A Reminder to All America
As Fox News is piddling over itself ecstatically about Saddam Hussein's execution, I just want to ONCE AGAIN remind America that THIS MAN (shaking hands with Donald Rumsfeld):

Had NOTHING to do with THIS EVENT (which I experienced first hand):

So all Americans need to ask THIS MAN:

when we will catch THIS MAN:

Write the media to express your opinion on Bush's failure to fight terrorism.
execution | scandal | sleaze | Terrorism | War | Iraq | Republican Party | Saddam Hussein
I bow my head in your general direction
This is the voice I wish I heard more. I wish to expand the fear objects to all brainwashed minds and fanatic religionists. Those whose view cannot expand to fit the modern reality and want to bomb us back to the stone age so they won't be afraid anymore. Or even more frightening;The ones whose religions promise them that death is the great freedom wherein paradise waits.
The supreme irony
As the right wing cheers the hanging of one of the Middle East's few secular leaders (dictator and all around asshole though he was) we have done little to stop the religious fanatic who actually attacked us and have opened Iraq up to more religious fanatics who had been kept at bay (often brutally, of course) by Hussein.
I have written about our failure and even enabling of a new regime of fanatical Islam many times including here, here and here. Even got on a BBC radio program because of my emphasis on these issues, though I don't think I got my point across well.
Problem is, our own government is becoming borderline Taliban in many ways. Recently the Parks Service has been told to stop talking about the geological age of the grand canyon because it contradicts fundamentalist views on the age of the earth and they have been told to carry a creationist book in their book store. We may not be beheading people yet, but we sure love our death penalty and torture and we are calling our wars "Crusades" and Republicans are opposed to people swearing their oaths of office over the Q'ran. We are on the road to the same kind of fanaticism that has gripped too much of the Muslim world.





























I'm old enought to remember a lot of things
It pains me that we do not live in a safe world. It also pains me that Americans have very short memories.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Munich_Massacre
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran_hostage_crisis
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pan_Am_Flight_103
Americans didn't cause these events, nor did American policy. Desperate people fooled by lunacy caused these events. Desparate people who live and think in Cultures with roots back to ancient times who can not or will not process social reality and norms in the modern times.
We could spend decades talking about symptoms. Or we could wake up and start trying to discuss root cause.