Mission accomplished, again?

There’s no difference between this declaration that the mission is over and declaring “Mission Accomplished.” This so-called withdrawal is utter nonsense. There are still 50,000 troops in Iraq. “Combat” versus “non-combat” semantics don’t change that fact. Troops are still at risk and the costs continue. As with the oil in the Gulf, things aren’t gone just because you officially say that they are.

Just as hard to stomach is NBC’s tone of self-congratulation for breaking the news. In fact, it’s not breaking news at all. It actually “constitutes official Pentagon announcement.” What is this, the Korean Central News Agency? Xinhua?

1936 and 2010

Now that capitalism was passing into a decadent phase, and many of the grooves along which they had rolled so happily were worn down to nothing, they were broken and beaten, and their ability to choose the broad outlines of their daily lives, to make political decisions, was now less than it had been originally. It was inevitable that the children of such muddlers, who would themselves be muddlers, would support any system which offered them new opportunities for profitable obedience, which would pattern society with new grooves in place of the old, and would never be warned by any instinct of competence and self-preservation if that system was leading to universal disaster.

Rebecca West, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (Penguin Classics) (Paperback) [Kindle Edition]