a head of my own

Yesterday I read a very good article by Frank Rich on the New York Times. Some highlights:

The armed forces are so eager for bodies they will flout "don't ask, don't tell" and hang on to gay soldiers who tell, even if they tell the press.

WHAT?!! So now that the President's lies and the horrible situation he put the country in is impeding the Army's recrutment goals, gays are more then welcome, in spite of the "discomfort" that some straight recruits might feel?

This reminds me that there was a time when blacks weren't allowed to serve in the US white-men-only Army, until the need for bodies was so high that the big generals decided the skin color wasn't more important than winning the war.

So blacks were allowed in, I believe in special all-black units at the beginning, and they've served this country ever since. Once they were in, once they served honorably and showed everyone that there was no difference between a white soldier and a black soldier, they couldn't be kept out of the Army anymore.

Is that gonna happen for gays too? Or will the military go back to enforcing that ridiculous "don't ask, don't tell" policy once this stupid war is over with?

Furthermore, if, like they said, the Army is getting ready to withdraw large numbers of soldiers from Iraq beginning next spring (just in time for the November elections in the US, mind you,) why do they need so many new recruits and so desperately that they're thinking of letting the gays in? Could it be that maybe, just maybe, Bush is eyeing an attack on Iran next and so needs an even bigger army than the one he had now in order to fight a bigger and stronger enemy?

Ssshh! Don't say that out loud...

Another good passage:

A Bush loyalist, Senator George Allen of Virginia, instructed the president to meet with Cindy Sheehan, the mother camping out in Crawford, as "a matter of courtesy and decency." Or, to translate his Washingtonese, as a matter of politics. Only someone as adrift from reality as Mr. Bush would need to be told that a vacationing president can't win a standoff with a grief-stricken parent commandeering TV cameras and the blogosphere 24/7.

It's unbelievable that this White House, run by Karl 'Machiavelli' Rove, would snub a mother who lost her son in a now very unpopular war while the President meets with Boy Scouts and takes naps. And tells the press about it!!

And more:

Iraq was a Bush administration idée fixe before there was a 9/11. Within hours of that horrible trauma, according to Richard Clarke's "Against All Enemies," Mr. Rumsfeld was proposing Iraq as a battlefield, not because the enemy that attacked America was there, but because it offered "better targets" than the shadowy terrorist redoubts of Afghanistan. It was easier to take out Saddam - and burnish Mr. Bush's credentials as a slam-dunk "war president," suitable for a "Top Gun" victory jig - than to shut down Al Qaeda and smoke out its leader "dead or alive."

This is striking. And the most upsetting, embarassing, unbelievable thing, is that we were all told these things (and more) last year, long before the election, and still more than 50 million people decided to vote for the worst President this country ever had AGAIN!!

They all decided not to believe the truth, no matter from how reliable a source it was coming from (I mean, there were even people who had worked with Bush, in his Cabinet, who were speaking up about him misguiding us all,) and preferred keeping this guy in charge no matter what he did and might possibly do, just because he says he's a good Christian (the jury is still out on that one,) he's against gay marriage (big news there,) and pro-life, which is THE MOST RIDICULOUS thing he could possibly say, since he sent Americans to die and kill thousands for his oil-war.

To this day it's our failure to provide that security that has turned the country into the terrorist haven it hadn't been before 9/11 - "the central front in the war on terror," as Mr. Bush keeps reminding us, as if that might make us forget he's the one who recklessly created it.

Thank you Mr. President for making us less safe than we ever were.

And finally:

A citizenry that was asked to accept tax cuts, not sacrifice, at the war's inception is hardly in the mood to start sacrificing now. There will be neither the volunteers nor the money required to field the wholesale additional American troops that might bolster the security situation in Iraq.

That is something I always found shameful of Bush: one thing was telling us to go on with our lives after 9/11 to show the terrorists that they hadn't won, they hadn't broken our spirit, or succeded in changing our "way of life."

A whole different matter was later on sending our troops to war and telling us, again, not to care, not to bother with what happened in Iraq, to just mind our own business as usual (like a scumbag who's out to steal your stuff and tells you to look the other way.)

Not asking us to make ANY sacrifice while our brave men and women were sent off to die.

Well, Bush certainly isn't sacrificing anything on his 5 week vacation.