Holiday in Cambodia

A few more days to go 'till the election and my head is about to explode. The news out of Iraq continues to be unbelievably bad (more hostages taken; Ramadi will soon be a no-go zone for US troops; the incredible blunder of not securing the 380 tons of plastic explosives at Al Qaqaa and the absolutely disgraceful effort of the White House and Pentagon to excuse it away; the execution of 11 Iraqi soldiers; the slaughter of 49 Iraqi national guardsmen; another 70 billion to be requested for the Iraqi occupation post-election), yet (if you believe the pollsters and pundits) half the electorate will follow Dubya over the edge into the abyss, no questions asked...

A new study by Johns Hopkins University just published in The Lancet estimates that about 100,000 Iraqi civilians -- fully half of the dead women and children -- have been killed during our little experiment in democracy and nation-building. And this study did not include the number of dead in Falluja, which would have skewed their results higher, since it has been unusually violent there. Of note, the researchers attribute many of the deaths to bombs dropped from US planes and fire from helicopter gunships (oh, sorry I didn't follow my Pentagon-issued style book -- not "deaths" but "collateral damage"). What's 100,000 non-white civilian deaths in our righteous "war on terror?" Liberty is on the march! (Yeah, we're liberating them from their lives, all right.) God forgive us for what death and destruction Bush and Co. have wrought on these people in our name.

The Village Voice posits that it's the end of democracy as we know it in the United States, in large part due to the rise of the Christian evangelical right:

"Evangelicals are trained to recruit from the cradle," observes one witheringly astute expert on Christian conservative culture. Call this informant Deep Faith: A Ph.D. student in divinity, he grew up in the rural South in an intensely pious Pentecostal community and still believes its creeds after five years at an Ivy League university. He has not, however, kept faith with his ministers' injunction that evangelicals must devote themselves to building a Republican America. The notion, in fact, horrifies him. In college, the first time he spent extended periods outside evangelical circles, he says, "I realized the main thing that separated us evangelicals from them was that they believed in dialogue and compromise. And we believed in taking no prisoners. . . . Democracy can't function in an environment where one party will not sit down and play by the rules.

He uses a saying of the apostle Paul, beloved of evangelicals, to drive home the point: "Be all things to all people." A missionary, he says, might interpret that to mean that it's OK to swear on a visa application that she's not a missionary: "Technically, it's illegal and you're lying. But if you honestly believe that you're going to save somebody from eternal torture and damnation, and deliver them into a life of eternal bliss, then you're going to do what you have to do." So, he thinks, might people who claim to be "registering" voters--for such means-justifies-the-ends thinking now also marks evangelicals' political attitudes.

"Whenever you think that there are eternal, apocalyptic stakes, and that you can make a difference, you can rationalize a whole lot of stuff to yourself," he says. "I think evangelicals really don't like democracy much at all, especially when it's not going their way."

No doubt, this is how Dubya doesn't lose any sleep, what with so much blood on his hands...

And the New Yorker, no doubt viewed as one of the preeminent elite, eastern, effete, intellectual-snobby publications by some of our friends in the red states, presents a powerfully damning indictment of the Bush administration in its first-ever presidential endorsement of Senator Kerry. Good stuff.

Paul Krugman rocks (as always)! This guy has been one of the few columnists brave enough to consistently call the Bush administration on all of its lies, deceptions, and blunders. Krugman, you are the MAN! Keep on keeping on! I've been meaning to write this for a long time. He deserves tons of props.

Finally, on the web there has been lots written about the curbing of free speech at Bush rallies and public appearances, but rarely do any articles on the subject appear in the mainstream press. This article from the Washington Post, "Policing is Aggressive at Bush Events," summarizes just a few of the incidents I've been reading about all summer. It'll send a good shiver up the spine of any American who cherishes their civil rights. Happy Halloween, indeed.