[Vision2020] This is Boring!

[Saturday Morning Mocha Runs]

Thanks for the reminder, Janesta.

I usually make my Saturday morning run to Wheatberries at about 8:30.  It looks 
like I will have to make it a bit earlier.

Take care,

Tom

> Maybe a litter of cats have a firm hold on their tongues.
> 
> So...... What is going this weekend in Moscow/Pullman, does anyone know?
> I do know this is the second weekend of Farmer's Market, and as of this
> morning, the weather looks promising for a warm weekend! 
> 
> U of I Graduation is tomorrow. There is an uplifting story here-
> http://www.today.uidaho.edu/details.asp?id=2605&sctn=news about
> Anita Mabbutt,  a 75 year old college graduate who proves it is never
> too late to return to school. *smile*
> 
> Have a fun weekend!
> 
> Janesta Carcich Sullivan 
>   ----- Original Message ----- 
>   From: Tbertruss@aol.com 
>   To: vision2020@moscow.com 
>   Sent: Friday, May 14, 2004 1:44 AM
>   Subject: [Vision2020] This is Boring!
> 
> 
> 
> 
>   All:
> 
>   Now that Christ Church members for the most part have abandoned V2020,
> and Bush supporters seem to be in hiding, at least on V2020, we are
> left, it seems, with a close knit group of list serve participants who
> echo each other at length on critiquing and satirizing Christ Church and
> affiliated institutions, and the Bush administration.  Won't someone
> please present a witty and well reasoned argument supporting Christ
> Church, New St. Andrews, or Bush's policies?
> 
>   Maybe Edna will return?  How about William F. Buckley Jr. for an
> erudite defense of Bush?
> 
>   Why look who it is, the elder grand conservative intellectual, calling
> for, it seems, Rumsfeld's resignation?  I give up!
> 
>   http://www.nationalreview.com/buckley/buckley200405111231.asp
> 
>   Exit Rumsfeld?
>   Strategic considerations.
> 
>   By William F. Buckley Jr. 
> 
>   Seeking relief from the special hideousness of the Abu Ghraib scene,
> some commentators thought back to My Lai. It could only be said about
> that black day in Vietnam in 1968, in search of an explanation this side
> of concluding that American soldiers are mass killers, that some of the
> men who engaged in the massacre did what they did under the impulse of
> hot pursuit. You are waging the war, there are snipers and other hidden
> assailants, and you find yourself authorizing your men to use their
> machine guns to just mow everybody down — one way to do it. In
> Iraq there seems to have been nothing there in the sense of dodging
> bullets and returning fire. It seemed sheer sadism, pleasure taken from
> torture. Psychological torture, we have reason to believe, though there
> are corpses to be accounted for. But there is no accounting for forcing
> naked men to enact sexual practices, some apparently perverse, for the
> gratification of an assembly apparently stripped of any thought of
> humane behavior.
> 
>   Yes, the miscreants, or at least those who are identifiable —
> the photographers were here useful — will be tried. It is hard
> to imagine what their defense will be, though no doubt it will be a plea
> based on the strain of their assignment and the disorientation of war
> prison duty. Lieutenant William Calley, whose infantry company killed
> the civilians in My Lai, pleaded the fever of the war, but he was
> convicted to life in prison. A startling thing then happened. What
> seemed all of America rose up in protest against the sentence. The
> American people were not saying, clearly, that it was wrong to convict
> someone who had so crassly violated the rules of war. But they were
> saying that they thought the sentence inordinate, and the pressure was
> so immense that President Nixon bowed to it, sharply reducing the
> sentence.
> 
>   It is unlikely that a great protest would follow upon the conviction
> of the Abu Ghraib torturers, but what will not be accomplished simply by
> trying and convicting them is any sense of national expiation. The
> American people are so dumbfounded by what happened, they are listening
> attentively to a cry for the dismissal of Donald Rumsfeld.
> 
>   The case against the secretary of defense goes beyond the events in
> the prison. For those, he has already apologized. But there was a sense
> there of a man apologizing because the Tables of Organization list him
> as the man-in-charge, a little like the mayor of San Francisco
> apologizing for the earthquake. Not yet explained is how it is that
> Donald Rumsfeld, looking at the report in March describing the behavior
> of the prison guards, did nothing more than merely approve their
> prosecution. Clearly what cried out to be done was a public repudiation
> of the misbehavior combined with the public exposure of it.
> 
>   No doubt Mr. Rumsfeld acted entirely on military considerations. The
> scene in Iraq had got bad, in March, and he was surely motivated by the
> temptation to think of anything other than the containment of the
> terrorists as clerical in nature. But of course he was wrong, and his
> misjudgment is paradoxically hitting him the hardest. While he might
> reasonably have thought the prison doings trivial in the context of a
> war in which 135,000 American soldiers were engaged, some being killed
> every day, the public has been seized by the hideous detail, seeing it
> as a sore that suddenly illuminates the disease coursing through the
> whole system. Abu Ghraib is causing some people to say: What in the hell
> were American soldiers doing in that grisly place? With those grisly
> people! While some of their companions were being ambushed and shot
> every day. Oh! And by the way, they are asking for billions of dollars
> more to pursue that nightmare.
> 
>   Not lucid thought, granted. If we had applied the same reasoning to
> incidents in the Pacific sixty years ago, we'd have declared the war
> diseased and unjustified, and fired Douglas MacArthur for losing the
> Philippines. History teaches us that the firing of a general, when wars
> go badly, is a pretty routine thing. President Lincoln fired General
> George B. McClellan, who then proceeded to nomination for president by
> the Democratic party in 1864. Japanese culture made way for failed
> generals to disembowel themselves in propitiation. 
> 
>   President Bush is understandably determined not to let Abu Ghraib
> dictate the course of our entire Mideast enterprise. But he may not
> succeed, and Donald Rumsfeld may be giving thought to whether his
> continued service is a strategic mistake.
>  
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------> ---
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>   v2020 post by Ted Moffett
> 



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