In Thursday's New York Times, Bob Herbert writes:
As Lizette Alvarez and Andrew Lehren wrote in Monday’s Times: “The service members who died during this latest period fit an unchanging profile. They were mostly white men from rural areas, soldiers so young they still held fresh memories of high school football heroics and teenage escapades. Many men and women were in Iraq for the second or third time. Some were going on their fourth, fifth or sixth deployment.”
There is no way that this can be justified. It is just wrong. I’ve said many times that if a war is worth fighting the way to do it is to mobilize the entire country, drawing the warriors from as wide a swath of the population as possible and raising taxes on everyone as part of an all-out effort to defeat a common enemy. This war is not worth fighting...
...All of the tortured, twisted rationales for this war — all of the fatuous intellectual pyrotechnics dreamed up to justify it — have vaporized, and we’re left with just the mad, mindless, meaningless and apparently endless slaughter.
Just by way of contrast, Herbert's Thursday op-ed partner, David Brooks, the Times' pet bobo, has this weighty thought about money-mad Nancy Pelosi:
I dream of a great harmonic convergence among the obscenely rich — between Randian hedge fund managers on the right and helipad environmentalists on the left. I dream that the big-money people who seem to dominate our politics will put aside their partisan fury and discover the class solidarity that Karl Marx always said they shared, and their newfound civility will trickle down to the rest of us. I dream that Berkeley will make peace with Buckhead, Streisand with DeVos, Huffington with O’Reilly...
..Why oh why can’t we have a decent overclass in this country — a group of highly attractive dimwits who spread bland but worthy stability over our political scene. Why oh why do we have to have this endless canapé war — the people of the vineyard against the people of the ranch.
Icky-poo.
