Completely Unnecessary

This milestone is underscored by the countless (or merely uncounted) dead and displaced Iraqis.

I was temped to add ‘of course’ to the sentence above, but the media rarely reports on those larger numbers, which number now in the millions.

I hope it is of some comfort to President George Bush that the four soldiers that pushed us to the 4000 mark died on Easter.

I doubt much that it’s of comfort to anyone else.

A.P.’s Death Toll for Iraq War Reaches 4,000 [NYT-AP]

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• Westboro Fined $11 Million

I generally prefer keeping bigots like Fred Phelps’ Westboro baptist church* off the radar. Any media presence, be it praise, derision, or just insanity, fuels the fire of these kinds of people.

It’s like the KKK - I respect their right to exist, but I’m down with their marginalization. Or like dog training; they’re not totally rational, so the best way to stop their bad behavior is through calm ignoring.

So view this post instead as a shout out to the American justice system, which today ordered Westboro to pay $11 million to the father of a dead soldier. Those familiar with the church will no doubt guess why - they protested the kid’s funeral because we’re all going to hell and Iraq is about gays. Or something.

Anyway, according to the judge, the award “far exceeds the net worth of the defendants,” which sounds like good news to me. Even posterboard and tempra paint can be pricey when you’ve got $11 mil to pay back.

* - I’m not using proper nouns for those two words because I think the church perverts the teachings of Baptists beyond recognition as part of the faith. That’s my own personal opinion, though - others would probably disagree.

Church ordered to pay $10.9 million for funeral protest [CNN]

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• Oh, By the Way? We’re Desperate.

Here’s surprising news:

I don’t know how you’d begin to figure this out, but if you could work out the total amount of government money spent in salaries (including aides, hours on questions prep, etc.) for the House Armed Services Committee to listen to this today… well you’d probably just want to vomit more than you do on, say, a daily basis.

ps - you’re missing the words ‘Crocker’ and ‘have’ there on the cut off bit. Cropping’s a bitch.

US News and World Report [via GoogleNews]

Vaguely Related

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Well, they just keep on coming. It appears that if you’re a gay man being recruited by the Army, the worst you have to deal with is insane, all-caps emails.

From Marcia Ramode, Army recruiter, to Corey Andrew, who is gay, African-American, and not interested in joining the Army:

You go back to Africa and do your gay voodoo limbo tango and wango dance and jump around and prance in the sun and run all over the place half naked there and practice your gay morals over there that’s where you belong… Obviously you do not understand if you are gay you are out of the military you are disqualified. So whats [sic] the big issue here. You are upset you do not qualify. I bet that’s true. Your inner spirits are not true to you since you do not know if you are male or female. You must be a total idiot and so stupid to presume [sic] that you do not know what gender you are.

This was all in caps. I have removed them for you because I am a wonderful human.

Granted, Marcia was probably a little ticked off by Andrew’s comment, “So take that to your next rain dance and STFU!” She’s Native American, after all. But perhaps Andrew was responding to her previous email:

You head of fto [sic] the gay land of people who have no morals and get rid of yourself. Personally I think being gay is disgusting and immoral…. Take your ass back where you belong not here.

I’m not a big fan of combating racism and homophobia with sarcastic racism, but I’ve got to give the upper hand to Andrew here.

Good news for the Army, though - Marcia says military recruitment numbers are up! “Thousands of qualified people join the Army every day.” Bad news for the Army? She thinks there’s a “WW11.” Someday, Marcia, someday.

Via ThinkProgess and Pam’s House Blend, who has a pdf of the emails.

Vaguely Related

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Never got around to that angry part yesterday. Spent most of the day attempting to procure potting soil with only a bike and flagging enthusiasm for my gardening project.

Onto the angry. Remember that blog I posted a little while back about the women being raped and otherwise sexually assaulted while being recruited for the Armed Forces? Turns out, it may have just been basic training. Helen Benedict, writing here for Salon, interviewed over 20 female veterans; they said:

…the danger of rape by other soldiers is so widely recognized in Iraq that their officers routinely told them not to go to the latrines or showers without another woman for protection.

I just want to go back and highlight the phrase “by other soldiers.” Yes, female American troops are being attacked by their fellow US soldiers. One woman Benedict interviewed carried a knife to protect herself from her own countrymen.

So much more after the jump…

(more…)

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The Boston Globe reports that the Pentagon is considering installing video cameras in its recruiting stations to prevent “misconduct.” This misconduct includes, but is not limited to: sexually assaulting female recruits!

Both analysts and the Pentagon said sexual misconduct is among the most pressing issues of recruiter wrongdoing. An investigation by the Associated Press found that in 2005, at least 80 male recruiters were disciplined for abusing female potential recruits.

More than 100 young women who had expressed interest in joining the military reported that their recruiters had victimized them, the AP investigation found. The abuse included rape on couches in recruiting offices, assaults in government cars, and gropings en route to military entrance exams.

Now, granted, you have to make sure they’re not lesbians, but I’m not sure this is the best way to meet your quota for the month. Grope her after the exam.

The Pentagon also recently introduced “buddy system” for recruiters interacting with potential recruits of the opposite sex. They seriously have to put a third person in the room to prevent “irregularities.” Presumably, most military recruiters aren’t interested in a threesome if it’s boy-girl-boy. That’d be totally gay.

Also, happy fourth birthday to the Iraq War. If you were a child, we’d be sending you to preschool this year! Instead, we’ll just continue to watch in horror as you murder hundreds of thousands of people, empty our coffers, and make us the most hated people on the face of the earth. Man! The ‘terrible twos’ are lasting forever!

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Not to mention, a year and a half or, say, three.

On December 18th, the president attempted to assuage the American people, saying, “My fellow citizens, not only can we win the war in Iraq, we are winning the war in Iraq.”

Last night, having gauged that no one was buying that line anymore, he tried for mutual indignation. “The situation in Iraq is unacceptable to the American people; and it is unacceptable to me.”

I’d like to refer to the first clause in that sentence as “The ‘Duh’ Heard Around the World.” And by the way, I gave the president the benefit of the doubt on that semi-colon.

I will say that watching the speech on closed-captioning with a drink in my hand made it easier to watch.

Think Progress has a video up from MSNBC (Joe Scarborough of all people) of clips from various Bush addresses. No CC though, so you have to watch it with the sound on. Bummer.

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The Stranger just posted of a guy who got “knocked on [his] ass” refer to all the dead Iraqis as “hodgies.”

I looked this term up, not knowing what it was. Turns out it’s a generalized reference to combatants against US soldiers in Iraq. The term is an Americanization of the word “hajjis,” people who have made the pilgrimage to Mecca.

Googling “hodgies” brings up this lovely comment on a myspace page…

what the fuck is up!?!! so what are you up to now??? i am an infantry soldier in the army now, b/c i am that hardcore! haha. who would have ever guessed i’d do something that required that i kill lots of people…those mother fuckin’ hodgies threw a party the day we rolled out of that sandbox! but as much as i fucking hate iraq, i cant wait to go back and shoot some more! (deployment date: august 2007) …

Proud moments. Since I’m not sure if I’m stealing his speech by posting it, here is his myspace page.

Interestingly, the term ‘hodgies’ is also occasionally used to describe Iraqis, in general. I find it interesting that a term to describe people making a peaceful pilgrimage is bastardized into a term for enemy combatants, and is then applied to the population as a whole.

Sheds a bit of light on the way our troops view the people they’re liberating, as well as the insecurity of not knowing who your enemy is, so everyone becomes your enemy.

Since the term is related to Islamic pilgrimage, that enemy appears to be Islam itself.

Vaguely Related

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• Westboro Fined $11 Million