Three Guys on Veterans Day:
This is what the guy who took care of German POWs during World War I and spent three years in a Japanese prison camp in Manila during World War II said yesterday, Veterans Day, when he was asked about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan: "I'm no authority, but I'm not in favor of war unless it's an emergency."

And this is what the guy who never even finished his cushy service in the Texas Air National Guard said: "Their service is noble, and it is necessary. The enemies who attacked us six years ago want to strike our country again -- and next time, they hope to kill Americans on a scale that will make 9/11 pale by comparison. By fighting this enemy in foreign lands, the men and women of our Armed Forces are helping to ensure we do not have to face them in our own land. And by spreading the hope of liberty to nations that have not known it, our troops are helping to defeat the ideology of the terrorists." Doesn't exactly seem like an emergency. Our war on an ideology has all the logic and urgency of a Long Island father in 1956 desperately trying to get a good price on a backyard bomb shelter.

Then there's the words of the guy who got five draft deferments. "America may be a country founded in revolution, but we've never been a warrior culture," he spoke, even as he and the administration he "serves" seek hundreds of billions of dollars to wage a war of choice. "[M]ay the rest of us never take them for granted," he said of veterans and soldiers, even as he abides, aids, and abets the Defense Department's stop-loss orders, the lowering of standards for the "volunteer" army, and the sending of troops on fourth and fifth tours of duty with little time at home between deployments.

Here is perhaps definitive proof that there is no God, no being that gives a flying ratfuck about what occurs on Earth: when Vice President Dick Cheney placed a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknowns at Arlington National Cemetery, the ground did not open up and vomit forth the zombie corpses of the thousands upon thousands of dead there so they might rip Cheney's remaining functioning organs out and drag his heaving, screaming being into realms of hell where he might be forced to suck mustard gas, be immolated by an atomic explosion, and be burned by napalm, all while having bullets fired through his flesh and grenades with their pins pulled shoved up his ass.

Alas, no, such savage poetry of gore is reserved for the real world, the real soldiers who wreak violence and who die in the real wars for the pusillanimous men whose experience of it is to merely honor the dead while merrily sending more to die.