Ann Coulter is not only an ignorant, slimy, cruel and bitter liar, she's also a bona fide plagiarist.

May she go down in flames. Please.

Our last trip down to New Orleans, I recieved this dollar as change at the Walgreen's on Tchoupitoulas. The corners and edges have been eaten up by water rot; along the back and on the bottom right are smudges of hardened, muddy sludge.

Pretty much sums up our state of affairs, don't you think?

From that now-legendary White House Correspondents' Dinner Saturday night, at which Stephen Colbert proved once and for all he really does have the grandest cajones in the entire fucking world:

On our fine president:

I stand by this man. I stand by this man because he stands for things. Not only for things, he stands on things. Things like aircraft carriers and rubble and recently flooded city squares. And that sends a strong message, that no matter what happens to America, she will always rebound -- with the most powerfully staged photo ops in the world.

[...]

The greatest thing about this man is he's steady. You know where he stands. He believes the same thing Wednesday that he believed on Monday, no matter what happened Tuesday. Events can change; this man's beliefs never will.

On the press:

Over the last five years you people were so good -- over tax cuts, WMD intelligence, the effect of global warming. We Americans didn't want to know, and you had the courtesy not to try to find out. Those were good times, as far as we knew.

But, listen, let's review the rules. Here's how it works: the president makes decisions. He's the decider. The press secretary announces those decisions, and you people of the press type those decisions down. Make, announce, type. Just put 'em through a spell check and go home. Get to know your family again. Make love to your wife. Write that novel you got kicking around in your head. You know, the one about the intrepid Washington reporter with the courage to stand up to the administration. You know - fiction!

Because really, what incentive do these people have to answer your questions, after all? I mean, nothing satisfies you. Everybody asks for personnel changes. So the White House has personnel changes. Then you write, "Oh, they're just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic." First of all, that is a terrible metaphor. This administration is not sinking. This administration is soaring. If anything, they are rearranging the deck chairs on the Hindenburg!

[...]

And, of course, we can't forget the man of the hour, new press secretary, Tony Snow. Secret Service name, "Snow Job." Toughest job. What a hero! Took the second toughest job in government, next to, of course, the ambassador to Iraq. Got some big shoes to fill, Tony. Big shoes to fill. Scott McClellan could say nothing like nobody else.

And then there was Scalia, and McCain, and the Generals, and the President again and again and again...I haven't laughed so hard EVER.

Monsieur Colbert, you are my hero.

(Watch the video at C&L, Video Dog, or C-Span. Or read the transcript at Daily Kos.)

If you read nothing else today, read Patrick McDonnell's piece in the LA Times magazine. Be warned, though. It's absolutely heartbreaking.

We've already lost the war because it's not winnable. When will Bush notice? And how many more will have to die before he does?

The spectacle on capitol hill yesterday was another pathetic, dark mark on our so-called democracy. This made me incredibly pissed:

At one point in the emotional debate, Rep. Jean Schmidt, R-Ohio, told of a phone call she received from a Marine colonel.

"He asked me to send Congress a message - stay the course. He also asked me to send Congressman Murtha a message - that cowards cut and run, Marines never do," Schmidt said. Murtha is a 37-year Marine veteran and ranking Democrat on the defense appropriations subcommittee.

So it will never end, this smearing of vets who disagree with the hawkish chickens in power. Is it any wonder at all that most want to get out of the military and stay out?

I wasn't surprised that the Iraq vet who Schmidt quoted was an officer, but I was surprised that he'd said anything at all. I had this image of marines being loyal to each other. S was a marine right out of high school. He has always had this dual loyalty to the marines and the rangers, which is quite unusual -- most stick to one and badmouth the other. But then, now everything is different. Everything is tinged with political opinion. Facts no longer exist. Slobs like Dennis Hastert can call decorated war veterans like Murtha cowards and the only consequence is young veterans agree with Hastert instead of defending Murtha. We're swimming in a poisoned pie and it's made us sick. We see everything through a fever-induced haze and therefore we see only hallucinations, if we see anything at all.

Early this morning, before the sun had risen all the way up in the sky, S called me from deep in the mountains via satellite phone. We talked briefly. He wanted me to know he was okay and that he would be out on this same mission until after Thanksgiving at least. It was great to talk to him, even if I was in a middle-of-the-night daze. I dreamt vividly last night, probably because I'd spent the evening watching stupid movies on television. I ought to have just read instead of wasting hours on nothing.

In that daze, I forgot to tell him about the All Things Considered essay. How silly was that?

For an excellent discussion of Idiot America, those who are bringing us "ID" as an alternative to evolution, the Iraq quagmire, and the deadly, flacid response to Katrina, read this from Esquire.

Dinosaurs wearing saddles. That pretty much sums it up.

(hat tip to Mike)

When S left for Afghanistan eight months ago I asked him to buy me a burkha. A bluebird-blue burkha like those worn by the amorphous shadow-women I thought of when I thought of our sisters in Afghanistan. In March he obliged me. I wore it around the house for a few moments -- I honestly couldn't stand it for more than that -- then stuffed it up on one of our closet's top shelves to sit next to the other cultural relics he's sent me, like the water-logged-sand-wool hat the men wear and a blood red velvet coat with frilly gold trim from what S calls "used to be Russia" Kyrzykstan. The burkha's symbolic power is undeniable: to those of us in the non- fundamentalist- Muslim "west", it represents all the pain and suffering some Afghan women live with every day, suffering that is imposed on them by the men in their lives. This may not be an accurate view (hopefully the women of Afghanistan will one day write their own burkha stories), but it is the one most of us have when we see photographs of those women-turned-feather-blue ghosts.

During our feverish fifteen days together a month ago when S filled my mind with stories about Afghanistan, he told me over and over how he had no real idea what it was like for women in Afghanistan because he so rarely saw any of them. When he did they were in their burkhas, usually in groups of two or more. One time he saw a group of women being herded through the streets of a village near Asadabad by an old man and his switch, his whipping stick, in a manner you might see a herder herding a group of belligerent cows. Another time he saw a woman in a burkha kick the crap out of a young boy. He said she was like one of those kung-fu heroes who transforms from a crotchety monk to a killer in seconds. S didn't see what happened the moments before the beating, so he had no idea what brought it about though it seemed to him like a reasonable response from a woman forced to wear a mummy shroud whenever she left the house.

To buy the burkha, S had to go into town and explore some of the markets. He'd been studying Dari since he purchased tapes after we'd been woken up by that early morning phone call that changed our lives in an instant. Not that it was easy to find Dari language instruction tapes or books. Farsi? Easy to find. Arabic? Everywhere. But the languages of Afghanistan, Dari, Pashto, were nowhere to be found in bookstores or the web. It took a serious search to find an academic series put out by the University of Nebraska that included pronunciation tapes. I don't remember exactly how much it cost, but I know it was around a hundred dollars and that didn't include the rushed shipping we required since it took us so long to find them. The same was true for books about our war. The "Current Affairs," "US Military History," and "World History" sections of every bookstore we visited were filled shelf by shelf with books about Iraq but there was very little to find about Afghanistan, and what there was tended to be about the Russian occupation and the Taliban terror that followed. Since he wasn't able to get the tapes until just days before he left for Ft. Hood, he wasn't able to study as much as he would have liked, but he still landed in Afghanistan with enough basic Dari to be cordial and count numbers. As it turns out most of the ANA troops he's worked with speak more Pashto than Dari, but his studies have helped him. He reads some Arabic now (the alphabet is the same) and he can ask enough questions not to get lost. And enough to buy a burkha.

The man who sold it to him was ecstatic to hear S was buying it for his wife. That is, until S told him that I had no intention of wearing it around town. The burkha he sent me is the standard issue pleated burkha. No fancy adornments, shiny polyester fabric. I suspect some are more beautiful than others, with the differentiations of class expressed in their stitching (hand- rather than machine-stitching) and the quality of the fabric. It is the only outward expression a woman's allowed, and though Afghanistan is the world's poorest country, surely their women are as interested in appearances as their men are, who hang tin dangles from their garden-tinted jingle trucks, and decorate their rifles with hand-painted flowers and swirly cues. When S came home for his visit, he brought back a couple of presents from the troops he trained, including a large box of green tea and a handmade sling shot, its handle adorned by colorful Czech-style beads.

Ambrose Bierce said "War is God's way of teaching Americans geography," but then he died in Mexico during the run up to the First World War and therefore didn't get to see how little geography we learn today even when we're waging two wars at once. When S went to Ft. Hood for his "train-up" in December, he was "briefed" after a month of non-training (he and his Ranger buddies worked out on their own; the national guard leadership had no interest in anything other than eating chicken at Popeye's) by a soldier who had just returned from Iraq. When S and his friend questioned this, asking why they weren't being briefed by a soldier who had served in Afghanistan, the briefer said "What's the difference? They're all in the Middle East." S pointed out that no, Afghanistan isn't in the Middle East, it's in Asia, and then the briefer said incredulously, "Well they're all Arabs, aren't they?!" No surprise, then, that S was the only soldier in his entire group who had studied any Dari at all. In fact, he was the only one who knew Afghans spoke Dari, not Farsi, not Arabic. He was stuck in Ft. Hood for nearly two agonizing months.

I took out the burkha today and took a few pictures from the view inside. I was thinking about how quickly the change came in Afghanistan, how in an historical instant the women became shrouded. The Taliban took over with their medieval politics and 21st century hyper-fast violence, and then, then. Imagine: women had been teaching in universities, performing surgeries in hospitals, running restaurants and shops and negotiating deals, and then suddenly nothing. Not allowed to take a breath outside unless hidden from view, and even then running the risk of being beaten, or worse, executed. It's the image of those women in the center of the soccer stadium, their beautiful bodies turned into sky-blue mountains then reduced to blue rubble when the shots were fired, that I see when I look at my burkha.

I wonder if the women of Afghanistan were stunned into submission, if it all happened so swiftly it gave them no chance to save themselves, to change the course of events. We weren't engaged in our war, hadn't learned any geography yet let alone the words for "sorrow" and "outrage" and "injustice" in Dari, so though we knew they had been transformed from women into shadows we didn't truly notice them and therefore we did nothing. Most of the women of Afghanistan are still hidden from view behind mud-brick walls and blue polyester shrouds. Laura Bush lauds the "freedom" of Afghan women now that "democracy" has come to their country. She offers up empty rhetoric to fill the dead space around her husband's morally bankrupt presidency. I wonder, will we be just as stunned when our rights are taken away from us? I ask because it seems we're at one of those moments now, a moment when things could change drastically if we don't prevent it. And once the change happens, it takes more than translated abstract nouns to change it back.


Looking at my back door from inside the burkha.

S called me this morning, a relief. I assumed he had been out on missions and I was right. Hopefully he'll be able to call again in the next couple of days, but so much is uncertain that he could call again tomorrow or not again until next week. We talked about the absence of news from Afghanistan (and Iraq, for that matter) and how this makes me worry more because I'm never sure if the violence has occurred in his province or not. He hadn't heard about the UK soldier killed in Masar-e-Sharif yesterday, a town he'd heard was completely safe. We are living in this time of nanopods and laptop computers, yet there is still such a basic lack of information when it comes to this war.

And then there is Iraq. On Tuesday the nation mourned the 2,000th American soldier killed. Since then another eighteen have died. Eighty-five this month. We have become numb to it, clearly, and remain disinterested. I can't help but think this is a product of our abstraction of the war and the men and women who are fighting it. But then, perhaps it's even more banal, a simple reflection of our preference for meaningless, shiny fictions and their matching accessories available at our local Target stores. Libby may go down but it won't matter if we're still waging this war with no plan. He'll be just another crony caught for a moment only to be released back into the world with his own Fox TV show or Clear Channel radio program. I imagine he'll meet our other infamous traitors, Ollie North and Liddy, to compare show notes on Monday mornings at the corner deli, or perhaps via conference call while they're served their heart healthy oatmeal and black coffee by their loyal trophy wives.

It is all the more offensive after seeing Operation: Dreamland last night, a more pointed and direct film than Gunner Palace. The film follows one squad from the 82nd Airborne based in Falluja in the spring of 2004 before the Marines retreated then invaded again and flattened the city. The plan is nowhere, not on the ground with the squad, not in the officers' planning room. At one point we see the squad's leaders sitting around reviewing the past missions and the captain giving the presentation asks the group what exactly the squad is securing on these missions. Someone suggests the government, and the captain asks if they really are securing the mosques and the local leaders, and if so why since they aren't in any danger anyway. Then he asks if they are merely keeping themselves secure, and if that's not it, then what was the purpose of these missions. No one could answer him, and finally he answers it himself: "I don't know."

No one knows what the hell is going on. That sums up the agonizing truth in the film. The raids seem pointless, the missions without end. When we saw the planning room captain say he didn't know what the purpose of the missions his men were risking their lives to perform was, the entire theater let out a "humph" sigh, a resignation tinged with anger over the futility of it all. This futility wasn't lost on the men, of course, though most were steady in their assertion that they were "doing the job" and would continue to until they were out of the army. Getting out is no easy matter, as S and I can attest to. They coerce like crazy and then lay on the guilt. In one scene we see a room full of exhausted, fed-up soldiers while an officer stands in front of them making the pitch for reenlistment. He begins by asking who had already told their commanders they wouldn't sign back up and nearly the entire room raised their hands. Then he asked them if they had jobs lined up when they got home, whether they had paid off all their loans and car payments, whether they had a place to live or if they had to move back into their mama's house, and whether the same bad kids were still in their neighborhood, the neighborhood they escaped when they joined the military. Nearly everyone raised there hands again, a cue for a second officer to step up and continue the pitch. Afterwards Sgt. Pacheco, a medic from Chicago (who was at the earlier screening last night for Q&A -- unfortunately we missed him), said he was sick of the officers hounding them every day, making them go to meeting after meeting (with the ubiquitous, amateurish PowerPoint presentations S has told me about), when they'd already made up their minds to get the hell out. Yes, it is a "voluntary army" (except those stop-lossed soldiers who are included in the reenlistment numbers), but the amount of coercion is as prodigious as the number of lies told to soldiers to get them to reenlist, let alone to enlist the first time.

The film is unbelievably depressing. We see the escalating violence and distrust of the Iraqis during the film and aren't surprised when the ending credits tell us the city burst open in the months afterwards, the insurgency taking hold of the community and erupting in unbelievable violence. (The story of how we took the city back will be told one day, I suspect, and it may be another story that is impossible to find pride in even if its outcome was inevitable.) The men the film follows are outspoken politically and about as divided on the war as the nation is overall. Most of them came to the army because they didn't know what else to do with themselves and were worried that they'd end up in jail or worse. And all of the men in the squad were under thirty.

This is Chicago's national public radio station's fall fund drive so yesterday they had a "three hour marathon" of This American Life. One of the stories was about the Johns Hopkins study published in Lancet and released days before the election last year that estimated the number of civilian deaths since the invasion in 2003. The researchers, led by Les Roberts, estimated that 100,000 Iraqis had died during the first year of the war and that the vast majority of violent deaths were caused by coalition bombs and bullets. Because of the timing of the study's release, and the fact that Roberts was outspoken against the war, the study was discredited in the press and given little coverage. The study was said to be deeply flawed because the methodology was corrupt and the samples weren't random, but as the This American Life story demonstrates, the study's methodology was sound and the samples were completely random. In fact, Roberts is the world's leading researcher on war-caused civilian deaths and his studies of Congo and Kosovo are widely cited across the political spectrum (and by the government). It is only his Iraq study, which used identical techniques as his others, that is flawed, a curious coincidence given how "we don't do body counts."

To be as fair as possible, Roberts didn't include numbers from Falluja, though they had surveyed that city. The numbers of civilians killed during the seige were so high Roberts feared they would have inaccurately skewed the other results, so they only averaged the deaths in the thirty-one other communities they surveyed. Watching Operation:Dreamland I thought about those high numbers. I thought about how so many Iraqi families were torn apart, and how so many soldiers came home with their minds impossibly heavy with nightmares of the civilians they had killed. Of the 100,000 dead, more than 50% were women and children.

It's not that the Pentagon intends to kill civilians. They just don't much care when they do. Marc Galasco, one of the people in the This American Life story, had helped the Defense Department come up with its "high-value targeting" in Iraq before the start of the war, their attempt to lower the number of civilian deaths and increase the disruption to military infrastructure. Galasco was amazed that the Pentagon had no interest in counting the number of civilian deaths seeing that it was the surest way to test whether their "high-value targeting" had worked. Now Galasco works for Human Rights Watch in Iraq tracking down how many civilians have died there, which just shows that fiction has nothing on real life.

We're still in the foggy days of these wars, when we're desperate to document what is going on as it happens, unable to process it all because it's just too soon. Some day the stories, the truths, shuffling beneath these documentations will be told. I wonder, what will our children say about these wars? Or will we still be fighting them twenty years from now?

Because, Mr. President, there has to be a better way to bring our troops home.

Watch the ad here.

Then give to Operation Truth what you can spare to get this ad on the air.

2,000


2,000 men and women, sons and daughters, some brothers and sisters, fathers and mothers, cousins and nephews and neices, some teachers and coworkers and lovers and exes, some neighbors and roommates and former neighbors and former roommates, some students, some joggers, some Doom players, some movie buffs, some poets, some boxers, some pilots, some knitters, some painters, some cooks, some bakers, some chocolate lovers, some anchovy haters, some fishermen and women, some swimmers, some afraid of the water, some who were afraid of love and some who fed off of it, some who told stories and some who listened, some who drank single malt whiskey and some who drank beer, some who had never lived away from their parents until they joined the military and some who had left many years earlier, some who lived in cramped city apartments and some who lived in suburban palaces, some who read the paper and some who did not, some who wanted revenge, some who dreamed about wide open spaces and some who dreamed of friendship, some who held hands in public and some who shied away from affection, some who shook out of anger and some who held it inside, some who whispered in their sleep and some who screamed loudly, some who believed in God and some who didn't, some who had never been outside of the US until their plane landed in Shannon then Kuwait then Iraq and some who swam across rivers to get to the US, some who were hated and some who were loved deeply, some who smoked and some who chewed, some who carried their stories in their back pockets and some who sent them through email or phone calls or the internet, some who loved hip-hop and some who loved classic rock and some who loved 'alternative' and some who loved salsa and some who loved opera and some who loved polka, some who bit their nails, some who flossed, some who loved the summer heat and some who loved the autumn chill, some who took pictures and some whose pictures were taken, some who were afraid, some who smiled easily and some who had to force it once in a while, some who believed in the power of lovemaking and some who believed in the power of sex, some who had spaniels or siamese or koi or iguanas or boas or toads or turantulas or turtles or hamsters or rabbits or canaries, some who were allergic to pets and some who were allergic to dustmites, some who were bastards and some who were bitches, some who were loyal and some who were backstabbers, some who were crazy with bravery, some who felt heavy with regret, some who did what they had to do, some who saved for tomorrow, some who bought their friends drinks even when they protested, some who knew how to install cabinets and software, some who had read the same books more than twice, some who could recite whole scenes from their favorite movies, some who could tell jokes, some who knew when it was time to leave, some who could dance, some who slept better during the day, some who thought heroically, some who believed in justice, some whose nights were riddled with nightmares, some who had only a few days left in Iraq and some who had just arrived, some who had voted, some who loved the color blue, some who loved gadgets, some who played guitar, some who sang beautifully and some who thought they sang beautifully, some who wrote thank you notes, some who had lost something dear to them, some who believed it was all good...

Operation Truth has begun an "Honor the Fallen" campaign to encourage newspapers to run stories of soldiers' deaths on the front page. You can join the campaign and send letters to your town's paper on Op Truth's website.

Remember after 9/11 when the New York Times ran detailed obituaries of everyone who had died that day? I remember them and I remember how much they affected me. They were meant to bring the human side to the tragedy to all of us and they did. Stories about foiled birthday surprises. Stories of falling in love. Stories of divorce and remarriage. Stories of hope and promise and disappointment.

It's time the stories of these 2,000 men and women, three-dimensional human beings, are told too. Imagine if the New York Times or the Washington Post or the Chicago Tribune or the small town gazette ran detailed obituaries about these people who happened to be soldiers. Would we be okay with their deaths even though we know they could have been prevented? Would we be angry enough to stop the war?