The Things That Carried Him by Chris Jones

For Memorial Day:

The next day, Thursday, May 31, 2007, he sat in the heat on a distant tombstone, waiting until he could finish the rest of his work. Just after twelve o'clock, the first people arrived: a vanload of nine honor-guard soldiers up from Fort Knox, dressed in their green Class-A uniforms, with knotted ties and berets. Collins had seen them practicing and pointing at various spots in the grass when he dug the grave. Now seven of them stacked their M16's in one of those spots. Each gun held three rounds; Sergeant Aaron Huber, a broad-backed thirty-one-year-old veteran of the war in Iraq, had taken care to polish his ammunition to a high shine. Six of the soldiers, including Huber, then assembled in two rows between the grave and where they knew the hearse would park. The extra rifleman remained with the weapons, and the noncom in charge, thirty-seven-year-old Sergeant Kenneth Dawson, stood at attention nearby. The ninth man, Specialist Robert Leatherbee, a boy-faced twenty-six-year-old from Massachusetts, took his place about forty feet away. With his buzz cut and iron-crisp uniform, he looked like a soldier, but there seemed something smaller or gentler about him, at least compared with the others. Maybe it was just that he was holding a trumpet instead of a gun, his fingers tender on the brass.

Read more of this great story from Esquire here:

Scott McClellan: “a decision to turn away from candor and honesty when those qualities were most needed.”

From AP:

In a shocking turnabout, the press secretary most known for defending President Bush on Iraq, Katrina and a host of other controversial issues produced a memoir damning of his old boss on nearly every level — from too much secrecy to a less-than-honest selling of the war to a lack of personal candor and an unwillingness to admit mistakes.

In the first major insider account of the Bush White House, one-time spokesman Scott McClellan calls the operation "insular, secretive and combative" and says it veered irretrievably off course as a result.

Is the money McClellan received to write a book more inspiring of truth than the money he took masquerading as a public servant? Now that there are over 4000 American military casualties in Iraq, McClellan makes it clear he made his own “decision to turn away from candor and honesty when those qualities were most needed.”

Missing evidence in the US presentation

As it did in the run-up to the first US debacle in the Middle East of this century, the Washington Post is putting the pro-War propaganda on Syria and Iran on the front page. Why? War sells papers! Unlike the past, it does include information that challenges the administration. However the facts are buried today on page A12. Here it is: "Missing Evidence in the U.S. Presentation:"

"The Bush administration this week asserted that an Israeli airstrike in Syria Sept. 6 destroyed a nuclear reactor being constructed with the assistance of North Korea... The intelligence community said it had ... "medium confidence" that North Korea was involved, and "low confidence" that Syria had a related weapons program.... The full range of U.S. intelligence information on the site is unclear, but skeptics have pointed to several key uncertainties:

• No fuel,
• No repocessing,
• No electrical power lines, and
• No weapons design.

It sounds like my golf game: no grip, no stance, no backswing and no follow-through.

Click here for the full-size graphic.

Hillary vs. Obama

STOP IT.

I say this as a first-grade student in the year Hillary graduated from college. When everyone said they wanted to be President, I said so too. Even teachers laughed. Imagine the power that gave to the students to deflate the dreams of elementary school girls.


Imagine the derision aimed at the smart, accompished, promising women of Wellsley in 1969, the same year. The year Hillary graduated.

An undated photograph of Hillary Rodham, center, during her days as a student at Wellesley College, from 1965 to 1969.

The women, and the men who benefit from their work, discoveries, and support, who read these words owe those women a debt that can never be paid. If you don't want Hillary, don't support her. But acknowledge this debt.

One World, One Dream for Hu Jia

This week, a Beijing court sentenced human rights activist Hu Jia to 3 1/2 years in prison for subverting state authority and to one additional year's loss of his "political rights." He was arrested in part for co-authoring, with Teng Biao, an open letter on human rights. The Washington Post prints Human Rights Watch's translation of the Sept. 10, 2007, letter descriing the imprisonment, torture, censorship, forcible removal form homes, and exile of hundreds of thousands of people in Beijing and China.