Ahmadinejibber-jabber

I was home sick, so I got an opportunity to hear the Iranian’s president speak at Columbia. I had to turn it off, so nauseated had I become. I’ve never had much room for little Hitlers, whether they be in the work place or international politics. Especially not the smug and flippant variety.

The man calls himself an educator, but refuses to believe that one of the best documented and most heinous travesties in the history of man (the Holocaust) ever happened. “We need more research” was his excuse.

Research for what? The documentation’s out there, down to serial numbers that were tattooed into peoples’ flesh. How much food they ate. When did they get there and when was their file “closed”. The Germans were obsessed with keeping detailed records of the carnage they were perpetuating.

What’s left to research?

And no homosexuals in Iran? Maybe that’s because they get executed. If you kill them, of course they won’t be there.

I had a lot of respect for Columbia University until that speech. To give someone who will do nothing but spout lies, half-truths and evasion of human rights concern a forum to propagate his lies, half-truths and human rights abuses is irresponsible at best and most certainly dangerous.

While I expect that most Americans will take his comments with a grain of salt that gets quickly tossed away, the same isn’t so for other countries. Particularly ones with any significant fundamentalist Muslim population and organizations.

Perhaps Columbia’s goal was to let him make a fool out of himself. Most American’s realize that he did.

But it ain’t gonna play the same way in Saudi Arabia.

Maybe the powers that be at Columbia don’t realize that most of the middle east has satellite TV. What got said at Columbia didn’t stay at Columbia, and never could have.

This is one of those times I just want to slap somebody and ask “What were your thinking? How has this helped anyone? And don’t you just have some common sense?”

I’m guessing the answers would be “Don’t know. Don’t care. Refer to answer #1.”

Here endeth the rant. I’ve said my peace.

Recycled

"That which does not kill us makes us stronger."
--Friedrich Nietzsche

"I am prepared to meet my Maker. Whether my Maker is prepared for the great ordeal of meeting me is another matter."
--Sir Winston Churchill, on the eve of his 75th birthday

The Scarlett O'Hara Principle of Time Management

I’ve been watching talking heads all morning holding forth on what to do about Iraq. I won’t dignify their exchanges with the label of “debate”. We haven’t had a real debate in this country since Nixon. His sweat-laden performance on TV reshaped how politicians let themselves be presented on TV.

Funny that it comes back to Nixon. He didn’t like Vietnam, didn’t start it, but got the brunt of the blame for it. He was faced with two options: keep on losing or pull out and lose. The first meant the continued death of American boys. The second meant almost certain genocide.

Granted, the Iraq war was conceived and contrived by a controlling Vice President and Secretary of Defense. They exploited a weak President in a time of national crisis to achieve their own ends. Other than settling old scores, I’m still not sure what their motivations were or why the executed things so badly.

Shock and awe we were promised. I’m pretty damned shocked by the incompetence and in awe of the utter lack of foresight that has been evident every step of the way.

That’s the only shock and awe I’ve experienced.

Still, we have a mess on our hands today. And like Nixon’s Vietnam quandary, there is no good answer.

Call it delayed shock and awe.

I watched the bombing of Baghdad online, and hoped for the best. I thought it was a mistake at the time, but hoped for the best. I thought we had other priorities that should be higher, but prayed for a good outcome.

But we’re back where we were 35 years ago. I remember seeing footage of Vietnam on TV as a kid. Then the last helicopter lifting off the roof of the American Embassy in Hanoi. I didn’t understand the significance of it, then. I was only 5 or so.

Since then, I’ve learned what happened after that last helicopter lifted off, and it ain’t pretty. The atrocities that started in Hanoi spread to Laos and Cambodia. Genocide became a reality, one that we were either powerless to intervene in or ignored.

So we come back to the talking heads. They’re still talking around the real issue: is it worth enough to keep troops in Iraq so that genocide does not occur again?

And would it if we were to withdraw, and to what extent? Would Iraq’s neighbors step in an prevent anarchy? Would the majority of Iraqi’s who oppose a civil war stop it?

Those are the real questions, but no one is addressing them, at least on the Sunday morning shows. Their still employing the Scarlett O’Hara Principle of Time Management: “After all, tomorrow is another day.”

Don’t deal with the real issues.

Delay. Delay. Delay.

After all, tomorrow is another election.

They need to go back to the scene where she's holding the roots she just dug up and swears that she'll "never go hungry again." They need to take the drapes down and make some sort of coherent policy, even if they have to weave it from scratch.

Tomorrow is another day, but we can't wait that long. After Rhett Bulter has walked off into the fog, we need something done yesterday.

Maybe Scarlett rebuilt her life, but if she hadn't taken that laise' faire attitude, maybe she wouldn't have had to. And in the end, she didn't seemed to have learned anything.

We cannot go back and correct the past. I know that all too well from my personal mistakes in judgement.

But we can change the future.

We can step up to the challenge, stop calling names and assigning blame, and get down to the dirty work of figuring out where we stand and what we should do.

Tomorrow may be another day, but I want someone to talk about what it's reallity is.

Scarlett may have changed her destiny by making a dress out of drapes, but a foreign policy based on whole-cloth just ain't the same.

Why?

This has been a trying time. I’m trying to put things into perspective, but damned if I can find it sometimes. Perspective seems to elude me in an almost-premeditated way. Once I think I have it, something changes.

And there it goes. Out the window. Down the street. Wafted aloft by a gentle hurricane.

Daddy’s gone, and I still don’t have the peace about it that I want. I’ve said I did, but I don’t.

To date, no one knows why his liver failed. They just know it did. And I have no complaints about his medical treatment, once he was so sick that the big guns got called in.

I just wonder how things might be different if the big guns had been involved earlier.

It’s a question I’ve told Mama not to worry about or dwell on. She and Daddy did the best they could.

Still, the question bounces around in my head so much that it keeps me from sleeping.

Somehow, a car wreck would have been easier. At least I would know why.

Well, maybe not the why, but at least the how.

“Why” still eludes me.

My perspective is unalterably skewed. I loved him, he’s gone and I’ll never understand why.

Of all the questions I’d like answered, that’s chief: why?