Hamas

I wish we didn't need a free and unfettered press so much, because they are, by and large, a despicable bunch. I was listening to NPR today, then switched to the local paper, then looked at the news on my computer. All pretty much the same: Israel is killing civilians.
It really doesn't take too much smarts to work backwards from that and see an interesting and very effective Hamas strategy in all this. They hide behind women and children, hide in schools and hospitals, shoot rockets at Israel and when Israel retaliates, leave it to NPR to heap the blame on Israel.
The media people aren't stupid (I think). Surely, one muses, they must know that Hamas and the West have different strategies for war. The West says, "We will wage war as long as no non-combatant gets hurt, no religious edifices are destroyed, and humane help can still reach the country." Hamas' strategy is "Kill the unbelievers." The media must know this. Then why don't they have some sense of context when they report the news? Certainly it is a tragedy that a school was hit, but I will bet you a carton of doughnuts that a Hamas installation was nearby. It's like the kid who hits you with a rock and then hides behind the teacher when you seek him to reason with him.
I'm actually a lot more bloodthirsty about this than Israel is. My strategy, were I the man at the helm would be "Warn them, warn them, then turn their country into a pile of rubble." It is very strong medicine, but you'd only have to give one dose and everybody would be cured. Maybe it's a good thing that I'm not in charge.
But I digress. back to the media. I try to ignore the right wing when they say the media leans left, though the numbers seem to back this up. What I find difficult to ignore is that the media seems inclined to leave out all those little messy details that fill out the picture but don't have immediate impact. (For a discussion of whether "media" is singular or plural, check out my blog meta-language.blogspot.com)
The drinking death I've been commenting on is a case in point. The first few stories made it seem that a driven-snow pure young man had been forced to drink alcohol and died therefrom. Why, it was almost murder. As more and more details emerged, the picture was much different. So, why the starkness of the initial report? Drama, drama, drama. A schoolroom full of dead children is so much more dramatic than a sober analysis of the reasons behind their deaths.

SOB as Presidential material

During the time that Nixon was president and his penchant for dirty play was coming out, people would say to me, "We need a president who is honest. We need a nice president." So we got one - Jimmy Carter. So much for nice presidents.
Which leads me to believe that we don't really need a nice president. We need a mean, nasty sonuvabitch who can stand toe to toe with Putin and tell him to stick it where the sun don't shine. We need somebody who is grouchy, touchy, who believes that the United States is the best thing since (and before) sliced bread and anyone who messes with us will be chewed up, spat out, and forgotten.
We need someone who understands that war is not civilized. Therefore, this person would not enter into a war unless there was no other choice, but once in the war would have two goals: not getting our people killed, and getting their people killed. As Patton said, you don't win a war by dying for your country. You win by making them die for their country. As long as the US fights tippytoe wars, we'll lose soldiers.
So, where does that leave us? Should we have invaded Iraq? Probably not. Should we stay? Until we have kicked some serious a##.
Which presidential candidate is more likely to think this way? Need I say?

Dying for the right

This thing has been festering in me for years, and now I've got to get it out. My countrymen in far away places are dying. That saddens me, but I am no so naive as to suppose that we can get rid of the Taliban by offering them Oreos. But people ought to die for something worth dying for, shouldn't they?
Which brings me to the subject of this monolog. Dying and making it worthwhile.
Some years back, the Mormon Tabernacle Choir made a recording of "The Battle Hymn of the Republic," that was a hit, as such things go. The music will give you goosebumps, sure thing, but at the same time, I'm bothered by it. For one thing, they didn't include all the verses. There's one that goes,

"I have seen Him in the watchfires of a hundred circling camps,
They have builded him an altar in the evening dews and damps
I can read his righteous sentence in the dim and flaring lamps"

And another that goes

I have read a fiery message writ in burnished rows of steel..."

These verses are not there. The meat of the message, "This is real honest-to-God war," is left out.
But that's not what really gets me. In the Julia Ward Howe poem, one of the last lines goes,
"As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free." The Tabernacle Choir version reads, "As He died to men holy, let us live to make men free." As if living were some sort of sacrifice in time of war? As if freedom for all can be won without blood?
Not only does this destroy the parallelism and strength of the lines, it mocks the fact that thousands of men did in fact die to make men free. Do we toss off their sacrifice? The way the Choir sang the song was a complete evisceration of what Howe was trying to say. She was saying, "Let us be prepared to die so that people might live free." The Choir negated that poweful image when they wimped the song down the way they did. Maybe we should send a copy, with Oreos, to the Taliban.