.
-John Kerry

“I am tired and sick of war. Its glory is all moonshine. It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for more blood, more desolation. War is hell.”—William Sherman

“I hold no brief for the prisoners. I do hold a brief for the reputation of the United States of America. We are Americans, and we hold ourselves to humane standards of treatment of people no matter how evil or terrible they may be. To do otherwise undermines our security, but it also undermines our greatness as a nation. We are not simply any other country. We stand for something more in the world – a moral mission, one of freedom and democracy and human rights at home and abroad. We are better than these terrorists, and we will we win. The enemy we fight has no respect for human life or human rights. They don’t deserve our sympathy. But this isn’t about who they are. This is about who we are. These are the values that distinguish us from our enemies. “— John McCain

“Make us to choose the harder right instead of the easier wrong and never to be content with a half-truth when the whole truth can be won.”—Col. Clayton Wheat (I don’t remember who Col. Wheat was, but the quote is worth including nonetheless).

I know the military has a long history of crappy accounting, but this is really appalling, particularly with an occupation that’s running into the trillions of dollars.

But I’m sure if we get a Democrat in the White House next year, Republicans will make overspending a serious issue again.

You may recall that we arrested and held members of China’s oppressed Uighur minority in Gitmo, long after the administration admitted they weren’t terrorists and hadn’t committed any crime (apparently they were turned in by bounty hunters). According to ABC news, a new government report from Department of Justice Inspector General Glenn Fine says Chinese intelligence officials showed up at Gitmo to interrogate the men. Our response was not to tell them “get lost,” but to subject them to sleep deprivation, starvation and cold before the Chinese got to question them.

If true, that’s even more shameful than usual for this administration.

But of course, for some conservatives, China is probably utopia: A thriving free market with no safety or health regulation matched with an increasingly oppressive one party state. That seems to be the dream government for some of our local Bush supporters, provided the one party were Republican.

I really liked the Iron Man movie. And having some leftover money on my birthday gift certificate, I decided to pick up Marvel’s trade paperback collection of Iron Man’s early adventures.

While at times the series is very good, I don’t think it’s anywhere near the level of Stan Lee’s best work from the Silver Age. The problem is, I think, that unlike FANTASTIC FOUR, SPIDER-MAN, THOR or XMEN, the cast is very small: Besides Tony, the only regulars at this point (about halfway through the volume) are Pepper and Happy Hogan, which limits how much interaction the story can develop (and their interactions aren’t much—all Pepper and Happy do is banter like leftovers from a second-string romantic comedy). Plus, there’s no romantic element—Tony dates a lot, but there’s none of the melodrama that comes with Sue choosing between Reed and the Sub-Mariner or Peter Parker’s endlessly angst-ridden love life. And that’s not a compliment, more melodrama would have been an improvement.

The emotional aspect of the series rides entirely on Tony Stark’s damaged heart and his frequent need to rush and recharge it, and that’s not enough (and while the early issues pointed out what a problem this was in his personal life, even that angle’s faded as the series goes). Though in fairness, that may be partly because reality has gone so far past the formerly amazing SF concept of an electronic chestplate that can keep a heart beating.

I don’t know if Stan just stumbled, or if it’s that Don Heck, as the primary artist, didn’t contribute to the plotting as well as Ditko and Kirby did, but this is definitely the second string.

This is Dreher’s best shot (apparently) at tackling the question of how gay marriage hurts straight marriage: If people are doing something bad, it hurts everyone!

Of course, the issue with slavery wasn’t how it affected the moral ecology, it’s that slavery was (and is) a denial of human rights to the slaves. Pro-choicers (myself included) see women denied control of their own bodies if abortion is banned. Right-to-lifers see the fetus being denied its rights if abortion is allowed.

Who’s being denied the rights with gay marriage? Are gay people being forced to marry against their will? What is it about gay marriage that pollutes the “moral ecology”? Yes, I’m well aware of the religious arguments, but Dreher says it can be condemned on secular grounds as well.