Fallujah in Pictures, Clearing Brush, Pharma-gov

As I'm going through the day's news, trying to forget them long enough to plan class, to grade some papers, to find some distance from everything that is going on, I inevitably fall on something like this: Fallujah in Pictures

Look at it. Think about it.

I don't know what's going to happen. I can't pretend to. But we are making enemies faster than we are making friends and, unless the Bushites get lucky and the Iraq election leads to a request for America to leave, we're in Iraq for a long time to come. Regardless, we have given the Muslim world ammunition for decades. Welcome to America's West Bank. I guess everybody knows that.

Meanwhile, back at the homestead, Holy George, is purging the ranks of the CIA. Like Homeland Security, he's setting it up to be a publicity apparatus, a research institution whose findings are guaranteed to be 100% in line with administration doctrine, or should I say dogma. This is ritual. This is like clearing brush. What are these darn weeds doing here? That's not the landscape I'm after. By golly, this here needs to be a golf course where I can drive the ball 250 yards without any water obstacles. That is my right. That is my priviledge. Serve me. Watch this drive.

Yes, clearing weeds.

It dawns on me that the administration is actually modeling itself not on the energy companies (though that is true to a certain extent as well), but on the drug companies. They do their own self-serving research, they spend luxuriously on advertisement and sell a lifestyle that finds its potency in a balance of fear (of death, of illness, of impotence) and often ambiguous results riddled with side-effects. Think Vioxx.

But hey, these manly men are tough right? They've got hard-ons that would make a mule blush. WEll, that's what they would like you to think. I think they are first-class sissies, policy hacks, and, unfortunately, politicians.

I'm depressed today.

Howard Dean for Chair.

Signing off.