"Excuse me while I set myself on fire"

I quote Katha Pollitt from The Nation magazine entitling this missive. Her piece is about a particular Harvard prof who argued for going to war and now has published a half-assed self-serving mea culpa about getting it wrong. Like Pollitt, I was not against the war from the beginning simply for "ideological" reasons (like we are a dirty fucked up selfish nation full of racial bias and whining fear-mongering who like to kill people to mollify our night tremors) but was against the war because as a historian I pay attention to evidence. And there wasn't any evidence good enough to go to war on. The WMD strawman fallacy or whatever you want to call it was crap and if you had a decent ear you could tell that this shithead couldn't sing a clear note. I suggest, modestly, that assholes like Michael Ignatieff should be force to ride in a Humvee though the streets of Baghdad, naked and straped to the hood until that time they have the joy of being hit by an IED. If they survive, then they can have their dignity and gravitas back.

I picked up a Time magazine while waiting for my kids orthrodontist and read the editor's note about why they went back to New Orleans to see what's going on there two years down the road. And that fucker, Stenger or something like that, said that he was surprised to find that his previous position of having "Katrina fatigue" was replaced after actually visiting the area with a new appreciation of what is wrong with America. Strap him to a building in the Ninth Ward, light it on fire and give 100 of his closest friends the opportunity to save him by pissing on the conflagration. If he lives, make him edit a local New Orleans obituary column for a year and then tar and feather him. That might make it about even. Fuck mainstream media. And fuck the experts of the meaning of 911 who what completely failed to make a difference in the way this nation does business.