In a moment completely severed from reality, Vice President Joe Biden went on The Colbert Report the other night and thanked former President Bush for honoring the people who serve in the military.
“Mr. President, thank you,” Biden said of Bush during his interview in a “Colbert Report: Been There Won That” special. “You’ve honored these guys, you’ve honored these women, you’ve honored these troops. And I’ve known you your entire eight years as president. I’ve never known a time when you didn’t CARE about happened. We disagreed on policy. But you deserve a lot of credit, Mr. President.”
Why he did that is truly a mystery. Credit for what exactly? Indeed we should be disagreeing about policies that include lying to the American people about the reasons for going into a war that has been a huge contributing factor to our economic disaster and has cost so many lives. And imagine if instead of honoring the lives of soldiers, we honored the lives of civilians? Our civilians, their civilians. The civilians who reportedly had their fingers turned into trophies by some of our hash smoking defenders,
Twelve American soldiers face charges over a secret “kill team” that allegedly blew up and shot Afghan civilians at random and collected their fingers as trophies.
Five of the soldiers are charged with murdering three Afghan men who were allegedly killed for sport in separate attacks this year. Seven others are accused of covering up the killings and assaulting a recruit who exposed the murders when he reported other abuses, including members of the unit smoking hashish stolen from civilians.
And combat mission over or not, Iraq is still game on, with private contractors and other troops still very much in residence in Iraq and the horrors experienced by Iraqi civilians because of our actions being woefully unaddressed. One wonders what it is the Pentagon thinks it is defending. Apparently not freedom of the press:
Defense Department officials are negotiating to buy and destroy all 10,000 copies of the first printing of an Afghan war memoir they say contains intelligence secrets, according to two people familiar with the dispute.
Meanwhile a judge who obviously has a better grip on the Constitution than the Pentagon does, courageously rules the obvious that should have been understood and rectified years ago rather than a hate-filled ongoing national debate,
In a blockbuster legal decision, a California judge last night declared the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy that bars gay and lesbian soldiers from serving in the US military to be unconstitutional, saying the ban violated the first amendment rights of homose
xuals and harmed the effectiveness of the armed forces.
But never mind all that, will he or won’t he, America waits breathlessly,
An anti-Islamic preacher backed off and then threatened to reconsider burning the Quran on the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, angrily accusing a Muslim leader of lying to him Thursday with a promise to move an Islamic center and mosque away from New York’s ground zero. The imam planning the center denied there was ever such a deal.
To borrow the famous words of Phil Ochs, it is time to turn away from this.
