Modern Hypocrisy Magazine--"All the Crust of a Pie Factory"

Special "Do As I Say" Edition

First up, and always on everybody's weblog, the tittilating tale of Terri Schiavo. Terri's body is on the auction block, and up for grabs. Who will pony up the moral currency to get to her first? Well, if little Brandi Swindell, 28, of the great Midwest has anything to say about it, it'll be chalk one up for the forces of righteousness. Sez the NYTimes:

"(Ms. Swindell), who said she traveled from the Midwest to spend the next few days staging a hunger strike in support of Ms. Schiavo's parents, said she would not mind being arrested in an attempt to come to Ms. Schiavo's aid.
"I think this is a grave human rights violation," Ms. Swindell said, "and I can't just sit by."

So one must therefore assume that Ms. Swindell was in the forefront of the movement to block Bush from waging an illegal and un-necessary war on Iraq, and that she was also among the citizens petitioning her government for relief for the Guantanamo detainees, and is still recovering from her last hunger strike during the US refusal to intervene in Darfur, and iseven as we speak making her fellow citizens aware of the horrors being continued in the heart of the eastern Congo. Eh?

Next up, that court jester of international diplomacy, Donnie Rumsfeld, who just has a knack for saying the wrong thing at the wrong time, doesn't he? This time it's a stern warning to the children of Iraq, when he goes:

"Mr. Rumsfeld noted the ferment, turnover and slippage inherent in the process as Iraq has moved from post-invasion governing council to interim government to transitional government.
He then warned that Iraqis had to "be darned careful about making a lot of changes just to be putting in their friend or to be putting in someone else from their tribe or from their ethnic group."
"This is too serious a business over there," he said on the program "Fox News Sunday," "and the United States has got too much invested and too much committed and too many lives at stake for people to be careless about that."

Well, the mind boggles. This coming from a member of what has got to be the most nepotistic, heads-up-each-others'-asses excuse for an administration in my lifetime. And the part about the US having so much invested--as opposed to the uncounted hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of Iraqi dead and maimed, the ruined businesses and infrastructure, the civil war, the stolen historical patrimony, the fast-dwindling rights of the distaff population--well, I'm sure that finger-waving is bound to straighten up those darned kids.

And finally, while we're in the Tigris Valley, there's this:

US Frees Iraqi Kidnappers
So They Can Spy On Insurgents
Americans undermining
local police attempts to crack down on wave of abductions

Kidnappers have been a major, if under-reported, problem since the invasion, targeting well-off and middle-class Iraqis for easy money, and there is a tremendous anger and frustration about it, unhelped by the American tendency to ignore it.

""The Americans are allowing the breakdown of Iraqi society because they are only interested in fighting the insurgency," said a senior Iraqi police officer. "We are dealing with an epidemic of kidnapping, extortion and violent crime, but even though we know the Americans monitor calls on mobiles and satellite phones, which are often used in ransom negotiations, they will not pass on any criminal intelligence to us. They only want to use the information against insurgents."

That's all right. They'll fix his ass.

Update: Mustn't leave out this, from CBS News courtesy of Tom over at Corrente:

"At least 108 people have died in American custody in Iraq and Afghanistan, most of them violently, according to government data provided to The Associated Press. Roughly a quarter of those deaths have been investigated as possible abuse by U.S. personnel."

But thoses folks, being generally walking, talking, breathing on their own, and capable of thought, probably don't count as "human life".