Saturday, January 17, 2009

We Are the Ones Who Are No Longer Waiting for Ourselves

They sent out a memo at work saying "We recognize that Inauguration Day is going to be a historic day, but we caution against watching the event on streaming video. Thank you for respecting our bandwidth issues".

Had they been on the ball, they would have set up a video feed in the largest conference room and played the inauguration on big screen TV. I guess that's only for official executive use, though.

Not that I would be watching at that historic noon. I'll be in the bathroom retching.

Chris Matthews, whose leg tingles when Obama speaks, does not feel that way about Bush. After Bush's farewell address, he claimed that Bush was responsible for 100,000 deaths in Iraq. If that is the case, then FDR and Truman were responsible for the deaths of tens of millions (including 6 million Jews). Doesn't that get things backward? Is there not at least some intellectual rigor left amongst the media (not at MS-NBC, apparently). Most of the deaths in the Iraq War were caused by the insurgents. They planted the IEDs and they were the suicide bombers. They blew up the mosques and marketplaces. It was not coalition forces killing these people.

That's not to say that no innocents were killed, but anyone who understands the concept of a just war realizes that innocents may be killed. One cannot fight a just war if one is afraid of dying oneself, nor if one is afraid of accidentally or inadvertently killing the wrong person (including killing one's co-warriors in friendly fire). Of course one strives not to make these mistakes, but one cannot remain paralyzed in fear of making them.

Nonetheless, it was not by coalition forces that the majority of such innocents perished. It was at the hand of the enemy that they perished. It is calumny to suggest that it is Bush's fault. And it is blindness to fail to realize that Iraq is far better off today than under Saddam Hussein. Moreover, Saddam was a murderous bastard in his own right, a prolific killer who would have killed and tortured almost as many as the nearly vanquished enemy unleashed by his capture.

But these people are blind to true suffering. Obama will be responsible for more than 100,000 deaths in his first year in office if he fulfills his promises to reverse Bush's anti-abortion policies, such as funding for the UN's family planning agency, which helps fund forced abortions in China and China's one-child policy -- don't let anyone tell you they're pro-choice when in fact these people are pro-abortion, even when it is not the choice of the mother. Ironically,many of the aborted babies are female since Chinese prefer males, thus the feminists support the death of future women.

This is just one of the reasons I'll be quelling my nausea on Inauguration Day.

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