Yes, I know. The president’s bin Laden victory lap was a bit much by Spock standards. (George W. Bush being more in the Kirk category.) But by the standards of American election year politics, it was pretty subtle. So the resulting outrage from the right was all the more laughable. Seriously – these are the people who had Dubya fly a jet fighter onto an aircraft carrier (which they had turned around to keep San Diego out of the shot), parade around in a flight suit, and then do his famously premature victory speech under an enormous “Mission Accomplished” banner. These are the people who incessantly reminded us of their greatness throughout the Bush terms, and who continue to this very day.
Luckily for them, we are Americans and, as such, are born anew each and every morning. We have no collective memory, like a nation in advanced dementia. We do not value knowledge of our own history; in fact, the very term ‘history’ carries a negative connotation. Our politicians take advantage of this, of course – who wouldn’t? – and accordingly serve up the same hash over and over again. Cutting taxes makes everything better. Check! Budget cuts lead to growth and prosperity. Check! Antagonizing and even attacking other countries will make us safer. Check! On we go.
Obviously, the Republicans do not have a corner on this franchise. The Obama administration is carrying forward a lot of their policies for them, including ludicrous destabilizing boondoggles like missile defense batteries in Eastern Europe. But just now the GOP happen to be indulging somewhat gratuitously in the not entirely unrealistic notion that we do not remember yesterday any better than the day before. Right now the conservative candidates for the GOP nomination are lining up behind Romney, as it was always certain that they would, and singing his praises. After a bruising primary fight during which Bachmann, Gingrich, Santorum, and others unsparingly and unflinchingly heaped scorn upon the Mittster, to see them now stumping on his behalf inspires a kind of cognitive dissonance that should spark our collective memory a bit. But we shall see.
It is another new day, after all.
luv u,
jp
My second thought was, this is not simply about burning Korans. This incident followed ten years of war and all the evils that are contained within that fact. It occurred during a stretch of weeks in which we saw cell-phone video of American soldiers laughing and joking as they pissed on the corpses of Afghans; our military personnel adopting an SS-type insignia for one of their units; our Defense Department persisting in its robotic Drone war on both sides of the Pakistani border. Now Afghans are turning their guns on our people. Is anyone really surprised?
I’m thinking about NPR particularly because of the president’s declaration that the Iraq war will be drawn to a close at the end of this year, despite the administration’s efforts to keep it rolling for an indefinite period of deployment. NPR was completely on board with the Iraq war back in 2002-03; they dropped the ball on anything like investigative journalism at a time when it might have mattered to get the truth out. People tend to forget that the alternative press, plus outlets like the London Independent, blew holes in the Bush Administration’s case for war well before the shooting began. 
It’s hard to imagine how a war this difficult to justify could last a decade or more on the backs of anything other than an all-volunteer force. If there’d been a draft, these wars might never have started. If the true costs were passed along to taxpayers, they certainly wouldn’t have lasted as long as this. Our nation’s war making power has been effectively insulated from public involvement and, consequently, from meaningful public input as well. America’s wars are now self-contained and self-perpetuating; they are fought by a separate nation of military families – one that bears every burden, pays every price, while we continue our normal lives, only vaguely aware of the catastrophe our elected leaders are visiting upon these unfortunate men, women, and children.
would be well-advised to avoid any bold statements of success based on this experience. This is Iraq war II; this is Bush lite. There may well be many negative consequences that will fall out of the rebel’s eventual victory, as well – I guess we will have to see.
World War II, flattening its dissidents, outlasting its main rivals … until we managed to elect a man so incompetent he could, to borrow a phrase, destroy the empire merely by strolling through it. I’m sure to the nation’s imperial board of trustees, George W. seemed a relatively safe bet, particularly with such seemingly reliable minders as Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld keeping an eye on the store. That miscalculation is proving very costly. Just as our attack on Vietnam bled us dry (to say nothing of what it did to the Vietnamese, Cambodians, and Laotians), this past decade of war – coupled with an amazingly irresponsible policy of deep war-time tax cuts – has helped to hobble our economy, perhaps beyond recovery.
leader that al Qaeda had ever known. This was a victory for all who have served since 9/11. One soldier summed it up well. “The message,” he said, “is we don’t forget. You will be held accountable, no matter how long it takes.”
I don’t get choked up very often listening to NPR, but I heard a story on Memorial Day weekend that did it – about the father of a soldier killed in Iraq, talking about how he’d planted sunflowers near his son’s gravestone because the young man liked them so much, and how the father went to Iraq and saw his son, he claims, and the apparition asked him what the f**k he was doing there, told him he should go home, and said that it was all right, he was in a better place. We’re on year ten of stories like this. Jesus! Time to shut it down.
A report by Pentagon correspondent Tom Bowman on NPR’s Morning Edition was perhaps unintentionally illustrative of how badly this can go wrong:
Of course, as we know, elections have consequences. If you give a drunk a gun, don’t be surprised when s/he shoots you in the ass. (Lesson leftover from the Bush administration.) But the warning goes both ways. If you shoot someone in the ass, don’t be surprised if s/he kicks yours a little later on.