Miracles

By Capt. Fogg

I’m still waiting for a couple of things I heard many times as a child – well one actually. The first was that the sun always shines on Easter, which of course is true, given enough altitude. Just ask the guys on the International Space Station. The other is that there are miracles on Christmas. Of course, it’s a cynical quest. A miracle has to be something that can’t happen but does happen, and to my way of thinking, if it happens, it can’t be a miracle. Most people, though, are satisfied with much less in their miracles: a water stain on a wall, a burn pattern on a grilled cheese sandwich, someone who was sick got better despite some doctor’s prognosis. As Christmas approaches, we search for these justifications for our idiocy.

I don’t know if someone somewhere doesn’t have a vast database of disasters plotted against the calendar, but I would be willing to bet that the odds are about the same on Christmas as any day of the year for floods, landslides, earthquakes, fires, famines, and pestilences. It may be a holiday for most Americans, but not for Death. Taking a quick break from supervising my holiday house guests today, I see that the news is still full of grief and horror and sadness and misery and death as has the world been down all the thousands of generations, but I’m sure that someone will ferret out a miracle from the endless stories of the ferret eating the baby’s toes or the infant run through the airport X-ray machine. People will be blown to bits today, people will starve and die in agony in gutters. Life with its concomitant horrors will go on as it always has and without interruption.

Still, we will have our miracles to clutch at in this cold and uncaring universe, to give a sense of meaning to lives that mean anything only to us as we sink into the inevitable grief and sorrow and suffering and an eternity of oblivion as the universe stretches out into an infinite and meaningless immensity.

Happy Holidays.

(Cross-posted at Human Voices.)

How convenient

By Creature





With all the talk lately about a conflict between the president and his top military brass over escalating the number of troops currently in Iraq, today we conveniently get these two wire stories to help the president's side of the escalation argument along. Like Bush's political campaigns, where rooms are filled with like-minded people, if these soldiers were cherry picked and used as spin fodder for these headlines then the White House has sunk to an all new low.

No soldier present said U.S. forces should be brought home, and none said current troop levels were adequate, as some commanders have argued.

Amazing. Not one dissenting opinion.

(Cross-posted at State of the Day.)

A rhetorical caveat

By Creature

Did Bush blink?

Apart from any increase in Iraq, Bush said the military's overall size should be increased to relieve the heavy strain on U.S. troops, reversing the previous position of his administration during Donald Rumsfeld's Pentagon tenure. Bush also said a troop surge in Iraq would have to be for a specific mission.

His remarks appeared intended to address doubts voiced by prominent military officials who worry that sending more troops to Iraq would be ineffective and put more demands on an already-stretched U.S. military.

"There's got to be a specific mission that can be accomplished with the addition of more troops before, you know, I agree on that strategy," the president said. [emphasis me]

So we have a caveat. The same caveat we have heard from the Pentagon brass. Does this mean Bush has turned away from the idea of a "surge" in troops? On last night's Hardball, Chris Matthews seemed to think so. He latched onto Bush's caveat as clear proof that the president is backing down from the surge idea. So, now we are all supposed to take a deep breath and sit back, secure in the knowledge that the president has stepped away from the neo-con cliff. If only we could trust what the president says. How long before the president announces that he has looked into the eyes of his new defense secretary and has been assured that there is a "specific mission that can be accomplished" and he is ready to agree on the new escalation strategy? It's only a matter of time, but in the meantime we'll be fed a steady diet of the "reasonable president" rhetorical spin.

The WaPo has more.

(Cross-posted at State of the Day.)