Monday is Memorial Day in the USA. Expect 24 hypocritical hours of full-blown media-saturated nationalistic, militaristic self-gratification. Bush will at least be forced to acknowledge the deaths of US soldiers. But what about the real victims of his illegal war? Diane at Daily Kos presents a memorial to dead Iraqis.
In the NYT, Bob Herbert quotes arch-Republican slimebag Tom DeLay urging Americans to reject "the treacherous notion that while all human lives are sacred, some are more sacred than others."
People have been murdered, tortured, rendered to foreign countries to be tortured at a distance, sexually violated, imprisoned without trial or in some cases simply made to "disappear" in an all-American version of a practice previously associated with brutal Latin American dictatorships. All of this has been done, of course, in the name of freedom...
Warfare, when absolutely unavoidable, is one thing. But it's a little difficult to understand how these kinds of profoundly dehumanizing practices - not to mention the physical torture we've heard so much about - could be enthusiastically embraced by a government headed by men who think all life is sacred. Either I'm missing something, or President Bush, Tom DeLay and their ilk are fashioning whole new zones of hypocrisy for Americans to inhabit.
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