All day long the news channels warn of Katrina bearing down with Biblical wrath upon the City of New Orleans. By late afternoon on this perfect blue sky summer day, Lola decides we should attend C J Chenier & the Red Hot Louisiana Band. Some people in the crowd are aware of the news and some people have not turned on a television in days. The band puts on a tremendous performance because Zydeco is party music to help you forget the hard times life blows your way. Midway in the show, CJ tosses off one comment about heading back to I-10.
Madison is filled with a core group of believers that The Republican Party and George Bush and Corporate Capitalism are the worst threat to the poor and oppressed on this planet. I learned along time ago, it isn’t worth my time to talk with them. A few liberals without a pathological obsession with ideology may eventually understand why Iraq was the correct choice for the second battlefield against the Jihadists who attacked us first. For example: A War to Be Proud Of by Christopher Hitchens.
LET ME BEGIN WITH A simple sentence that, even as I write it, appears less than Swiftian in the modesty of its proposal: "Prison conditions at Abu Ghraib have improved markedly and dramatically since the arrival of Coalition troops in Baghdad."The sun will come out tomorrow and the new day will be filled with challenges. Every new day is.
I am one of those who believe, uncynically, that Osama bin Laden did us all a service (and holy war a great disservice) by his mad decision to assault the American homeland four years ago. Had he not made this world-historical mistake, we would have been able to add a Talibanized and nuclear-armed Pakistan to our list of the threats we failed to recognize in time. (This threat still exists, but it is no longer so casually overlooked.)
The subsequent liberation of Pakistan's theocratic colony in Afghanistan, and the so-far decisive eviction and defeat of its bin Ladenist guests, was only a reprisal. It took care of the last attack. But what about the next one? For anyone with eyes to see, there was only one other state that combined the latent and the blatant definitions of both "rogue" and "failed." This state--Saddam's ruined and tortured and collapsing Iraq--had also met all the conditions under which a country may be deemed to have sacrificed its own legal sovereignty.
