Flutterby™! : courses

Over at Medley, Lyn had an entry titled Always Been At War with Eastasia in which she contrasted Dubya's "We've never been stay the course, George!" response to George Stephanopolous's query about James Baker's plan to find a middle ground in Iraq with all the times he's said, of U.S. policy in Iraq, that "we will stay the course",

Think Progress has cites, and there's a YouTube video collection of Georgie saying "stay the course".

While we're talking about lying politicians and bad policy, Yesterday my dad mentioned an instance of abusing our veterans. Coincidentally, RC3/ofinterest linked to Kevin Tillman: After Pat's Birthday (alt link). Kevin is the brother of Pat Tillman, the football star who gave up a pro career to enlist, and who, we've mentioned, was killed by "friendly fire" in Afghanistan:

It gets me thinking about a conversation I had with Pat before we joined the military. He spoke about the risks with signing the papers. How once we committed, we were at the mercy of the American leadership and the American people. How we could be thrown in a direction not of our volition. How fighting as a soldier would leave us without a voice ... until we got out.

That was the hook, one that especially got me in light of the "you're not signing up for 4 years, you're signing up for at least 8, but they don't tell you that" that I learned while looking deeper into my the circumstances behind my Dad's note. But the whole damned thing is a must read, because it's just too powerful to excerpt. Go read it.

On a related but separate note, I also remember, back in the early days of the invasion of Iraq, saying to a friend that it'll be months or years before the U.S. took Baghdad. I didn't say anything when U.S. troops rolled in a few days or weeks later, but as this report from Baghdad shows, even though we've got troops on the ground there, we're still a long way from taking the city (also via RC3/oi).