Ding Dong!

Well, Saddam is dead. Will it make any difference? I doubt it. The bombs set off in Baghdad this morning killed at least 55 people, including women and children. Doesn’t seem anything has changed.

Get Ready, Boys & Girls...

President Bush is talking about increasing the size of the military. For those of you who can’t or won’t read between the lines, that translates as ‘I’m going to be proposing reinstating the draft soon.’ Real soon. There’s no way to do it with a volunteer force; the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines and Coast Guard are struggling mightily getting enough qualified recruits as it is. There have been rumblings (mostly from Charles Rangel) for two years now and it would appear the President is finally listening to his generals at the Pentagon.

Anybody in their teens or twenties should be aware of this one little sentence – and that goes for you girls as well. (Hooray for equal rights, yes?)

Time to Go Home…

It’s fairly obvious from the President’s disdainful reaction to the report from the Iraq Study Group that there will be no changes of any significance in the United States’ strategy in Iraq. Given the fact that current policies have been a gigantic disaster, it’s time to stop wasting American lives and resources on a war that can’t be won the way we’re fighting it.

Message to the new Congress: bring our troops home.

My Advice on the War (A Poem)

There was this catastrophe, I remember,
when the Planes hit the Towers – five years ago,
wasn’t it? – and the people wept and prayed
and forgot, for a time anyway, forgot the
Money and Celebrity and forgot all the dissections
of Politics, of Conservative, Liberal, name-calling,
mud slinging ‘I hate you because you're different
from me’ bull that goes on every day. There
was that catastrophe when Three Thousand died
Horrible, Burning, Scalding deaths, crushed under
Tons of concrete and steel, those days when we
were all ‘Americans’, all the same, all one,
those days now left behind in blood-letting and
steel-cutting words, hot-button newsbites and
that aforementioned mud-slinging, mongering,
mongrelizing, braying noise from East-Coast latte
leftists and Middle-American Ford drivers.

There was this war, a war in a Mosque-
riddled desert carnage but full of black gold state,
where boys named Roberto and girls named Julia
were blown apart or shot into fragments like the
shrapnel that tore into them, and the United States,
so grand, powerful, bully-pulpited and big-sticked,
riding their tanks on the high moral ground,
ran into the desert with machines on ground and
in air and explosions all around and killed, killed,
and were killed until “Mission Accomplished.”
But here we are and it’s not and I want it to stop
and we all want it to stop and we don’t know
how. But we want peace with honor and know
these red white and blue boys and girls won’t
run, they’ll die before they run, and we’re trapped
there. So end it all, end it all in a bath of crimson
and we’ll give those left alive a little parade when
they get home.