Grr. My web hosting service has been extremely poor this month. A lot of down time. I’m not happy.
Ted’s backups are apparently being corrupted, so once more, he’s stuck at work for all eternity. Grf.
There is a great deal of ranting going on about the war today. Some of it is my ranting. My part of the ranting was inspired by someone asking that a group of people pray for the troops (the person who mentioned it said, “I kept my mouth shut,” which is reasonable as she’s 1. not particularly religious and 2. not American), is in no way meant as an insult to people who /do/ wish to pray for the troops, and went like this:
I don’t object to praying for the troops, although it’s not my inclination to pray. I object to the troops being put in danger to liberate a people who aren’t eager to be liberated. I object to being lied to repeatedly by my government. I object to a war that was touted as being a 7-days war (did anyone /believe/ that?) being redefined, a week into it, as having no clear end in sight. I object to being defined as a traitor or unpatriotic because I don’t support my government’s actions.
I object to conflicting news reports and propaganda. I object to not having a clear picture of what’s really going on; I object to a media that rolls over for the government, and even more, I object to the yellow-bellied Congress that the American people in all their wisdom have elected. I object to Rumsfeld telling us that it’s a war crime for Iraq to show the POWs they’ve taken on tv, but that it’s perfectly fine for the US to do the same thing. I object to the fact that we’ve violated the basic precept of the Geneva Convention, which states that instituting a war of aggression is the first and most obvious war crime that there is. I object to the fact that Bush is incredibly unlikely to be tried in the world court for that violation.
I object to a /lot/ of things. But wanting people’s loved ones to come home safely isn’t one of them.
Hear, hear. With the added proviso that even more than redefining it after a week, I object to the blatant lying implied in redefining the length the morning after the very first night’s attack.