Friday, March 13, 2009

Atlas Tugged

I saw this Atlas Shrugged shit coming a mile away.

The internet has been crackling of late with the ramblings of rightwingers so outraged at the prospect of paying a slightly higher top marginal tax rate starting in 2011 that they're threatening to "go Galt," like the protagonist of Ayn Rand's unreadable dooorstop Atlas Shrugged.  In the book, the nation's "productive class," also known as rich douches, lead by John Galt, a brilliant inventor, stages an exodus from a society that taxes them in order to support the existence of poor moochers.  Now a legion of web dorks are trying to start a movement to have the richest Americans reduce their productivity in order to avoid the top marginal rate.  There are yeomen among the left=leaning blogosphere who have done a fantastic job of annihilating this idiocy, so I won't bother.  I just want to point out that I saw this shit coming down the pike.

When I was working at Barnes and Noble in Wauwatosa earlier this year, Atlas Shrugged started flying off the shelves shortly after Obama won the election.  I had hoped that it was because of a school assignment or something, but sure enough, in February a dude asked for the book and I pointed out that it was selling well, hoping he would explain why he wanted it.  Sure enough, the dipstick says "It's happening right now."  I resisted the urge to smack him across the grill with a copy of Das Kapital.  

This was in February, before the budget proposal and its sunsetting of Bush era tax cuts was even released and this fuckstick was already horrified at the prospect of his fantasy quarter million dollar earning power being taxed at the rates they were during the 90s.  What makes me want to peel my skin off is the fact that this legion of Randites were gnashing their teeth as soon as Obama was elected, not remembering for a second how in the hell a gay Communist Muslim abortionist who was actually born simultaneously in Kenya and Indonesia was able to get elected president in the first place.  

THE ECONOMY HAD JUST COLLAPSED THANKS TO THE VERY LOW-TAX, DEREGULATED REGIME THAT RANDIANS SUPPORT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The most powerful and influential Randian in America is Alan Greenspan.  When I say "Randian," I don't mean the motherfucker read The Fountainhead on summer vacation once, I mean the dude was one of her proteges.  He worked with her, he studied at her "institute," she was the signal influence on his intellectual life.  He took her insights on the nature of economics (he wrote a letter to the New York Times rebutting their criticism of Atlas Shrugged in 1957, writing,"Parasites who persistently avoid either purpose or reason perish as they should") and applied them as Chairman of the Federal Reserve.  From that post, he endorsed a policy of lax regulation on derivatives trading and even went before Congress in 2004 to tell every homeowner in the country that adjustable rate mortgages were the greatest thing since the invention of the glory hole.  This all lead directly to an unprecedented meltdown, and the shit of it is is that Greenspan himself has essentially admitted that his theories were horseshit!  He went in front of Congress again a few months ago and said that there was a "flaw in the model" he used to determine "how the world works."  

It seems to me that now would be a time for anyone who ever said a kind word about Ayn Rand (or Alan Greenspan for that matter) to keep a low profile to avoid being pelted with rotten vegetables.  Instead, you see this defiant embrace of Atlas Shrugged as holy writ. Not just among the conservative blogs, but on the floor of Congress, as well.  This points to a fundamental fact about the modern conservative movement, one that helps explain how they're able to continue holding influence over millions of people regardless of the fact that they've been wrong about every major social and economic issue since forever.  They cannot be shamed.

Wednesday, March 11, 2009

Fuck Yeah/Fuck It... Volume I

Now that I've been exiled to the ice planet Hoth, I'm fixin' to resurrect this here blogspot to vent my spleen all over the internets for the benefit of my long suffering friends who just can't get enough of my spittle-flecked rantings. Now that Obama is president, writing this thing is a whole new challenge. The institutional criminality of the American government remains, but it's hard to avoid the siren call of Obama's eloquence and seeming commitment to something called "change." As I wrestle with alternating bursts of despair and delirious hope, I'm introducing a periodic feature in which I catalogue the various ways that the Obama administration is filling me with optimism and making me want to punch a baby.

Fuck Yeah!

Attorney General Eric Holder announces that the Justice Department will no longer prosecute medical marijuana growers or raid dispensaries. New Drug Czar is a cop with a drug using stepson, not a military general and he no longer enjoys cabinet level status.

Fuck it...

There still IS a fucking Drug Czar. And Joe Biden is as big a wrongheaded, gung ho drug warrior as Barry McCaffery ever was.

Fuck Yeah!

All U.S. Troops out of Iraq by 2011.

Fuck it...

2011? Seriously? And that date is only certain because the Iraqis insisted on it when they signed the Status of Forces Agreement last year.

Fuck Yeah!

Executive orders closing Gitmo and banning torture.

Fuck it...

Gitmo still holding "enemy combatants" for the foreseeable future. Obama Justice Department continues to use Bush administration interpretations of executive authority in federal court.

Fuck Yeah!

Proposed budget is a radical departure from thirty years of supply side corruption. Cuts in farm subsidies to agribusiness giants, slashes in wasteful defense projects, more money for health care and education, and the end of Bush era upper class tax cuts

Fuck it...

Senate filled with bursting with grandstanding "centrist" cockslaps who won't rest until they've gutted every decent reform in the budget.

Fuck Yeah!

Stimulus package passed with relative ease, points way to worthwhile expansion in public transit and infrastructure

Fuck it...

Had to get rid of a lot of worthwhile projects and lard in bullshit tax to appease above mentioned cockslap centrists. And, it's probably not big enough to really have an impact. Not to mention that the whole idea of an economy based on exponential growth of consumer spending is a recipe for cultural bankruptcy and ecological collapse.

Fuck Yeah!

Reversal of Bush era policies on stem cell research, family planning, federal land use, government transparency, and a bunch of other stuff

Fuck it...

Being a better president than George W. Bush is like being a better parent than Susan Smith. Pretty much the very least you can do.

Tuesday, October 21, 2008

Caribou Barbie: She-Wolf of the GOP

The slavering freak show that is the McCain-Palin campaign has made for some rivetting public theater the last few weeks. You just can't beat the sight of hundreds of paranoid, delusional racist lizard-brained right wingers working themselves into a lather over the prospect of terrorist Muslim commie Barack Hussein Obama becoming president.

The lusty boooing, catcaling and microphone ranting by wild-eyed retirees and bedraggled women in purple sweatpants is a fascinating break from rote stump speech blather. There's also something hilarious in seeing the terror and hysteria caused by the creeping realization that Obama is probably going to win. They are already envisioning a future of strike teams composed of black gang members and Al Qaeda operatives conducting house-to-house sweeps to confiscate the firearms of godfearing Americans. As a veteran leftist American-hater, I think that's probably a bit unrealistic. I'd settle for universal health care.

The most interesting part of this ritualized group therapy for dumb bigots is the role the candidates themselves play in it. McCain, of course, is the person most responisble for this outpouring of venom. Stuck with the shit end of the stick, issue-wise, during an economic meltdown and soundly defeated in three straight debates, McCain needed to change the subject. And what better subject than: OBAMA IS NOT ONE OF US! There's also McCain's personal anger at the effrontery of Obama, depriving McCain of the prize he rightfuly deserves: HE WAS A POW, damnit, we owe him this! Still, you can tell that Johnny boy isn't really comfortable demagouging the rubes with red-meat stemwinders. When the crowd starts their bloodthirsty baying of "terrorist!," McCain's eyes start flitting around nervously and that rictus grin of his wilts into a grimace of discomfort. McCain's squeamishness is partly due to the fact that he clearly hates hobnobbing with te unwashed. For all his supposedy "straight talk" bluster, McCain is first and foremost a creature of Washington. Getting down in the mud and rolling around with the fascist hogs is a far cry from Georgetown cocktail parties and the high roller room at the Bellagio.

McCain's identity as a D.C. fixture relates to another reason he doesn't seem to savor his new role as the avatar of white reactionary resentment. McCain's entire political career rest on his chummy-to-worshipful realtionship with the Beltway media. He may be "playing to the base" of the Republican party with his rightwing identity politics, but the Republican base has never been his base: those are the same Washington scribes who have spent the past decade knob-slobbering St. Maverick of Hanoi for his impeccable character and forthrightness. The David Broders and Richard Cohens of the world don't look kindly on rabble rousing of any political hue, it's improper! So, you had the surreal spectacle of McCain being hooted down by his own partisans for trying to reign in their Obama hate. It was shocking, but inevitable: McCain was never the candidate of the Republican base. He was the carbuncular booby prize left over when the GOP carnivores split between Romney, Huckabee and Guiliani. McCain isn't really ONE OF THEM either, but he's certainly closer than Obama.

The real blood and thunder doesn't flow at a GOP rally unless Sarah Palin is there to work the crowd into a frenzy. Palin is emphatically ONE OF THEM. In fact, she's the physical and intellecutal incarnation of a particular American way of life that fetishizes "authencity" and demonizes rationality and empiricism. These people pride themselves on their genuine "small town values," but the flipside of this is a violent revulsion to anything that smells faintly of THE OTHER. This dual character: immense pride in one's friendliness of those of like mind combined with viper-like hostility to "un-American" types, has been on perfect display in Palin's transformation on the campaign trail. She started out as America's Hockey Mom, but after several pathetic attempts at feigning competence in media interviews and the continuing Troopergate imbroglio brought some of the bloom off of the rose, she morphed into Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS. You can see the dark energy flowing through her when the congregation shouts "Amen" to her denunciation of Obama and his terrorist buddies. She is in her element in these moments: riling up a savage mob that would gleefully chew their own brains out if they could reach them.

Mindless, animal grunting is what Palin is looking to provoke because she is at war with the very notion of verbal communication. She aims to strip politics of any meaningful discussion of anything, let alone actual issues. That's why her main target of contempt, even more than Obama, is the "media elite." Whatever you think about the media (commie symps or handmaidens of corporate brainwashing, discuss!), most people would agree that a crucial part of their job during a political campaign is to measure the statements of political candidates against the known facts. Since her entry onto the national scene, Palin has brazenly lied, time and again, and essentially dared the media to call her on it, confident that she could summon enough hostility to these "elitists" to nullify their criticism among the electorate. Practically the first words out of her mouth as a national figure "I said 'thanks, but no thanks' to that bridge to nowhwere," were false, and since then she's been steadily shoveling bullshit. From a bizarre and easily-disproven claim that the teleprompter malfunctioned during her RNC speech to saying that the recently released Troopergate report cleared her of any unethical action even though the report explicitly labeled her conduct unethical, the manure keeps pouring out of her mouth.

Her anger at the press isn't just that they call her on her falsehoods, but that they insist that words have to mean things. After her incoherent ramblings to Katie Couric, Palin went on the offensive, complaining about a "media filter" that consisted entirely of Couric asking follow-up questions when Palin spewed mindless talking points. During the vice presidential debate, she came right out and said that she wasn't going to address the questions that moderator Gwen Ifill posed to her. She wants to reduce political rhetoric to a series of images and gestures that bypass the frontal lobe and arouse the basest possible emotional responses. Droppin' the "g" from all words with gerunds, saying a few words (Maverick, Hockey, Small Town, etc) over and over so that they become incantations, winking at the camera so that the middle-aged white men in the audience who long for a hot piece of ass who won't give them a lot of feminist backtalk can fantasize that she's looking right at them. If Palin could make it happen, she'd strip campaigns of their annoying chatter and simply appear before her worshipful crowds with a shotgun in one hand and an apple pie in the other, bend over a few times, pantomime a quick prayer, and close with the ritual slaughter of a gay Islamic moose.

Saturday, September 06, 2008

Isn't It Pretty To Think So...

So the Republican Convention is finally over. The delegates have packed their jowls and departed for sun-blasted concrete hellscapes like Sugarland, Texas and Orlando, Florida, which their porcine little minds convince them are paradises, and the poor workers at the Xcel center are just now starting to get the stench of BrylCream and prostate cancer out of the fabric. The entire affair was an airless recitation of classic Republican bullshit and vitriol, alternate fawning hero worship of John McCain with vicious contempt for anyone who lives outside the imaginary Republican America of white fences and white faces. It was hollow and stupid and hateful and boring, but it did leave us with a couple of interesting insights.

1. Communities are for losers.

The biggest laughs from the crowd in St. Paul came when goblins like Rudy Guiliani and Sarah Palin invoked Barack Obama's time working as a community organizer. The very word sparked waves of derisive guffaws. For Republicans, any community that needs organizing isn't worth a damn in the first place. Hell, communities are only for people who don't have the intelligence and wherewithal to live in a gated suburb. The sort of urban, minority communities that Obama helped organize in the early 90s are to be subjugated, not empowered. Republicans have been at war with the very idea of "community" for thirty years now, destroying these neighborhoods with deindustrialization, cuts in social spending, and the "war on drugs." All with the goal of destroying the urban working class as a political force, turning its people into an atomized social detritus, good for hard labor in the prison industrial complex and the neo-feudal service economy. The last thing Republicans, secure in their exurban bunkers and hostile to anything smacking of collective action want is to see some uppity* Negro organizing these people into an effective grassroots movement to push back against their re-enslavement.

2. Drill, Baby, Drill!

One of the most striking things about the Republican Convention, other than the fact that it set the world record for number of middle-aged pricks in cowboy hats assembled under one roof, was the complete and total lack of policy discusion on display. In a country facing economic crisis and a disastrous foreign occupation, there was nary a hint of actual proposed solutions to the nation's problems. A lot of bullshit about how awesome John McCain is for being a war hero and how delicious mooseburgers are, but nothing in the way of discussion of domestic or foreign issues. Except one: More offshore drilling! These asswipes talked about drilling so much you'd think there was some sort of subconscious psycho-sexual release to be had in all that discussion of plunging deep into the earth to unlock gushers of hot, sticky, sweet light crude. That offshore drilling is THE Republican issue of the election speaks volumes about the essential nature of Republican governance. Offshore drilling will accomplish absolutely nothing by way of reducing fuel prices or oil dependency, but it WILL create massive environmental damage AND make billions of dollars for oil companies. This has been the GOP gameplan for a generation: propose solutions that do more harm than good, while simultaneously enriching their corporate benefactors.

It's a sweet con, but this time around it might just be too much for even the remarkably bullshit-tolerant American electorate. This time, my disgust with the spectacle of Republican hatefulness and venality on display at the RNC was tempered by the strong, thrilling suspicion that these jizzbag's days are numbered. There are too many angry, fed-up people struggling in a failing economy, too many people killed in a pointless war, for the old snake oil to work anymore. Add to that the fact that the GOP is facing a once in a lifetime political talent with a shitload of money and an amazing ground organization, and it looks like the wrecking crew may well finally get the gasface from the American people.

And there's the goddamn rub.

You see, all of this awful Republican-ness is really, really making me want Obama to win in November, and that makes me feel like a goddamn chump. I know that on the fundamental issues, it simply does not matter who wins. We live in the international empire of corporate transaction that Ned Beatty rhapsodizes in the film Network,a "holistic system of systems" designed to generate profit for the shareholders at the expense of the many. All significant decisions of state are made not in by the political process, but by the sociopathic needs of the market economy, an empire of dollars as well as armies.

Elections are fought over the aesthetics of this empire. The sad fate of the Iraqi people over the past sixteen years serves as a perfect case study. It may disturb a lot of anti-war liberals to hear this, but Bill Clinton is responsible for the death of as many Iraqis as George W. Bush. The difference is that the Iraqis who died during the Clinton administration were killed by a merciless sanctions regime that denied the people of Iraq access to life-saving medical supplies, and technology to repair the water treatment infrastructure destroyed during the first Gulf War. The United Nations estimates that more than half a million Iraqi children died as a result of these sanctions, which liberal heroine Madeline Albright declared to be "worth the cost." Now, George Bush is certainly no slouch at killing Iraqis, of course. His invasion has destroyed the lives of millions of them. In Iraq, the result of Clinton foreign policy was similar to that of Bush's:
death and pain and horror. The difference between the two policies lay in the way they are perceived by the American electorate. People of the liberal temperament prefer the Clinton approach because the deaths are quiet: no bombs, just starvation and untreated disease. Quiet enough to allow people who prize their ability to empathize and live humanely to feel self-righteous. Folks of a conservative bent like the Bush method because the deaths are loud. The cluster bombs and depleted uranium rounds pound out a rhythm of American power and domination, gratifying people who cherish righteous displays of violence. These two groups of Americans fight tooth and nail in elections to determine what political aesthetic tendencies will determine the superficial shape of the empire. Either way, the result in Iraq is the same: industrial-sized misery doled out in order to "stabilize" the world energy market.

So why the hell do I care who wins?

Part of it comes from my addiction to electoral politics. I follow it with the same rapt attention to the details as I do baseball, and like baseball, I know that I can only truly enjoy it if I pick a team to root for. Mainly, though, I long for the chance to really be disappointed by a politician. I came to political consciousness in the waning days of the Clinton administration. His craven triangulations were taken for granted as part of the political landscape. Then, came Bush, who I despised as a witless, entitled rich kid disphit from day one. I never had the experience of having my giddy hopes for change crushed under the heel of political reality. Clinton's mushy, pro-corporate third way and Bush's psychotic end times warmongering are all I've known. I'm a political cynic, but I haven't earned it. I want to experience that sinking, gasping realization that the man who filled my with a real sense that a better world is within our grasp was just another conman shoveling bullshit down my windpipe. I want to test my reason, which tells me that the game is rigged and that politics is a farcical kabuki show, against a political reality with the potential to upend my theoretical understanding. If Obama ends up sucking, at least I'll know I was right all along. And if, by some amazing chance, Obama doesn't end up revealing himself to be another gutless cog in the machinery? If he does succeed in at the very least humanizing the empire, of taming it and forcing it to serve the needs of humanity and the planet and not simply profit, if we find ourselves in 2012 living in a world where Guantanamo Bay has been shut down, where quality health care is affordable for all, where we are really turning away from an carbon-based economy, where no more children are shredded by American-made cluster bombs in Baghdad or the Gaza strip...well, that sure as hell would be something, wouldn't it?

*That's straight from the mouth of Republican Representative Lynne Westmoreland, who called Obama "uppity" in a recent interview. He says he doesnt' think there's a racial connotation to that word: the cocksucker's from Georgia.

Abu-Jamal/Zubaydah '08!

Republicans mock Barack Obama for presiding over an empty cult of personality, but their geriatric dog-and-pony show in St. Paul consisted almost entirely of paens to John McCain's personal heroism as a POW during the Vietnam war. Health care? Jobs programs? Global Warming? Iraq Exit Strategy? Who needs that shit, this dude was a fucking prisoner of war for like, five years. The entire argument for McCain's candidacy consists boils down to this: He was a POW for five years. You people owe him.

Beyond the fact that this is a punishingly stupid and mendacious way to pick a president (Mumia Abu-Jamal has been in a tiny cell for a lot longer than John McCain ever was. Write in!), it speaks to the historical amnesia and immorality that goes into the way McCain's time in the Hanoi Hilton is remembered.

In the bathetic introductory video to McCain's speech Thursday night, Fred Thompson gurgled his way through this line: "When you spend five years in a box, you dedicate yourself to making sure other people don't have to live in that box." As though John McCain's top priority as president will be safeguarding American citizens from being taken prisoner by Vietnamese communists. You know what, John? I'm not too worried about that happening. There's pretty much zero chance that I'll be taken prisoner by the Vietnamese...because I'm not going to drop a bunch of fucking bombs on their country for no good reason!

None of the billion or so retellings of the John McCain imprisonment story told during the RNC contained any sort of context. He wasn't kidnapped by the SLA or something. He was shot down on during his 23rd bombing mission over Vietnam. A duty that he volunteered for. McCain wasn't some poor bastard drafted off of the back of a tractor. He was the son of an admiral who was already 30 years old, a man who could write his own ticket in the Air Force and chose to fly payload after payload of explosives into the heart of a third world country that had never attacked the United States, in order to help prop up a corrupt illegitimate government that wouldn't have lasted a day if free elections were held. His endurance and sense of personal honor are certainly impressive, but it doesn't abnegate the fact that he willingly participated in an air war that killed around three million Vietnamese people. Even scarier is the fact that McCain seems to take his suffering as proof of the righteousness of his actions.

In any event, it was certainly surreal watching a gaggle of red meat Republicans celebrating the bravery and character of someone who was tortured and imprisoned. Ninety miles off the coast of Florida the U.S. government has got a bunch of guys who've been jailed for longer than McCain, subjected to many of the same "enhanced interrogation techniques" as McCain, and all are being held on far flimsier pretexts. Something tells me, though, that the Gop-bots wouldn't say that Abu Zubaydah is ready to lead.

Monday, June 16, 2008

Winston Churchill can suck my dick.


At work today I saw the new issue of Newsweek staring out at me like a grinning death mask. The article within is a typical Evan Thomas snorefest about how comparisons of contemporary world politics to the Munich agreement between Chamberlain and Hitler are ahistorical and fatuous. That's true as far as it goes, and important to remember as John McCain continues his mushheaded analogizing from coast to coast. What chapped my hindquarters was this blithe invocation of Churchill as a symbol of political wisdom, especially given the fact that almost all of the foreign policy debates currently raging in this election are over the Middle East.
Because nobody in this goddamn country (including members of the supposed elite media) can remember more than one fact about any given historical figure or event, Winston Churchill is known exclusively for his stiff-spined opposition to Hitler. The man had an incredibly long, varied career in British politics, and for some crazy reason, the part of his career that is most directly relevant to the current geopolitical clusterfuck has completely dissapeared from memory. After World War One, the defeated Ottoman empire was portioned out between the victorious Entente powers. France got what is now Syria, while the British gained control of Palestine, Jordan, and what is now Iraq, which was essentially invented by the British by unifying three Ottoman provinces under an imposed Hashemite king.
Then, as now, British troops occupied the territory now called "Iraq" in order to prop up a handpicked ruler. Winston Churchill was instrumental in that occcupation, first as minister of war and air power, then as Colonial Secretary. Then, as now, Iraqis responded to the occupation of their land by a foreign army with violent uprisings. The British, lead by Churchill, responded with a campaign of terror that was even more naked in its brutality than shock and awe. Not only were villages burned to the ground and civilians shot, but Churchill, a devout fan of the air power as a tool for maintaing imperial tranquility, authorized a campaign of bombing, including the dropping of poison gas, on recalcitrant tribesmen. During the early 20s, air raids, sometimes featuring mustard gas bombs, were visited on rebellious Iraqi villages and cities, as well as peaceful communities that had committed to capital crime of refusing to pay taxes to the regime. Some weak sisters in the colonial office objected to the practice, but Churchill was adamant: "I do not understand this squeamishness about the use of gas. I am strongly in favour of using poison gas against uncivilized tribes."
So, on the most pressing foreign policy question facing a prospective American president: what to do about the occupation of Iraq, we don't have to resort to speculation when considering what Winston would do. We know exactly what he did! It's easy to imagine him proudly puffing on a stogie while advising Bush to deal with the Mahdi army by dropping a few tons of mustard gas on Sadr city to keep the wogs in line.
The reason Newsweek, in their haste to play the guardian of historical truth, has displayed, once again, the horrifying blind spots that plague established media and ensure that any halfway ambitious politician who wants to start a war will always be able to count on the press as an eager accessory. In any given policy debate, you can guarantee that no one will be able to keep more than one historical fact in their heads at any one moment. So, whenever the sacred name of Churchill has been invoked during the debate over Iraq, from before the war until now, it has always been in the context of Munch, Appeasement, and how much of a douchebag pussy Neville Chamberlain was for not standing up to Hitler, who, like Saddam Hussein, had a mustache. AT NO POINT did any of the elite media types use the introduction of Churchill into the debate to remind people that a Western country invading and occupying Iraq in order to secure "stability" and "democracy" (wink) was not a new development. In fact, the reaction of the Iraqi people to a foreign occupation that proclaimed itself to be a force of liberation was easily predictable: it had already happened. Also predictable is the reaction of an Imperial power who sees its well intentioned gift of liberty rejected: it drops bombs. In 1920, they were filled with mustard gas. In 2005, they were filled with napalm and white phosperous. That's called progress.

Wednesday, February 01, 2006

On the suckiness of Justice Samuel Alito. (You asked for it!)

It is total.

Also, did anyone notice that during the State of the Union speech, Bush didn't mention the fact that a significant portion of said union is still waterlogged and depopulated, six months after a hurricane strike?

Wednesday, January 25, 2006

Joel Stein: Fuck the Troops!

http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/opinion/la-oe-stein24jan24,0,1803125.column?track=hpmostemailedlink


Finally! Somebody makes the obvious and similtaneously unspeakable point that, if you think that innocent civilians are being massacred in Iraq, as they have for the past three years, it means that somebody, namely the troops, has been massacring them. All those families shot to pieces at checkpoints were killed because there were people willing to invade a foreign country and shoulder rifles at those checkpoints. I really don't know how much moral responsibility "the troops" hold for what is happening in Iraq, but I do now that the current situation: in which the actual perpetrators of the war are completely off-limits from consideration as moral agents, is morally untenable. And watch as Joel Stein is destroyed by pundits of the left and the right, in order to maintain that ridiculous taboo.