I’m posting this a little late, but - on the Arlington List, the “Co-Leader of MoveOnArlington”, wrote:
MoveOn.org is planning vigils all over the country when we top 2,000 Americans killed in Iraq. As of this morning, 1,992 American soldiers had tragically died.
On the date we learn about the 2,000th death, if we hear before 3:00 PM Eastern time, the plan is to hold the vigils the next day at 6:30 PM. If we hear after 3:00 PM Eastern time, MoveOn will host the vigils two days later. If the 2,000th death is announced this weekend, the vigils will be held on Tuesday.
As a Co-Leader of MoveOnArlington, I have agreed to host an Arlington Vigil. It will be held in front of Town Hall at 6:30 PM on the determined date. I hope Listers will attend, and invite their families, friends, and neighbors.
If you attend, please bring candles.
When hassled a little by some of the few (known) conservatives on The List, he elaborated [presented out of order, and incompletely]:
If one believes our country acted wrongly, as I do, we are obligated to protest. “To announce that there should be no criticism of the President or that we are to stand by the President right or wrong is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public” - Republican President Theodore Roosevelt.
While I concede that he certainly has a right to protest when he thinks his government is acting improperly, his fellow citizens certainly have the right to point out to him that he’s at best a stooge and at worst a dangerous idiot.
If it were completely up to me, the vigil would never be held, because that would mean that the 2000th casualty has not occurred. In fact, if it were up to me, the 1st casualty would not have occurred, and ten of thousands of innocent Iraquis would not have died.
Now, as sketchy as various casualty esitmates floating around out there may be, let’s consider the poster’s assertion at face value. He says “ten [sic] of thousands”. Now, maybe that’s 10,000. Or, maybe it means 20,000. Or perhaps 30,000 - which I could accept, for the sake of the argument. If the number was larger, I assume the poster would have provided something less general in order to make his horse that much higher. So, let’s say 30,000 [A little googling reveals the number to be somewhat below 30,000, and one source says that almost half of post-invasion deaths were due to criminal violence and the insurgency], or 10,000 per year of occupation.
Even thought it may not be as safe as it used to be to assume that something published in a newspaper has been fact-checked: David Warren tells us that Hussein took power 26 years ago (which means his reign lasted 23 years) and that the Ba’ath Party took control of Iraq 37 years ago. And also that since the occupation began, we’ve discovered 450,000 dead Iraqis in mass graves, with no particular reason to think we won’t continue to find more. Even if we give Hussein the benefit of the doubt and assume that this little landfill project began not with him but with his Ba’athist predecessors, and we divide 450,000 by 37 instead of 23, we get roughly 12,000 killed per year in order to keep these assholes on top of the heap.
So, Mr. studly-cap Co-Leader of MoveOnArlington, I suspect that tens of thousands of innocent Iraqis WOULD have died had it been “up to you”, and would continue to die at a similar or more horrible rate for the foreseeable future. Happily, there will instead every year be thousands more Iraqis glad that it wasn’t up to you, who would otherwise have been too dead to be glad of anything.
2 Comments
Par for the course for a MoveOn-ite. Par for the course. Especially for one in love enough with the group to get himself into a leadership (however minor) position. And that’s not even counting his near-gleeful ghoulishness over his beloved countdown to 2000.
It occurs to me that to your average peacenik, a vigil for war dead is not a bad thing. In fact, it really shouldn’t seem like a bad thing to anyone. So I really have to credit MoveOn for managing to make such a simple thing so terrible. What a bunch of scumbags. It did amuse me to note that the vigil is for dead americans, yet only the dead iraqis were described as “innocent” in the Co-Leader’s post. It seems like they can’t decide who to praise and who to denigrate.
Another idiotic (and usually fairly hysterical) listmember posted about this event, which I note is touting that discredited lancet report. The degree to which the self-importance and assumed moral authority of these jerks (not to mention political clout) relies on piles of dead brown people is astounding (it’s almost like a new spin on voting the graveyard). If one pile of dead brown people gets you moral authority and political clout, two piles gets you more clout, etc. The temptation to lie about how many piles of dead brown people there are apparently becomes irresistable, since it’s fairly obvious that the statistical methods applied in the Lancet study are so inappropriate they could only have been used deliberately to ensure that falsely high numbers would be found - an excusable crime because it’s all in service of a good political cause, of course.