BY TOM TOMORROW
Lame Duck pulled out some of that bold, decisive leadership in his final State of the Union.
And so I call on Congress to pass legislation that bans unethical practices such as the buying, selling, patenting or cloning of human life.
I think Abraham Lincoln already beat you to the first two.
“Reality Is Totally Different”
Iraqis on “Success” and “Progress” in Their Country
By: Dahr JamailThis March 19 will be the fifth anniversary of the shock-and-awe air assault on Baghdad that signaled the opening of the invasion of Iraq, and when it comes to the American occupation of that country, no end is yet in sight. If Republican presidential candidate John McCain has anything to say about it, the occupation may never end. On January 7th, he assured reporters that he was more than fine with the idea of the U.S. military remaining in Iraq for 100 years. “We’ve been in Japan for 60 years. We’ve been in South Korea 50 years or so… As long as Americans are not being injured or harmed or wounded or killed. That’s fine with me.”
He said nothing, of course, about Iraqis “injured or harmed or wounded or killed.” In fact, amid the flurries of words, accusations, and “debates” which have filled the airways and add up to the primary-season presidential campaign, there has been a near thunderous silence on Iraq lately — and especially on Iraqis…
Once again, with rare exceptions, that media has had a hand in erasing the catastrophe of Iraq from the American landscape, if not the collective consciousness of the public. What, it occurred to me recently, do my friends and acquaintances back in Iraq (where I covered the occupation for eight months during the years 2003-2005) think not just about their lives and the fate of their country, but about our attitudes toward them? What do they think about the “success” — and the silence — in America?
I wrote this one because I kept running across something I found really bizarre: the notion that top tier candidate X is above criticism, and any Democrat who supports top tier candidate Y or Z instead is a Republican dupe, if not an active emissary sent out by Karl Rove himself. If you follow message boards or comments threads at all, you know that it’s vehement this year, in a way that I don’t really remember from previous primaries. Supporters of each candidate are certain that if you don’t fall in line behind their person, then the Democrats will lose and “it will all be YOUR fault!” Whoever you are. Choose the wrong top-tier candidate this year and you might as well be a Naderite. It’s a strange way to approach a primary season.
I’m no economist, but isn’t this the very textbook definition of “throwing money at a problem”? We’re essentially going to drop $150 billion from airplanes and hope somebody spends it. Couldn’t the same money somehow be invested in a more sustained program to counter the increasing economic malaise, maybe some sort of WPA for the new century? As a wise man is purported to have once said, if you give a man a fish, you feed him for a day, but if you teach him to fish …
Then again, some Very Serious Republicans on one of the Sunday shows assured me that the trillion or so dollars that we’ve thrown at Iraq would have had absolutely no impact either way on our current economic situation, and there’s no reason whatsoever to even discuss the issue. These things are clearly beyond the understanding of a simple, undeducated cartoonist such as myself.