4000 dead U.S. Soldiers since Bush’s Splendid Little War began…

Flashback…Washington D.C…March 18, 2003

Tuesday afternoon. I am attending a conference on open source software in government being held at George Washington University. I am here because my project manager is investigating the possibility of moving the system I’ve been working on for the past several years to open source software. Work on the Hubble Space Telescope will go into maintenance mode shortly, and the thinking is that the Institute doesn’t want to spend a lot of money it won’t have on software upgrades, simply because a certain vendor has a business cycle that requires you to do that. At least with open source we would have the option of making any small fixes we absolutely needed to have before the end of the mission ourselves, without breaking our systems that depend on it. The alternative is to stick to the vendor’s upgrade cycle, and pray the new versions don’t break anything in our software, or introduce new bugs and security holes.

Between conference sessions, I wander around the Foggy Bottom area, and back and forth to my hotel, which I paid for out of my own pocket, rather then hassle with Washington traffic, which is a nightmare. The hotel has a nice little kitchenette, which allows me to eat reasonably well without further damaging my budget for the month. Around noon I begin the walk back to my hotel for lunch, stopping to examine a decrepit building right next to the conference hall, that I assume is one of the student dorms. It is, and I see by the bronze plaque by the door that this one is named Lafayette Hall. I read the inscription, which briefly describes the history of Marquis de Lafayette, who fought beside George Washington, taking a bullet in the process, for the freedom of a nation that was not his own, and who later attended the first commencement ceremonies of the university that bore his friend’s name, shaking the hand of each of those first graduates. While I am reading, a snarky voice in the back of my mind is saying Freedom Fries…Freedom Toast… An old friend of mine I’d had breakfast with that morning, told me a joke he’d heard about a man who, while visiting France recently, asked a random Frenchman, "Sir, can you speak German?" When the Frenchman replied that he couldn’t, the American said, "You’re welcome." I told my friend the Frenchman could just as easily have asked the American, "Sir, do you have a king?"

My hotel is somewhat oldish. My room is on the sixth floor and the elevators are small and slow. I press the button and when one finally appears, I see that there are already two businessmen inside. It’s a tight fit for three. As we go up I feel the hair on the back of my neck rise. There are some who you would never know from the look of them, to be of the right wing thuggish persuasion, and there are others who hit you with it in waves, in the cut of the clothes, the bullying posture that is as second nature as breathing, and the coldness of the face, particularly when smiling at nothing in particular. I tune them both out, pulling out from a space within me I’d almost forgotten about, a "Yes I’m a longhair, yes I know you hate my guts, and no mister establishment person sir, I really don’t give a flying fuck" attitude, close my eyes, and listen to the elevator floor counter click off the floors to mine. I toy briefly about writing a book, "Everything I know about living under Bush II, I learned from Nixon". The old elevator rises slowly. I hear one of my companions say, "I hope they don’t cancel our flight out Thursday." The other chuckles and says, "The war will be over by then."

Atrios has a point…all we ever see in the round table discussions about the war in the News Media are people who supported it.  The only other side to the discussions we’re even getting now are from the ones now admitting they were wrong about the war, and terribly, profoundly wrong about president Nice Job Brownie.  What we still don’t hear, the people who are still not part of the News Media conversation about the war, are the ones who had it right from the beginning.  Doesn’t it make sense to start inviting the people who were right all along into this conversation now?

No.  It doesn’t.  Because the next step after that, is the News Media facing up to their responsibility for cheering this war on, and hyping up a drunken, spoiled, self-absorbed, bullying, petulant rich man’s brat into the image of a towering world leader.  The man who failed at everything he ever put his hand to in his life, but always managed to avoid responsibility for it.  The man who treated the presidency of the United States as if it was all just one big happy frat house game with him in charge.  This guy:

Our news media dragged this country to war with that guy in the white house.  And now they’d rather drink poison then own up to it.  That’s why you will never see any war critics on network news.  That’s why the only liberals you’ll ever see are the ones who, like them, were all gung ho about having a splendid little war in Iraq.  It was supposed to be all over the following Thursday.  This country will be generations coping with the consequences.   And that’s not so much Bush’s fault, as our news media’s.  They failed America.  Profoundly.  Unforgivably.  They took liberties and freedoms that journalists in other nations have sacrificed their lives for and played petty schoolyard games with them and now there are four-thousand dead U.S. soldiers and hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqis and our moral capital is gone, gone, pissed away in the whirlwind of images of dead, bloody victims of U.S. torture, the Geneva War Conventions are in tatters, we are less secure, our military forces are weaker, We Have Lost A City and the economy is teetering on the brink of the worst disaster since the Great Depression.  Nice work if you can get it.  Mission Accomplished people.

Now go home.  Please.  But before you do, I want you to get up out of your chairs and go to the window, open it up and shout as loud as you can: I FUCKED UP AND I’M SORRY.  Then…jump.