Shoddy work by Vice President Cheney's (former?) private defense companies in Iraq and Afghanistan is resulting in U.S. soldier deaths by electrocution.

Halliburton and KBR whistleblowers and U.S. military personnel brought the problems to light as early as 2004.

And they were mocked for their concerns and lied to.

Staff Sgt. Ryan Maseth - a highly-skilled Green Beret - was electrocuted in the shower in a Baghdad military compound three months ago, and the Army told his mom that he died because he brought an electrical appliance into the shower with him ... like the woman just fell off an applecart or something.

These are the same people who wanted us to believe a public relations fairy tale about Pat Tilman and Jessica Lynch.

I may never stop puking.

via mal contends

Comes up every once in a while. My girlfriend so proud of her dad talking about what she knew of her late father's service in World War II. And from both of our parents (my father was a veteran recruited by the CIA but he went to grad school instead to have me), we hear of the society-wide, shared sacrifice to defeat some pig NAZIs and fascists.

War profiteers, they were a pariah. Not like today when they are protected by the Bush DOJ.

So when does incompetent, lying, and cowardly behavior make one a Vince Lombardi?

Having lied their way to war, and disgraced the sacrifice and courage of American troops in the field, now the war cheerleaders are saying that the chickenhawks are Vince Lombardi incarnate.

Hey fella, if you want to lie and cheat your way to a war and a disastrous occupation, that's not fine. But don't drag Lombardi's name into it.

You're out of your depth, so crawl back to the Brookings Institution and American Enterprise Institute, and posture about war from these safe and comfortable confines.

"I want to call them the Lombardis of this war," said Brookings analyst Michael O’Hanlon, who seems to know even less about football than war.

O'Hanlon is referring to the Surge architects who, he claims, have achieved their objective of bringing about Iraqi political reconciliation through the escalation of American troops.

See the video at ThinkProgress of these chickenhawks congratulating themselves.

Bottom line: Clinton bought Bush's war talk, Obama didn't.

Anyone in Wisconsin against the Iraq War?

Check out this NYT piece on how Berkeley is opposing the Iraq War.  

It's past time for municipalities to ramp up war resistance in as many creative ways as possible.

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George W. Bush's invoking the Vietnam withdrawal and post-World War II American occupation of Japan to support the continued occupation of Iraq is of-course laughable on its academic merits. [Via the Poltico, see one Bush-cited historian's knocking down such a comparison in November 2002.]

To the anti-intellectual and authoritarian Bush administration, facts and history are malleable instruments that can be changed to fit whatever ideological and political objective is on the administration docket.

But the well-crafted and politically risky speech is revealing of the desperate situation in which the anxious administration fabulists and fantasists find themselves.

They well know that if the invasion and occupation were to continue into the 2008 elections and be perceived by the electorate in anything resembling reality, the war party would face losses approaching the 1964 Johnson-Goldwater election.