Judith Warner
Domestic Disturbances
May 31, 2007, 9:47 pm
I was going to move on this week and write a column about end-of-school-year dyspepsia, but your answers to last week’s post have been so voluminous and so passionate that I don’t feel ready to let that topic – the response to Madeleine McCann’s abduction – go just yet. You will note the phrasing: the topic here (as last week) is “the response to Madeleine McCann’s abduction,” not the abduction itself. (more…)
Memorial Day 2007
O how shall I warble myself for the dead one there I loved?
And how shall I deck my song for the large sweet soul that has gone?
And what shall my perfume be for the grave of him I love?
Sea-winds blown from east and west,
Blown from the Eastern sea and blown from the Western sea, till
there on the prairies meeting,
These and with these and the breath of my chant,
I’ll perfume the grave of him I love.
~Walt Whitman
“When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d”
(10th stanza)
Photo: Mary McHugh visited the grave of her fiancé, Sgt. James J. Regan, who was killed in Iraq in February, 2007. He is buried in the new Section 60 of Arlington National Cemetery for those killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. John Moore/Getty Images
[Post submitted by MW.]
Our Lives as Atoms
May 29, 2007, 6:32 pm
By Mark Buchanan
The political party that claimed it would restore “honor and dignity to the White House” has done nothing of the sort. Having on false pretenses led us into the disaster of Iraq, the administration and its supporters are now beginning – cravenly and shamefully – to shift blame onto the Iraqi people. The administration continues to hold hundreds of people without charges in secret prisons around the world, while arguing that torture is O.K. and that President Bush can disregard the laws he doesn’t like. I haven’t even mentioned illegal spying or efforts to keep scientists quiet if they’re saying the wrong thing.
Where’s the honor and dignity? (more…)
Aaron Houston
George Somjen in his office with photos of his son Gregory, a Marine lance corporal stationed in Iraq and scheduled to get home in October.
By PETER APPLEBOME
ROCKAWAY, N.J.
A few years back, when he worked part time for a limousine company in Parsippany, George Somjen was the driver on a day when Gene Simmons of the rock group Kiss went to visit his mother. She offered Mr. Somjen whitefish for lunch, and he got to see her basement filled with Kiss memorabilia.
(more…)
May 31, 2007
Op-Ed Columnist
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
WEIHAI, China
Every evening in a little village near this coastal city, peasants gather in a private home and do something that used to be dangerous. They pray.
(more…)
May 31, 2007
Guest Columnist
By ATUL GAWANDE
As a surgeon, I’ve worked with the veterans’ health system, Medicare, Medicaid and private insurance companies. I’ve seen health care in Canada, Britain, Switzerland and the Netherlands. And I was in the Clinton administration when our plan for universal coverage failed. So, with a new health reform debate under way, what I want to tell you in my last guest column is this:
(more…)
May 30, 2007
Op-Ed Columnist
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Man, was I wrong about Iran.
I thought this regime was powerful and self-confident, and actually felt strengthened since we destroyed its two main enemies — the Taliban and Saddam. That could not be further from the truth. This Iranian regime is afraid of its shadow. How do I know? It recently arrested a 67-year-old grandmother, whom it accused of trying to bring down the regime by organizing academic conferences! (more…)
May 30, 2007
Op-Ed Columnist
By MAUREEN DOWD
The odd thing is that conservatives wear pinstriped suits. They love the ancients so much that they really should be walking around in togas. The main contribution of the Greeks to modern American politics may have been Michael Dukakis, who once climbed the Acropolis in wingtips.
(more…)
But now on his third deployment in Iraq, he is no longer a believer in the mission. The pivotal moment came, he says, this February when soldiers killed a man setting a roadside bomb. When they searched the bomber’s body, they found identification showing him to be a sergeant in the Iraqi Army.
Back home in Iraq, Umm Hiba’s daughter was a devout schoolgirl, modest in her dress and serious about her studies. Hiba, who is now 16, wore the hijab, or Islamic head scarf, and rose early each day to say the dawn prayer before classes.
“We Iraqis used to be a proud people,” she said over the frantic blare of the club’s speakers. She pointed out her daughter, dancing among about two dozen other girls on the stage, wearing a pink silk dress with spaghetti straps, her frail shoulders bathed in colored light.
May 29, 2007
Op-Ed Columnist
By BOB HERBERT
These are small incidents, but they are accumulating by the tens of thousands, and someday New Yorkers are going to be shocked by the power of the anger that these seemingly insignificant incidents have generated.
(more…)
I have endured a lot of smear and hatred since Casey was killed and especially since I became the so-called “Face” of the American anti-war movement. Especially since I renounced any tie I have remaining with the Democratic Party, I have been further trashed on such “liberal blogs” as the Democratic Underground. Being called an “attention whore” and being told “good riddance” are some of the more milder rebukes.
By Cindy Sheehan
May 28, 2007
Op-Ed Columnist
By PAUL KRUGMAN
“In this place where valor sleeps, we are reminded why America has always gone to war reluctantly, because we know the costs of war.” That’s what President Bush said last year, in a Memorial Day ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery. (more…)
May 28, 2007
Op-Ed Columnist
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Taishan, China
With China’s trade surplus with the United States soaring, the tendency in the U.S. will be to react with tariffs and other barriers. But instead we should take a page from the Chinese book and respond by boosting education. (more…)
By Tomás R. Jiménez, assistant professor of sociology and a visiting research fellow at the Center for Comparative Immigration Studies at UC San Diego.
What exactly is a father’s duty when his son is sent into harm’s way?
Andrew Bacevich
Mark Twain
It was a time of great and exalting excitement. The country was up in arms, the war was on, in every breast burned the holy fire of patriotism; the drums were beating, the bands playing, the toy pistols popping, the bunched firecrackers hissing and spluttering; on every hand and far down the receding and fading spread of roofs and balconies a fluttering wilderness of flags flashed in the sun; daily the young volunteers marched down the wide avenue gay and fine in their new uniforms, the proud fathers and mothers and sisters and sweethearts cheering them with voices choked with happy emotion as they swung by; nightly the packed mass meetings listened, panting, to patriot oratory which stirred the deepest deeps of their hearts, and which they interrupted at briefest intervals with cyclones of applause, the tears running down their cheeks the while; in the churches the pastors preached devotion to flag and country, and invoked the God of Battles, beseeching His aid in our good cause in outpouring of fervid eloquence which moved every listener. It was indeed a glad and gracious time, and the half dozen rash spirits that ventured to disapprove of the war and cast a doubt upon its righteousness straightway got such a stern and angry warning that for their personal safety’s sake they quickly shrank out of sight and offended no more in that way. (more…)
Trail all your pikes, dispirit every drum,
March in a slow procession from afar,
Ye silent, ye dejected men of war!
Be still the hautboys, and the flute be dumb!
Display no more, in vain, the lofty banner.
For see!where on the bier before you lies
The pale, the fall’n, th’untimely sacrifice
To your mistaken shrine, to your false idol Honour.
Anne Finch
by Walt Whitman
A sight in camp in the daybreak gray and dim,
As from my tent I emerge so early sleepless,
As slow I walk in the cool fresh air the path near the hospital tent,
Three forms I see on stretchers lying, brought out there untended lying,
Over each blanket spread, ample brownish woolen blanket,
Gray and heavy blanket, folding, covering all.
Curious I halt and silent stand,
Then with light fingers I from the face of the nearest the first just lift the blanket;
Who are you elderly man so gaunt and grim, with well-gray’d hair, and flesh all
sunken about the eyes?
Who are you my dear comrade?
Then to the second I step - and who are you my child and darling?
Who are you sweet boy with cheeks yet blooming?
Then to the third - a face not child nor old, very calm, as of beautiful
yellow-white ivory;
Young man I think I know you - I think this face is the face of the Christ himself,
Dead and divine and brother of all, and here again he lies.
I read of a thousand killed.
And am glad because the scrounging imperial paw
Was there so bitten:
As a man at elections is thrilled
When the results pour in, and the North goes with him
And the West breaks in the thaw.
(That fighting was a long way off.)
Forgetting therefore an election
Being fought with votes and lies and catch-cries
And orator’s frowns and flowers and posters’ noise
Is paid for with cheques and toys:
Wars the most glorious
Victory-winged and steeple-uproarious
… With the lives, burned-off,
Of young men and boys.
Bernard Spencer
How magnificent the war is!
How eager
and efficient!
Early in the morning
it wakes up the sirens
and dispatches ambulances
to various places
swings corpses through the air
rolls stretchers to the wounded
summons rain
from the eyes of mothers
digs into the earth
dislodging many things
from under the ruins..
Some are lifeless and glistening
others are pale and still throbbing..
It produces the most questions
in the minds of children
entertains the gods
by shooting fireworks and missiles
into the sky
sows mines in the fields
and reaps punctures and blisters
urges families to emigrate
stands beside the clergymen
as they curse the devil
(poor devil, he remains
with one hand in the searing fire)..
The war continues working, day and night.
It inspires tyrants
to deliver long speeches
awards medals to generals
and themes to poets
it contributes to the industry
of artificial limbs
provides food for flies
adds pages to the history books
achieves equality
between killer and killed
teaches lovers to write letters
accustoms young women to waiting
fills the newspapers
with articles and pictures
builds new houses
for the orphans
invigorates the coffin makers
gives grave diggers
a pat on the back
and paints a smile on the leader’s face.
It works with unparalleled diligence!
Yet no one gives it
a word of praise.
by Dunya Mikhail
Translated by Elizabeth Winslow
All wars are planned by older men
In council rooms apart,
Who call for greater armament
And map the battle chart.
But out along the shattered field
Where golden dreams turn gray,
How very young the faces were
Where all the dead men lay.
Portly and solemn in their pride,
The elders cast their vote
For this or that, or something else,
That sounds the martial note.
But where their sightless eyes stare out
Beyond life’s vanished toys,
I’ve noticed nearly all the dead
Were hardly more than boys.
~Grantland Rice
Americans have opened nearly 1,000 new graves to bury U.S. troops killed in Iraq since Memorial Day a year ago. The figure is telling — and expected to rise in coming months.
A federal appeals court on Friday denied an organization permission to stage an antiwar demonstration on Saturday on the grounds of the United States Military Academy at West Point, where Vice President Dick Cheney is to deliver the commencement address.
How Monica Goodling played the gender card and won.
By Emily Bazelon and Dahlia Lithwick
This week’s cave-in on Capitol Hill—supplying a huge new jolt of funds for the horrific war effort in Iraq—is surprising only to those who haven’t grasped our current circumstances.
Norman Solomon
The John Edwards haircut keeps getting resurrected, like a creature from a bad horror movie. The Republicans unearthed it most recently in their second debate, when former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee said, in a quote that the national wire service story called “the most memorable sound bite of the night.” To wit: “We’ve had a Congress that’s spent money like John Edwards at a beauty shop.”
Thousands of low-income North Carolinians are now finding it much easier to register to vote, thanks to the North Carolina State Board of Elections’ efforts to ensure the state is in full compliance with an often-neglected provision of the National Voter Registration Act of 1993.
Scott Novakowski
Barry Blitt
by Frank Rich
May 27, 2007
WHEN all else fails, those pious Americans who conceived and directed the Iraq war fall back on moral self-congratulation: at least we brought liberty and democracy to an oppressed people. But that last-ditch rationalization has now become America’s sorriest self-delusion in this tragedy.
(more…)
May 27, 2007
Op-Ed Columnist
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Since my daughter is graduating from college today, I am thinking a lot about the class of 2007 and the world they are about to enter. I’m not sure what they call this generation. (more…)
May 27, 2007
Op-Ed Columnist
By MAUREEN DOWD
WASHINGTON
For me, the saddest spot in Washington is the inverted V of the black granite Vietnam wall, jutting up with the names of young men dying in a war that their leaders already knew could not be won. (more…)
On Tuesday night, Chris Hedges and Sam Harris debated “Religion, Politics and the End of the World.” The following is Hedges’ opening statement, in which he argues that Harris and other critics of faith have mistakenly blamed religion for the ills of the world, when the true danger lies in the human heart and its capacity for evil.
“Especially after the war has been going on and the people wake up and realize how many people die and how much it costs. And that’s why i think people are really ready for a message that says we don’t have to be in this mess. Logic tells us that we can make a better world in a much easier way than causing wars.”
Kentucky’s Creation Museum, opening May 28, puts dinosaurs in the garden with Adam and Eve.
Rather than expressing solidarity with others experiencing unwanted pregnancies, many abortion patients take pains to distinguish themselves as different from other women getting abortions.
By Carole Joffe and Kate Cosby
After committing troops to a war that has left hundreds of thousands dead and millions without homes, George W. Bush says he prays for safety and peace. Way to go, Georgie, shift the responsibility for your mess to God.
By Jim Hightower
Like the children’s classic, “A Fish Out of Water,” Al Gore has outgrown his fishbowl. He has developed a following of millions simply by reminding people that they can use knowledge as a source of influence.
The company, infoUSA, one of the nation’s largest brokers of information on consumers, paid $146,866 to ferry the Clintons, Mr. Gupta and others to Acapulco and back, court records show. During the next four years, infoUSA paid Mr. Clinton more than $2 million for consulting services, and spent almost $900,000 to fly him around the world for his presidential foundation work and to fly Mrs. Clinton to campaign events.
Related:
What is the ‘benefactor’ involved in?
Bilking the Elderly, With a Corporate Assist
May 26, 2007
Guest Columnist
By ATUL GAWANDE
This is my fourth week as a guest columnist. Let’s take a look at the health care news that’s transpired in that time.
(more…)
May 26, 2007
Op-Ed Columnist
By BOB HERBERT
No one is paying much attention, but parts of New York City are like a police state for young men, women and children who happen to be black or Hispanic. They are routinely stopped, searched, harassed, intimidated, humiliated and, in many cases, arrested for no good reason. (more…)
22-Year Old Killed In Road-Side Bomb, Cared For Dog Before Attack
Our Lives as Atoms
May 23, 2007, 6:11 pm
By Mark Buchanan
Something seems a little out of whack between the mainstream media and the American people. Take the arguments of the past few days over former President Jimmy Carter’s remarks about the Bush administration and the consequences of its particular brand of foreign policy. Carter didn’t attack President Bush personally, but said that “as far as the adverse impact on the nation around the world, this administration has been the worst in history,” which can’t really be too far out of line with what many Americans think.
(more…)
Dick Cavett
May 23, 2007, 6:51 pm
What does it take to be a comedy writer? Some people ask because they want to be one and some (the more fortunate ones) because they merely want to know. (more…)
Campaigning for History: Reflections on the American Presidency
May 22, 2007, 8:00 pm
By David Greenberg
With the title of his 1980 book, the journalist Sidney Blumenthal coined a term that has entered the political lexicon: “The Permanent Campaign.” The phrase denotes the blurring of the line in modern times between campaigning and governing. Presidents, of course, have always made decisions with an eye on their popularity. But with the advent of television, polling, and professional consultants, presidents of the 1970s and ’80s—Nixon, Carter, and Reagan in particular—upped the ante by devoting the full arsenal of modern electioneering tools not just to winning office but to holding office as well.
(more…)
Campaigning for History: Reflections on the American Presidency
May 24, 2007, 6:22 pm
By Jules Witcover
WASHINGTON — More than three decades ago, Nixon White House Counsel John Dean called the Watergate cover-up “a cancer on the presidency.” Another one exists today, posing a challenge for the next president to restore the office as a credible voice in foreign policy.
(more…)
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