scribblings from a deist transhumanist libertarian minarchist citizen soldier

What’s Memorial Day for?

Posted by Trevor in under other on May 29th, 2006 | View Comments |

Ben Stein captures the meaning better than I ever could:

The media try to rob your husbands’ and wives’ and kids’ lives of meaning saying this war is not about anything.

They’re wrong and they say what they say because they don’t see the truth. They print a story on the front page about Marines killing civilians in a town in Iraq and if they did, it was wrong. But the big media never report a MARINE throwing himself on a bomb to protect an Iraqi child, or a Marine giving his life to rid a town of murderers or a Marine or an Army man or woman or a Navy Seal or a Coast Guardsman offering up his life so that Iraqi human beings can have the same freedoms and rights we take for granted here in America.

The media are like grave robbers, robbing you of the certain knowledge that your spouses gave their lives for something deeply worthwhile: human dignity.

Your loved ones’ lives and deaths had as much meaning at the lives and deaths of every American who died for freedom from Valley Forge to the Battle of the Bulge to Cho-Sin Reservoir to the Cu Chi tunnels to the Balkans to Kabul, Afghanistan, to Falluja, Iraq.

Go read They Did God’s Work. May your Memorial Day be filled with a sense of purpose.

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jamal

"MARINE throwing himself on a bomb to protect an Iraqi child, or a Marine giving his life to rid a town of murderers or a Marine or an Army man or woman or a Navy Seal or a Coast Guardsman offering up his life so that Iraqi human beings can have the same freedoms and rights we take for granted here in America."

Maybe the slaughter, torture and death BY marines, navy seals and coast guardsman just outweighs any good they may have done in illegally invading iraq and forcing upon them a regime that has cause death and near them to civil war!!
Dan Cameron Rodill

Yes, this Ben Stein piece is better than the coment I posted at the Baroness Alexandra's Allthingsbeautiful.com, but I'll re-post here anyway as a contribution, for whatever it's worth..............

nteresting how Murtha, who spent less time in Vietnam than I did---although admittedly he was military unlike me, and knew how to play the old "war hero" card so very, very, very useful in U.S. politics---has become the Democrats' go-to drama queen on questions of war and peace and how to attack Bush (who once snubbed him, according to reports.)

It's the media-enabled theatrics which are so suspect. If there is a criminal case against these young Marines---and let's assume there is, without knowing all the facts---the Marines will court martial accordingly. Everyone knows that. Murtha has to know that. But now he seems like a deranged old grizzly,improperly medicated, as he keeps chewing on that chewed-up bone (but not too loony to enjoy the media spotlight and adulation from the grateful who wouldn't be caught dead in the uniform of the country that fattens them.) Even on the solemn occasion of Memorial Day. To what purpose, aside from anti-Bush rage and Dem lust to regain position and office?

Which raises the question yet again: Is today's Libstream intelligent, or just hopelessly tone deaf?
Are crude polls and poll shakers and $500 an hour "consultants" convincing it that Americans will react favorably to this orgy of American Guilt and shame about the one sector of U.S. entitlement society that truly sacrifices and understands responsibility? There used to be a time, on the other extreme, when Americans focused on the war crimes of the enemy. That ended, of course, with the Vietnam War, when the World Left turned on the U.S. which was no longer pals with the "worker's states."

Do the Democrats and their media really think this will play---despite Republican failings (and the DemoPub mutual surrender of the U.S. border to Mexico and the Business/Illegal Alien Lobby?).

Do they really think that an old Murtha and his media enablers, exploiting the noble 'Duty, Honor and Country,' will be excused from the duty and honor of focusing on the daily unspeakable atrocities of the enemy, instead of grandstanding exclusively on what is, by most accounts, occasional and alleged, of his own country? They gorge on what might be aberrations (if proven) from the most courageous and disciplined Americans. Have they no sense of shame left for the beastliness of the enemy? Final question: Have they no sense of shame left about themselves?

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Gringofoto. Mekong Delta, 1973. Face to face, at last, with the Vietcong, down in that Delta below My Tho, during the famous Paris-born 'Truce'. (Black and white original.)
Steve

I have begun to ask the unthinkable: Are we really deserving of the people in our military? And I am beginning to think that the answer is no we are not!