"Bush's Iraq War Fodder With Rubber Ducky"

Bush's Iraq War Fodder With Rubber Ducky, originally uploaded by casual clicks.

Today's Flickrfind, entitled "Bush's Iraq War Fodder With Rubber Ducky" by casual clicks who captions the picture as follows:

Godson #1 was sent to Iraq yesterday. He will be in a hot zone. He's the one who carries the extra ammunition for his unit. Here, he's having a heart-to-heart with his little yellow friend. Note his "shades" and lips match the ducky's. He's enjoying a little last day pool fun. What a contrast to what he'll face in just a couple of days.

The picture was uploaded on July 18 of this year. I hope the subject and his family are doing okay.

Comments

[swampcracker]

I have a bad habit of resorting to snark when something is hurting inside (and I am not facing it).

I refer to an experience in the month of May at Hunter Airfield when I was seeing my daughter off, her third deployment in the Iraq war. There were thousands of young people waiting for the next flight. Husbands and wives, boyfriends and girlfriends, parents and children ... all locked in interminable embraces as if their embraces could somehow freeze time and stop deployment. They were not ready. Like my daughter, they were tired, some still suffering from the PTSD of their last deployment.

She called me from Iraq on Fathers’ Day. Conditions were terrible, the worst ever, she says. It has been more than month since I last heard from her.

Then I read about this Neo-Con cruise, and what they really think … their unmasked bigotry … their contempt for law and human dignity. This is how they think and what they say:

"Of course, we need to execute some of these people," I wake up. Who do we need to execute? She runs her fingers through the sand lazily. "A few of these prominent liberals who are trying to demoralise the country," she says. "Just take a couple of these anti-war people off to the gas chamber for treason to show, if you try to bring down America at a time of war, that's what you'll get." She squints at the sun and smiles. " Then things'll change."

My ancestors perished in the Holocaust, and when I read comments like these, I think: “These wingnuts extremists are capable of doing the same thing.” They want nothing less than to hold in their hands the power of life and death when, in fact, they have no common decency or humanity at all.

Finally it dawns on me how angry I am. What arrogant, hypocritical, and corrupt bastards these neo-cons really are. I am not sleeping well these days.

Please refer to Echidne’s post titled, “The Neocon Cruise” (7/18/2007). She provides a link that will take you to the original article.

[Lindsay Beyerstein]

Thanks, SC.

Here's the Neocon Cruise link, via Echidne, and here's Johann Hari's original piece.

[Cass]

This reminds me of an radio interview I heard recently of a journalist who had spent several months in Iraq. After fearing for his life for so long, and witnessing scenes of violence and cruelty he would never previously have been able to imagine, he thought his emotions had gone completely numb. Then on the return flight, he happened to see some silly children's movie, the kind of thing he wouldn't ordinarily give a thought to- and when the predictable happy ending arrived, he found himself, much to his own shock, crying like a baby. Now I've got Jim Henson's "Rubber Ducky" going through my head, and I feel a bit like crying myself.

[Dave]

Wow, swamp, with that post about the Holocaust I would figure that you would be for the war.

The American people never heard the one real and factually based reason that Saddam had to be removed for.

[mudkitty]

I'm reminded of Fellini.