Week of August 17, 2009
As Afghans go to the polls in what is being widely decried as a flawed presidential election, a new Washington Post- ABC News opinion poll shows that American support for the Afghanistan War is collapsing. For the first time in two years, the percentage of Americans who said that the war was worth fighting fell below 50, all the way down to 47. Only 31 percent felt strongly about it being worth fighting.The bad news for Obama is that liberals and Democrats are far more hostile to the Afghanistan War than are Republicans. The Democratic majority in the House and the Senate could, if these numbers keep going south, become sufficiently afraid of their constituents that they vote to stop funding the war. Some close observers of Washington think the president only has a year or two before that confrontation with Congress takes place.
Michael Vick, the football player who's all over the news, should have tortured humans instead of dogs. Then we would have been told to overlook it for the sake of moving forward. Better yet, he should have killed humans rather than only torturing them. Then we would have been told next to nothing about it at all. It might have been reported, but it wouldn't have become a hot topic, an echo-chambered story to be dismissed only after a great deal of hand-wringing. It certainly would not have interfered with watching football games.No, I don't support harming dogs. No, I don't really want people tortured. (Yes, I've had to explain that to the severely satire-impaired after making the above statements.) And, no, I don't really think murder is better than torture. Nor do I think murder by bomb or gun or suffocation is necessarily any worse than murder by health insurance company. But I am concerned that we arrest and prosecute people in this country for individual small-time acts of torture and murder, whether of people or dogs, but never for the large-scale authorization of torture or murder. We do, however, publicly worry about our souls because of mass-torture, whereas mass-murder doesn't seem to gain the same coverage in our corporatized communications system. Of course I want torture prosecuted, but torture is a symptom.
The tree of crazy is an ever-present aspect of America's flora. Only now, it's being watered by misguided he-said-she-said reporting and taking over the forest.