heroine

The Agony of War
By BOB HERBERT / NY TIMES

Nothing is so beautiful and wonderful, nothing is so continually fresh and surprising, so full of sweet and perpetual ecstasy, as the good." — Simone Weil

"There's no doubt in my mind that the good Lord has his hands full right now." — The Rev. Ted Oswald at the funeral Mass for Marla Ruzicka

In a horrifying incident that occurred in the spring of 2003, an Iraqi woman threw two of her children, an infant and a toddler, out the window of a car that had been hit accidentally in an American rocket attack. The woman and the rest of her family perished in the black smoke and flames of the wreckage. The toddler, whose name was Zahraa, was severely burned. She died two weeks later.

The infant, named Harah, was not badly hurt. She was photographed recently on the lap of Marla Ruzicka, a young humanitarian-aid worker from California who was herself killed a little over a week ago in the flaming wreckage of a car that was destroyed in a suicide bomb attack in Baghdad.

The vast amount of suffering and death endured by civilians as a result of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq has, for the most part, been carefully kept out of the consciousness of the average American. I can't think of anything the Bush administration would like to talk about less. You can't put a positive spin on dead children.

As for the press, it has better things to cover than the suffering of civilians in war. The aversion to this topic is at the opposite extreme from the ecstatic journalistic embrace of the death of one pope and the election of another, and the media's manic obsession with the comings and goings of Martha, Jacko, et al.

There's been hardly any media interest in the unrelieved agony of tens of thousands of innocent civilians in Iraq. It's an ugly subject, and the idea has taken hold that Americans need to be protected from stories or images of the war that might be disturbing. As a nation we can wage war, but we don't want the public to be too upset by it.

So the public doesn't even hear about the American bombs that fall mistakenly on the homes of innocent civilians, wiping out entire families. We hear very little about the frequent instances of jittery soldiers opening fire indiscriminately, killing and wounding men, women and children who were never a threat in the first place. We don't hear much about the many children who, for one reason or another, are shot, burned or blown to eternity by our forces in the name of peace and freedom.

Out of sight, out of mind.

This stunning lack of interest in the toll the war has taken on civilians is one of the reasons Ms. Ruzicka, who was just 28 when she died, felt compelled to try to personally document as much of the suffering as she could. At times she would go from door to door in the most dangerous areas, taking down information about civilians who had been killed or wounded. She believed fiercely that Americans needed to know about the terrible pain the war was inflicting, and that we had an obligation to do everything possible to mitigate it.

Her ultimate goal, which Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont is pursuing, was to establish a U.S. government office, perhaps in the State Department, to document the civilian casualties of American military operations. That information would then be publicly reported. Compensation would be provided for victims and their families, and the data would be studied in an effort to minimize civilian casualties in future operations.

War is always about sorrow and the deepest suffering. Nitwits try to dress it up in the finery of half-baked rationalizations, but the reality is always wanton bloodshed, rotting flesh and the lifelong trauma of those who are physically or psychically maimed.

More than 600 people attended Ms. Ruzicka's funeral on Saturday in her hometown of Lakeport, Calif. Among them was Bobby Muller, chairman of the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation. A former Marine lieutenant, he knows something about the agony of war. His spinal cord was severed when he was shot in the back in Vietnam.

He told the mourners: "Marla demonstrated that an individual can make a profound difference in this world. Her life was dedicated to innocent victims of conflict, exactly what she ended up being."

happppppppppy birthday tomdog!!!!!

wherever you are

circus circus

Schiavo Circus Hurt the GOP

Friday, April 1, 2005

San Diego -- NOW THAT Terri Schiavo has died, many of the questions the country has been wrestling with are moot.

It no longer matters which doctor had the right diagnosis, or whether Schiavo's husband or parents had her best interests at heart, or whether the federal government should have been involved, or whether this was a case that was best handled by doctors and family members as opposed to politicians and judges.

But, when it comes to the political legacy of Terri Schiavo, there is at least one question that is still open: Did this whole circus hurt the Republican Party? I'm afraid the answer is "yes."

Sure, there were some Democrats who supported reinserting Schiavo's feeding tube. It was hard to miss Rev. Jesse Jackson's surprise visit this week to the hospice in Pinellas Park, Fla. But it was Republicans in Congress who ran this sideshow -- and, in the process, they nearly ran their party into the ground.

Democrats need to suppress their glee. They did much the same thing 20 years ago. During the 1980s, Democrats went so far overboard in pandering to the special-interest groups that made up Jackson's Rainbow Coalition that they lost sight of the fact that Americans were not of one mind on issues such as immigration, affirmative action, gay rights and abortion. It wasn't that Democrats were listening to the wrong people. It was that they didn't spend enough time outside their comfort zone considering alternative points of view. They were also too quick to demonize the other side, and portray themselves as more progressive and more enlightened.

That's the way it was until the creation of the Democratic Leadership Council and the arrival on the national scene of a certain charismatic governor from Arkansas, who wasn't afraid to tell the country that he supported the death penalty and wanted to "end welfare as we know it."

Some people think that the hardest thing about politics is getting things done when you're in the minority. But what's really challenging is not overreaching when you're in the majority.

That's a lesson that Republicans are having trouble with. Lately, it seems they don't know how to act gracious in victory. They control both houses of Congress. They won the presidency by more than 3 million votes. They control a majority of the nation's governorships. And they're almost single- handedly responsible for most of the ideas floating around Washington, good and bad.

Republicans are making inroads with Latinos, thanks to White House efforts to reform the immigration system. They're laying the groundwork to do well with young voters for years to come by trying to make Social Security more equitable for the taxpayers of tomorrow. And, according to polls, they're still the choice of a majority of Americans when it comes to which party can be trusted to fight the war on terrorism.

Now those gains are threatened by the rigid agenda of social conservatives within the GOP. Democrats once convinced themselves that they were more open-minded than anyone else; for social conservatives, it's all about being closer to God than anyone else. They spend a lot of time trying to convince the country that they have cornered the market on morality and they imply, or sometimes say outright, that anyone who disagrees with them comes up short in that department.

That was the modus operandi of House Majority Leader Tom DeLay once the Schiavo drama kicked into high gear. He referred to Michael Schiavo's attorney as the "embodiment of evil." He insisted to a group of religious conservatives that God "brought us Terri Schiavo." He demonized those who disagreed with him -- those who thought that Terri Schiavo's husband should decide her fate -- by accusing them of being part of a larger conspiracy to harm DeLay's reputation and that of other conservatives. He dared try to link his own ethical problems with Terri Schiavo's ordeal.

And DeLay did all this despite the fact that -- as we now know thanks to a report in the Los Angeles Times -- he and his family confronted a similar predicament 16 years ago with DeLay's dying father, and they decided to cut off life support. According to the paper, DeLay did not object to that decision at the time.

DeLay insists that the two cases are in no way comparable. His father had no chance of recovering, he says. Where have I heard that before? I know -- from Michael Schiavo, in talking about his now departed wife.

- Ruben Navarrette Jr., San Diego Union-Tribune

news from the rabbit hole

Editor -- The "fajitagate" cops were the actual victims; firemen don't drink on duty; Barry got that big head of his the "natural" way; Arnold doesn't pander to special interests; the war in Iraq is going well -- as is the clean-up operation in Afghanistan -- and, Terri Schiavo is not a vegetable.
Congress protected our financial interests by passing the bankruptcy bill; oil in Alaska is going to save us from dependency on hostile regimes; global warming is not a problem; and Social Security is going bankrupt.

Stay tuned for more "news" from the rabbit hole ...

Oh, and in a final tribute: O.J. didn't do it!

Rest easy, Johnnie Cochran.

ALEXANDER HAMILTON
San Francisco

Letter to the Editor
SF Chronicle