Friday, February 27, 2009

Friday Rant Blogging

I'm sure we've all heard that the Obama administration is reversing the GHW Bush ruling, started in 1989 in the wake of the invasion of Panama to oust Noriega (sound familiar?).

Pentagon to allow photos of U.S. war dead


I think this is fine. They deserve recognition for their sacrifice if their families, not neocon presidents, see fit.

One thing - these are not pictures of 'war dead'. They are photos of highly sanitized flag-draped aluminum containers that contain corpses or parts of corpses.

I have a suggestion. Put helmet cams on Army medics and Navy medical corpsmen. Little lipstick cams with a real-time satellite uplink. Raw footage available 24/7.

See what they see and hear what they hear. Watch what these first responders do to try to save lives while the shooting is going on all around them. Hear men who have just had their legs blown off scream for their mothers. Let people see a 20-year-old medic, not a surgeon but trying to do a surgeon's job on his knees in the dirt, try to stuff a man's intestines or brains back in, or put a man's jaw back on. Show the look that comes over a soldier's face as he bleeds out and dies. Listen to very brave men cry when a soldier or Marine, or a hundred of them, die in their arms because there's no power on earth that could have saved them no matter how hard they tried.

Maybe, just maybe, if enough people heard and saw this stuff they'd realize that war is the absolute most serious thing a nation can do and the decision to go to war is not to be left up to one man and a radical cabal to be used for political, imperialistic, and monetary gain.

That is exactly what Bush1 and his moron spawn were trying to keep people from thinking about when they refused to allow pictures of aluminum boxes. Fill people's heads with 'patriotism' and 'spreading democracy' and baseless fear and other bullshit propaganda so they'll get behind the crimes their so-called 'leaders' are perpetrating.

War is last-ditch, in extremis, save-our-ass shit and had better be saved as the last resort danger-close final protective fires, and only when all else fails. Our young warriors, and thank God for them, would charge Hell with a bucket of water if we told them to, and we had better be damned careful in future not to send them off to die for nothing like in Iraq.

One of our esteemed readers said it's Friday and I should chill. OK. Here's a little light entertainment for a Friday afternoon:

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