I Think The Canary is Wheezing

My little boy has a pretty bad cold so I’m keeping him home from school today. He’s not running a high temperature or anything. Just sneezing and coughing. He calls it “Having a Head full of Snooze.”

So I’ve got him all set up with blankets, juice, The Big Box of LEGOs, his stack of DVDs, and he just came upstairs and grabbed some of his Favorite Hot Wheels. Now he’s ready for his morning.

So am I. I’ve got a fresh cup of coffee, the computer’s on, time to seek out The News of The Day.

And in under 3 minutes flat I’m debating whether or not I should take a pill to pound down a building panic attack or just grit it out for the next 3 to 4 hours.

I went downstairs to watch and admire our 8 year old Zen Master. He is Absolutely In The Moment in a world of SpongeBob assembling something from a pile of LEGO bricks that eventually will have something to do with the fleet of Hot Wheels.

Y’see I can stop his cold from getting worse by keeping him inside out of the rain. I can top off his juice thermos throughout the day so he’ll be getting plenty of liquids. And I can make sure that he’s warm enough while building his LEGO world.

But I can’t seem to do a goddamn thing to keep him out of the crosshairs of the architects of the Project for The New American Century.

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/iraq/2004285470_iraq5halfway16.html

U.S. may be just at midpoint in Iraq
By Brian Murphy, The Associated Press

WEST POINT, N.Y. An American father agonizes as his son prepares for a second tour in Iraq. Baghdad morgue workers wash bodies for burial after a suicide attack. Army cadets study the shifting tactics of Iraqi insurgents for a battle they will inherit.

Snapshots from a war at its fifth year. Each distinct yet all linked by a single question: How much longer? Most likely, the war will go on for years, many commanders and military analysts said.

It’s possible to consider this just the midpoint. The U.S. combat role in Iraq could have another half-decade ahead, or maybe more …

… “Four years, optimistically” before the Pentagon can begin a significant troop withdrawal from Iraq, said Eric Rosenbach, executive director of the Center for International Affairs at Harvard’s Kennedy School, “and more like seven or eight years” until Iraqi forces can handle the bulk of their own security.

… If many experts are to be believed, the Iraq war will follow roughly a 10-year arc, ending after a new crop of soldiers some now barely into their teens is on the battlefield.

So let me get this straight … The kid mowing the lawn across the street might be fighting for his life in Iraq in a couple of years? And a few more years later and it’s my boy’s turn in the barrel??!!

Fat chance. That. Will. Never. Happen.

And the goddamn quisling Democratic leadership is trying to figure out how to give Bush enough money in advance to fund The War until the next administration comes to power so the war funding issue won’t be a distraction before the fall elections. If the Democratic leadership crams that piece of crap legislation through then for the life of me I can’t imagine one reason in the world to support that kind of Democrat in 2008 … or ever.

And … impossible to forget … We Torture. A few Bad Apples weren’t flying solo at Abu Ghraib. They’re in charge of our country.

http://www.crooksandliars.com/2008/04/10/they-knew/

… Torture techniques were discussed and approved in meetings by the National Security Council’s Principals Committee, a group that included Vice President Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell, Donald Rumsfeld, George Tenet, John Ashcroft, and President Bush admits he was fully aware of them.

But as Naomi Wolf pointed out in her book The End of America, historically, once a state sanctions torture upon people who are seen as marginal, ultimately that state turns torture upon its own citizens. But who in their right mind could have imagined torture … specifically waterboarding, would ever be used to motivate telephone solicitors!!

http://www.fayobserver.com/article?id=291348

Bizbits: Waterboarding: Boss’s bizarre ‘team-building’ leads to lawsuit

By Karl Vick
The Washington Post

PROVO, Utah No one really disputes that Chad Hudgens was waterboarded outside a Provo office park last May 29, right before lunch, by his boss.

There is also general agreement that Hudgens volunteered for the “team-building exercise,” that he lay on his back with his head downhill, and that co-workers knelt on either side of him, pinning the young sales rep down while their supervisor poured water from a gallon jug over his nose and mouth.

And it’s widely acknowledged that the supervisor, Joshua Christopherson, then told the assembled sales team, whose numbers had been lagging: “You saw how hard Chad fought for air right there. I want you to go back inside and fight that hard to make sales.”

… “So they held me down,” Hudgens said, “and the next thing I know, Josh has a gallon jug of water and he’s pouring it on my face. I can’t scream because the water’s going down my throat.

”And halfway through he stopped for a second. I tried to mumble the words, ‘Stop, knock it off.’ I tried to get that out and he continued to pour.“

”I’m not getting any air,“ Hudgens said. ”Toward the end, I’m starting to black out. I’m getting very dizzy, light-headed. The sensation that’s going through my head is, ‘I’m going to drown.’ “

That is the oft-described whole point of waterboarding, though Hudgens said he was not then familiar with the word. He said that what he told a friend in the human relations office two hours later, after ”coughing, choking, mucus“ was: ”My team just tried to kill me.“

******************

Millions marched to try to stop the war before it started. Net Impact: Zero. But a little later we didn’t boil out into the streets when Bush cut Habeas Corpus out of The Constitution. We haven’t demanded every year, month, week, day, and hour that Nancy Pelosi and John Conyers do their goddamn jobs and investigate and arrest the entire National Security Council’s Principals Committee and the President for High Crimes and Misdemeanors. These people should be in jail awaiting trial for war crimes instead of Ruling Our Country. Hundreds of thousands of our kin are returning home from Bush’s Preemptive War brain and Soul damaged. Why are the citizens of The United States of America seemingly accepting what was until recently … Completely Unacceptable?

So is it time to protest Once Again? Or are we waaaaaay beyond the “Protest Stage.” As Kurt Vonnegut wrote:

When it became obvious what a dumb and cruel and spiritually and financially and militarily ruinous mistake our war in Vietnam was, every artist worth a damn in this country, every serious writer, painter, stand-up comedian, musician, actor and actress, you name it, came out against the thing. We formed what might be described as a laser beam of protest, with everybody aimed in the same direction, focused and intense. This weapon proved to have the power of a banana-cream pie three feet in diameter when dropped from a stepladder five-feet high.

The architects of the Project for The New American Century have already proved over the last 5 years that they don’t give a rat’s ass about the sanctity of Human Life. Over 4,000 American and well over a million Iraqi dead have proved that particular point with crystalline clarity.

I don’t know what to do. I admit I don’t know where to turn. I’ve got kids … you’ve got kids … But you don’t even need to have ‘em to realize that we’ve somehow got to get all the kids up to higher ground and out of the reach of these monsters. Jesus H. Christ … Aren’t we in The Majority? Don’t most Americans want this Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace to just STOP!

Are we hamstrung by Learned Helplessness or too scattered across the landscape to form into a Real Opposition?

In short … Who The Hell Knows What To Do? Where Do We Sign Up? Is there someplace to sign up? Because isn’t it abso-goddamn-lutely true that unless we change the direction we are heading … we’ll end up where we are going?

And why do I get the feeling that regardless of what I do … It will all boil down to the nonsensical:

Dyslexics of the World … Untie!

We have nothing to lose but our Chinas.

I Think The Canary is Wheezing April 18, 2008