Pretty Hot in Crawford, Pretty Hot in Hell
by Mike Whitney
www.dissidentvoice.org
August 6, 2005



 

“A Marine assault vehicle on patrol during combat operations hit a roadside bomb Wednesday, and 14 Marines were killed in one of the deadliest single attacks in Iraq against American forces.”

-- The Guardian (London)

Fourteen Marines touched down at Dover Air Force Base on Thursday, their lives cut short in a brutal war that has yet to produce a rationale.

The architect of that war landed at nearly the same time at his vacation home in Crawford, Texas, resting up from the grueling task of sending other-mothers'-sons to die for nothing.

Where’s the outrage?

Of the 14 men who were killed, not one was named Bush, or Cheney or Rumsfeld. They were all just grunts doing their jobs, fighting for their country.

Or, so they thought.

Not one of them joined the fray to fight to defend the torture chambers at Guantanamo or Abu Ghraib.

Not one of them fought to make Iraq safe for Halliburton, or Bechtel, or Exxon.

Not one fought to increase domestic surveillance and intrusive big government like the Patriot Act.

Not one fought to shift more of the nation’s wealth into the pockets of the bloodsucking parasite-class to which Bush belongs.

Not one fought to ensure that Bush and his warmongering cadres could continue to flatten whole cities, poison the water, devastate the economy, steal their oil, destroy their society, and kill and imprison their people.

Not one.

Every one of them fought and died because they loved their country and they trusted their leaders not to lie to them.

WHERE IS THE OUTRAGE.

Bush wasn’t there when the plane touched down in Dover; way too busy.

It was just the bereaved families, the devastated parents, the bewildered children the inconsolable wives and lovers. The normal collection of average people whose lives end the moment they get word that their son was killed in battle.

That’s all. Just normal people, just shattered lives.

End of story.

They got a flag, and the Commander-in-Chief got a nice long ride on his mountain bike.

Fair enough.

What’ll it take to enrage the American people, to send them into the streets, to hurl them against the White House gates, to bang on their pots and pans until the politicians scramble for their bunkers?

And, when will the people gather en masse in front of the Time-Warner Building, and FOX News, and MSNBC, and CNN, rattling the windows and pounding on the doors.

We don’t want their war anymore; we don’t want their news anymore; we don’t want them anymore.

Get out!

Leave!

Kill someone else’s sons and daughters. Steal someone else’s wealth. Ruin someone else’s country.

Just get out!

14 Marines killed in Iraq, just another footnote in the Crawford Times that Bush can pass over on his way to the Sports page.

There’s no place in hell hot enough for the likes of these people.

Mike Whitney lives in Washington state, and can be reached at: fergiewhitney@msn.com.

Other Articles by Mike Whitney

* Straight-Shootin’ George Galloway
* “Operation Community Shield”: Comrade Chertoff’s Preemptive Crackdown
* Kristallnacht: What Happens When the Public Says Nothing? 
* Burying Blair: Post-Mortem for the British PM
* “Withdrawal” from Iraq?: Forget About It
* The Globalization of State Terror
* Tom Friedman: Fabricating the Roots of Terror
* Doomsday: The Final Months of the “Housing Bubble”
* John Roberts and the National Security State
* Guantanamo: the Calculus of Human Misery
* Did Greenspan Know About the London Bombings Two Days Before?
* Another Casualty in Rumsfeld’s Information War
* Genesis of an American Gestapo
* Bush's Orgy of Carnage
* Goodbye to Sandra Day O’ Connor . . . and Good Riddance
* The Rumsfeld Solution: “Liberating Iraq, One Journalist at a Time”
* Show Your Independence on the 4th -- Burn a Flag
* "Up in Smoke": Bush Flops in Prime Time
* More Rumsfeld Lies About Insurgent Meetings
* Incinerating Iraqis: The Napalm Cover-Up
* Guantanamo: The New-World Icon
* The Bush Radio Address: More Delusional Blather While Iraq Bleeds
* The Friedman Solution: Reinstate the Draft
* Body Slamming the 4th Amendment
* Operation Desperation: Rumsfeld’s Baghdad Fiasco
* The EU Constitution: Don’t Believe the BS
* Protecting the Plutocrats
* What Was Laura Bush Doing at the Al Aqsa Mosque?
* Free Jose Padilla!
* Alberto Gonzales’ Kristallnacht: Purges for a Safer America
* Tom Friedman: The Imperial Chronicler
* Gods, Gays, and George Bernard Shaw
* A Tentative Strategy for Ending the War
* The Specter of Violence in America
* Free Speech in the Crosshairs
* Why America Needs to be Defeated in Iraq
* More Madness at the Bush News Conference
* Ratzinger’s Plan to Hide the Pedophiles
* Let’s Let Atheists Back into Politics
* Pope Ratzinger: More “Pie-in-the-Sky” for the Struggling Masses
* The Purveyors of Violence: The NY Times in Falluja
* Screw You, Paul Volker!
* Pope TV and the New World Media
* The Economic Tsunami: Sooner Than You Think
* Destroy Abu Ghraib!
* Terri Schiavo and the Battered Judiciary
* Railroading Moussaoui
* The Wolfowitz Appointment: A Red Flag for the Coming Wars
* “Economic Meltdown” -- Sorry, but We’re Toast
* John Bolton and the Road to Tehran
* Clearing the Way for the American Police State
* Challenging the Language of Violence
* Jose Padilla and the 10 Commandments
* Crushing the UN for a Stronger America
* Europe to Bush: “Hands Off Iran”?
* The Incredible Shrinking Dollar
* Assassinating Al-Hariri Fits Washington’s Plan
* Washington’s Plan to Foment Civil War in Iraq
* Condi’s Euro-Tour
* Folksy Tom Friedman and New Age Imperialism
* Government Without Consent
* The Desperate State of the Union
* Iraq’s Election Fiasco
* Boarding Up the “Window of Opportunity”
* KGB Chieftain Finds Home at Homeland Security
* Bush’s Grand Plan: Incite Civil War
* Pink Slips at CBS

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