Archive for April, 2005
51 items.
THE BLOB ATTACKS! Seriously, it does. Look around you, it’s everywhere. That bright light falling from heaven, the meteor that ruptures and spills out amorphic ooze that goes around gobbling up people? Considering the beliefs of the directors and producers of “The Blob”, it’s a safe bet it’s the fallen light of Lucifer deluding and absorbing humanity. Maybe not so confessed but I’d be seriously surprised if it wasn’t the quality inspiriation behind this Sci-Fi, horror flick that, despite poor acting, effects, script and lighting (no, I was never impressed), scared the begeezuz out of untold numbers of children. But for those not destined to be part of the Choice 144,000 reserved for the Rapture, the BLOB may instead remind of the tenacious growth of the ultra-conservative Dominionists and Neo-Dispensationalists, the absorption of millions into their faithful ranks, and their seeming bottomless pits of wrath and hunger.
Actually, there is no consensus among Dispensationalists on whether the 144,000 mentioned in Revelation 14 refers to those raptured, or to saints who are preserved and go around preaching the gospel after the rapture, or if they are raptured and immediately descend again with Christ, or if they are raptured and then immediately thereafter all other believers are raptured. Also, there are many different brands of dispensationalist and what makes a person a neo-dispensationalist or a progressive dispensationalist or this or that dispensationalist is unclear to me and from what I read seems sketchy to many who should be in the know. Rapture terminology is not even found in Revelation and didn’t appear until 1830 when a young Scottish girl, during an illness, had ecstatic visions in which she perceived Christ coming not once but twice. Or maybe not. Maybe instead it was a preacher in 1832 who originated the notion of the rapture. Somewhere around then, a charismatic revival followed one or the other with its outpouring of charismatic gifts which proved to individuals the end was near. Maybe John Darby picked up on this new doctrine and spread the word on the rapturous secret removal of the church or maybe it was first someone else followed by John Darby. But a man named Cyrus Scofield (not a theologian) eventually put together the Scofield Reference Bible (1909), an end times training kit that followed Darby’s teachings with notes on dispensations and prophecy for the layman. After Scofield’s death, his pupil, Lewis Sperry Chafer (not a theologian), went about spreading the word and founded the Dallas Theological Seminary in 1924 which, along with the Moody Institute in Chicago, became a key dispenser of dispensational theology.
The Rapture? It is said that Ms. MacPherson, the ill girl who had the ecstatic visions had also a friend who shared in her interests. Together they would in states of ecstasy appear as statues barely touching the ground, nearly levitating, such levitation known as the “rapture”. In Revelation, in the Greek, the whisking away is instead harpazo which connotes a powerful seizing, carrying away of something.
Much like the blob, Rapture theology morphed and grew and morphed and grew so that now it is fairly synonymous with Xtian fundamentalism and evangelism and conservative Xtianity in general. Never mind what the theologians believe in their colleges. It’s what the layman believes that’s important here, and I imagine one would be hard pressed to find an American layman Xtian who hasn’t been influenced in some way by Apostolic pentacostal thought (baptizing in the name of Jesus rather than the Father, Son and Holy Ghost) and the rapture theology of evangelicals and fundamentalists. It’s been heavily mainstreamed since the 1970s.
Maybe some visitors remember Hal Lindsey’s “The Late Great Planet Earth” (1970). His book was a prime vehicle of Rapture thought in the 70s and was popular with the Xtian student group that went around capturing high schoolers through veiled means. Young Life. I know I was a naive thing when invited to a Young Life meeting which was presented to me as just some kind of get-together with friends. I was 15 it was the beginning of the school year and I’d never heard of Young Life. Someone played guitar. They sang Bob Denver songs and Kumbaya. I realized immediately that I’d been duped, that the group had an agenda and the agenda was Christ, but a friend promised boys and the prospect of romance was a powerful incentive to go anywhere and my friend seemed to have a great time. I went to maybe three meetings but about the only boy worth anything who kept showing up was an ex boyfriend from when I was 14 who I had dropped and who had not only become quite Xtian (a surprise, he’d not been when we were together), he was also with someone else, and I wasn’t interested in him and I wasn’t interested in anyone else who showed up so I stopped going because it felt weird, and it felt weird being around him, and everyone was always quite normal big happy and singing and stuff and this became very stressful to me after a while as there was nowhere for my angsty self to fit in. So, as angst was a foreign element that just seemed perplexing to all else, and as there were no boys to be had (more precisely, no boys with angst and alcohol or drugs) I stopped going. But what Young Life did do was put “The Late Great Planet Earth” in my hands because I saw everyone else reading it and I wondered what it was about.
The Norton Anthology of English Literature provides a somewhat disarming biography of Lindsey.
Hal Lindsey, formerly a tugboat captain in New Orleans, attended the Dallas Theological Seminary, the heart of American Dispensationalist apocalyptic inquiry, where he studied with John F. Walvoord, author of the 1974 best-seller Armageddon, Oil, and the Middle East Crisis. After touring extensively with the Campus Crusade for Christ, an evangelic ministry, Lindsey established Christian Associates, a prophetic ministry based in California. Deriving his authority from apocalyptic scripture alone, he has spoken on an impending third world war (as Armageddon) to U.S. military intelligence committees, the American Air War College (an Air Force strategic training center), the U.S. State Department, and the Pentagon itself.
Lindsey’s most influential book, The Late Great Planet Earth (1971), proved immensely popular in the troubled early 1970s. Its publishers claim that it sold over 28 million copies; it was made into a documentary film in 1978, narrated by Orson Welles. The importance of Lindsey’s writing lies in his reshaping and popularizing the elementary apocalyptic scenario into a third world war involving nuclear weapons and a Russian invasion of the Middle East.
Hal Lindsey has a website, with cartoons! Like this one. Which is not satire. And this one. And this one in which all the Republicans are carried off by the Rapture.
But back to THE BLOB!
THE BLOB was directed by two individuals although only one is credited. The credited individual is Irvin S. Yeaworth Jr. who in 2004 died in an automobile accident in Jordan where he had been working on the building of a theme park called the Jordanian Experience. Yeaworth was born in Berlin in 1926 but was in Pennsylvania by the age of 10. The son of an ordained minister, in 1952 he founded Good News Productions and began his career of making films for the Christian market. He also headed the Pennsylvani company, Valley Forge Films, which produced noncommercial short subjects on religious themes. Yeaworth had already directed the morality flick “The Flaming Teen-Age” (1956) when Jack Harris, producer of “The Blob” invited Yeaworth to direct it. “4D Man (1959)”, “Dinosaurus!” (1960) followed but didn’t do as well, and Yeaworth returned to Valley Forge Films. In the 60s he directed the Christin comedy “The Gospel Blimp” and “Way Out”, a horrors of heroin addiction film with an “I found Jesus” ending. His mini-bio at IMDB gives his later religious films as a return to his first love, and he apparently made some films with Billy Graham, then later worked on World’s Fair and theme park pavilion design and production.
Jack Harris was a native of Pennsylvania who linked up with the movie ministry of Forge Fillm Studios and is connected also with “4D Man”, “Dionsaurus” and “The Eyes of Laura Mars”. He also directed and wrote “The Unkissed Bride” (1966), a comedy in which a couple’s honeymoon is disrupted by the groom’s childhood obsession with Mother Goose. When the groom is unable to consummate the marraige they go to a psychiatrist where LSD is used as treatment. (Where in the hell is a copy of this film? I’d love to see it!!)
Finally, to our current friend of The Rapture, an uncredited director of “The Blob”, who was also associate producer, was a Russell S. Doughten Jr. He has in his list of credits: “The Hostage” (1967 producer, director), “Fever Heat” (1969 producer, director), “A Thief in the Night” (1972, executive producer, story), “Happiness is…” (1975, writer, director), “All the King’s Horses” (1977, producer, writer), “Sammy” (1977, director), “A Distant Thunder” (1978, executive producer, screenplay, story), “Image of the Beast” (1980, executive producer, writer), “Home Safe” (1981, writer), “The Prodigal Planet” (1983, executive producer, screenplay, story), and “A Stranger in the Forest” (1988, executive producer).
Doughten, raised in Iowa, was in the Navy during WWII, studied at Drake University and then the Yale Graduate School of Drama. He must have been interested in the movie ministry because I read he then looked for work among companies that made religious films and was thus he was invited to join Yeaworth’s Good News Productions in Chester Springs, Pennsylvania.
Eventually Doughten returned to Iowa where he founded Heartland Productions and Mark IV Pictures and produced dozens of Christian movies, including the “end of day” series that is so popular and for which the youth of America had been primed by “The Late Great Planet Earth”. Heartland and Mark IV closing shop in the 1990s, Russ Doughten Films was formed. At the website, one can purchase an “End Times Prophecy Chart” for only $11.99, and “A Tribulation Map” tract “written as a guide for unbelievers who miss the rapture. (Don’t miss out on that one!)
Doughten’s “A Thief in the Night” is a rapture film in which a woman wakes up to find millions have mysteriously disappeared, followed by earth-shaking events. This woman, Patty, reappears in “A Distant Thunder”, a fugitive from evil, finally captured by UNITE forces (United Nations Imperium of Total Emergency). “The Image of the Beast” is the third film in the series, in which the anti-Christ establishes a one world government. The 4th in the series is “The Prodigal Planet”, in which a man escapes from UNITE Detention Center and “leads an expedition across the United States with a secret that could scuttle that evil system and bring hope to the surviving believers.”
Doughten appears in all his films as a survivalist preacher, The Reverend Turner, who doesn’t fully believe in the bible but has a chart of the End Times.
Rev. Turner is doomed. He dies in the first movie. Then he comes back and spends the entire series obsessing alternately over his personal tribulation chart and the fact that he’s still around, post-rapture. Turner was a Christian-in-name-only, you see, and he misled all of his parishioners. Because of his this, and the fact that he’d heard the gospel message and rejected it, God will not have him. No matter how much Turner learns and despairs, he is cut off from God’s grace, and boy are you going to hear about it.
Source: http://www.jesus21.com/content/movies/rapture2.html
I read that Patty screams a lot. With a whine. She also, poor dear, buys the farm in the 1981 “Image of the Beast”, a film which opens with her shrieking over the beheaded body of another character who has been doomed not to continue with the contination of the series. She is strapped into a guillotine by the forces of the anti-Christ. An earthquake happens. Her persecutors run. Terrified, Patty pleads to receive the mark of the beast but she has been abandoned in the parking lot where she still lies strapped in the guillotine. She attempts to free herself, but…bye-bye Patty. Main character focus in the series then switches over to bad ass David Michaels who goes about wooing the ladies and sharing the gospel with them, but not sleeping with them.
Dan Raeburn, in his analysis of Jack Chick’s comic books in The Imp, correctly identifies a deep sexual undercurrent to much of the “witnessing” that takes place. While neither Image of the Beast or The Prodigal Planet is quite as blatant as Chick’s work, it’s fitting to see David as a cinematic analog to Chick’s “Crusaders” team of soul-winning studs.
Source: http://www.jesus21.com/content/movies/rapture2.html
I’m going to have to take Jesus21′s word on all this because I’ve not seen any of these movies. Nor do I think I’m up to renting and viewing them. Though I may decide eventually it’s a must if they’ve been such a powerful influence among fundamentalist and evangelical Xtians.
Does Patty make it to heaven or does her lack of faith under the shining guillotine’s blade, her plea to receive the mark, seal her as destined to eternal hell. Had Patty not said, “I’ll do it!” would her head have rolled?
Bloody, nasty stuff! Do they show this to all Fundie and evangelical Xtian teens? “Here, role models!” I much prefer the “Rapture” that I saw on television when I was 15, vintage 1965, starring Dean Stockwell as a fugitive with whom a teenager (Patricia Gozzi), whose only previous experience with men is a scarecrow, falls in love. He was in love with the maid but Patricia runs the maid off. Dean and Patricia get together and run off to Paris to set up household together. Tragedy ensues. I sobbed for years.
Patricia Gozzi was a fine actress and Dean Stockwell is a great actor and the story was great and the cinematography was rich and the musical score was wonderful, but how many people have seen “Rapture” as opposed to Doughtsn’s films?
The first Christian filmmaker to turn to prophecy theology was Donald Thompson. Thompson’s four prophecy films spin contemporary action-adventure stories around the apocalyptic events that many evangelicals believe are predicted in the Bible. Although it was never released in conventional theaters, the first film in Thompson’s series, A Thief in the Night, “has been translated into three foreign languages, subtitled in countless others, and its international distribution continues strongly…six or seven hundred prints now circulate, in addition to videocassettes.” Randall Balmer explains that,
“In the United States, where distribution is limited to church groups, camps, youth organizations, and the like, it is difficult to quantify the number of people who have seen the film. When I pressed Russell Doughten [the film’s co-producer] for a figure, he reluctantly estimated that one hundred million people had seen A Thief in the Night in the United States, a figure, he hastened to add, that would include those who had seen it more than once. Even if you slash that number in half to account for hyperbole, fifty million is still a staggering figure, a viewership that would be the envy of many Hollywood producers. ”
Source: Excerpt from: Shaking the World for Jesus: Media and Conservative Evangelical Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2004)
Yeah, no kidding! 50,000,000 people interested in a rapture movie that leaves you with hell and antichrist and guillotines and bad acting and and bad production values and sex as tease and horrendous non-plots and no one interested in a rapture where a confused, emotionally-stunted, Patricia Gozzi and confused, fugitive Dean Stockwell make love in the fields and run off to Paris and try to build a life in a dirty tenament and she loses their money in the gutter and you say, oh no, please, Patricia, don’t leave Paris and go back home but she does and he follows her and…sigh…like I said, I sobbed for years.
Doughten paved the way for the mega-selling “Left Behind” series of Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins who credit Doughten as a primary influence.
Sigh.
I don’t know if this is coincidental. Like the weather balloon, “Rover”, that always prevents Patrick McGoohan, “The Prisoner”, from escaping the parnoia-inducing village in which he finds himself, early shots of the blob are a modified weather balloon. McGoohan says the weather balloon was a stand-in for an idea that didn’t work. But how many people immediately think of weather balloons as cold war, paranoia-ville, people-eaters? No, the balloon doesn’t eat Patrick McGoohan but in a sense that is it’s function, to force his personality and will to be consumed with terror so that he will become a sort of Clockwork Orange.
Some Sources:
http://www.imdb.com
http://www.blogofdeath.com/archives/001117.html
http://irvin-yeaworth.biography.ms/
http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/read.php?id=3199
http://www.explore-religion.com/religion/R/Russell_S._Doughten.html
http://www.wwnorton.com/nael/20century/topic_3/crystal.htm
http://www.timlahaye.com/about_ministry/index.php3?p=bio§ion=Biography
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Interesting. And bravo. The United Methodist Church has reinstated minister Irene Stroud, who had been defrocked for being a lesbian. More at Raw Story.
Via Political Wire a silly game. Hammer the hammer. It gets a kid point rating of 10 with my 7 year old who was rolling on the floor laughing hysterically and is now playing it on his computer. I say, Agh, gack, blech, and other nonsensical syllables. Time to go scrub my brain with sand paper. I’m usually pretty good at getting through videos of these guys, but watching a C-Span offering of Delay addressing the NRA I had to shut it down after 10 seconds. I was already creepy-crawly when he took the podium and started to speak. He shortly thereafter crowed that speaking at the NRA meeting was the highlight of his political career. My hand autonomously snapped out and closed the screen.
Kind of like my son’s response to the big frog exhibit at Fernbank. He refuses to go to Fernbank now because there was a slide show of a frog being dissected. Unnerved him. Too much. He was relieved to learn that it’s not a permanent installation because he’d decided he never wanted to go back in the building. In the meanwhile we go to the Fernbank Science Center rather than the museum. Which also threw him when he was five years old, all the stuffed animals on exhibit.
I lie on that “I’m usually pretty good at getting through videos of these guys”. It took me a long, long while before I could begin to watch Bush. I suppose I should be ashamed to admit that I managed to avoid any video of him at all when he was first running for Prez. And his voice was just as bad. Like Delay’s voice. Both are literally painful. Though I have managed some immunity to Bush.
I’ve more stamina than my husband though, who still can’t watch Bush.
Whoever could get past just the initial gross-out factor with Bush and Delay and tolerate watching them long enough to decide “Hey, that’s my choice!” …well, the evidence is that many have but the how of it escapes me.
My gross-out factor is kind of squirrely.
Nur al-Cubicle continues to follow the news on Guiliana Sgrena and the killing of Nicola Calipari. More information on circumstance.
Continuing from Why Tom Delay apologized
And Marilyn-Aphrodite saw the photos of Tom Delay on the tarmac at Andrews Air Force Base, and her heart wept for him, and she loathed herself for punishing him by abstaining from him, and went to him and said, “The photos of you on the tarmac struck me with unexpected force, for which reason I come to you now. Tom, please, the truth may hurt, but hear me out. ”
“Oh, Doll-baby,” said Tom Delay dropping to his knees, “don’t ever do that to me again. Don’t leave me, please. You don’t know what it’s been like around here. But Tom Delay has been fightin’ like the lion he is. You won’t have any reason to be ashamed of me, babe. I’m a winner.”
“I know you’re a winner, Tom,” said Marilyn-Aphrodite sadly.
“The press, the photographers,” said Tom, “you don’t know what it’s like, but I live for the contest.”
“Well, Tom, if you get out of your vain skin and think about it for a minute, you may reconsider and decide I know something about living on the stage.”
“Oh, no doubt you’re an icon, babe,” Tom said, eager to not anger his Marilyn-Aphrodite. “They say you were the most photographed woman in the world. And, to think, you’ve chosen me…”
“It took me years to fully flesh my Marilyn Monroe persona. There has never been another Marilyn, and never will be.”
“And there will never be another Tom Delay, ” said Tom.
“I should hope not,” said Marilyn-Aphrodite, gently patting Tom’s head. “Without a doubt, you are a repulsive, degenerate, distasteful, corrupt, thoroughly repugnant human being.”
“A matter of perspective.” Tom rested his head in Marilyn-Aphrodite’s delightfully perfumed lap.
“You are driven and driving, never resting, ever discontented, demanding more. You are a lover of money and conniving conjuror of the same. You are critical and condemning and unethical. Your history as a politician is not only infuriating, and contemptible, it’s a crime against nature and humanity. Your voting record is from hell because hell is your habitation.”
Voting records are not a matter of perspective, they are a matter of fact. Tom bristled. It was a little bit of bristle, he didn’t want to run Marilyn-Aphrodite off again, but he did bristle.
“Despite that low estate,” Marilyn-Aphrodite continued, soothing, stroking his hair, “the angels say you are failiing, you are falling, Tom, which doesn’t constitute demise as an individual with your passion, fury, prodigious connections and unfulfilled ambition is unlikely to consort with idle disuse. Whatever you are, you’re no George Bush, an acknowledgment I’m certain you’ll appreciate. It’s said you’re intelligent and I’ve no doubt that’s true, so it’s a pity your intelligence and seeming endless reserves of energy have been for decades absolutely invested in first ultra-conservative, then Dominionist, patriarchal, scorched-earth, death-cult, apocalyptic interests. But you are used to criticism, Tom, and you are used to vanity-petting praise…”
“Sticks and stones may break Christ’s bones, but his boundless love sustains and preserves me.”
“You’re not listening to me, Tom. I want you to listen to me and not go robotic.”
“Sure, doll-babe. Say what you want. I’m not stopping you.”
“You’re a perverse creature. You revel in that perversity, which is why I’m here with you, rather than with Bill Frist.”
Tom didn’t know what to say to that, so said nothing.
“I have faith in that perversity, Tom, your intelligence, your ability to withstand the slings and arrows and your martyr-enthusiasm for taking them on. But more than anything, I have faith in your twistedness. Political ambition has outlived its purposefulness for you, Tom, I see it in your eyes. You’re bored, and confused with that boredom. You are mortal, decrepit, feeble and the the pace of your fleeting days is wearing on you. But it’s not too late to be reborn and find life in a new role.”
Tom had to admit to himself he was listening with more than vague interest.
“Tom,” said Marilyn-Aphrodite, “If you would redeem your mortal flesh and immortal soul you must renounce Tim LeHaye, the Council of National Policy, your profession and devote your spiritual pursuits to my worship, or you could become a Quaker, that might do. Maybe a Unitarian-Universalist.”
“Shit.”
“And, of course, you’d have to write a book about everything you know and have seen.”
But Tom’s wearied, unfocused mind had drifted elsewhere.
“So,” he said, “Frist is a total nut job?”
First installment here.
Third installment here.
Pissed on Politics posts the (Note update: satiric) news, via Democratic Underground, of Delay calling for judges to be disemboweled and guillotined. Just go read. (Distanceblog, you’ll be interested, the article mentions Ralph Reed.)
I’ve nothing else to post on it. Because I’m thinking on it. Inspired.
(Update: Ah, drat. Pissed on Politics informs it’s satire. Check out the comments. I’d thought it was for real. I read after perusing all night things on the Council for National Policy and KKK and Amway and always after reading about the Council for National Policy I feel like I’m in some fuzzy alternate universe. Even when shoveling conspiracy theories off to the side for the fundamental known, one pushes away from the desk with a sense of many drugs mediating sensory perception. The edges of things get wobbly. Throw in LeHaye and I’m down for the count. Anything in his vicinity is veritable PCP, an unsuspected element you realize must have been in the mix as things start turning very sour.)
Via the Green Knight, who picked it up from Max Blumenthal. Tony Perkins, head of the Family Research Council (Just Us Justice Sunday) purchased the Ku Klux Klan mailing list in 1996 for $82,000.00.
Tony Perkins spoke to the Louisiana Council of Conservative Citizens on May 19 2001 but declines to answer questions about his ties to the group.
To learn more about this of course one’s next hit is The Southern Poverty Law Center which has written at length on the CCC and notes elected officials who have ties to it.
Neoconfederates, the CCC is a successor organization to the White Citizens Council which fought against desegregation. They’re the ones that raised millions of dollars that funded the small, private, white academies that sprang up around the South during the early days of desegregation.
Tom Parker, Republican candidate for the Supreme Court of Alabama, isn’t shy about touting his conservative credentials. He despises “liberal judges” who are “trying to take God out of public life.” He is an “ardent opponent” of gay marriage, and “a national leader in the fight against Political Correctness.” He underlines his close ties to Christian Right leaders like Phyllis Schlafly and James Dobson.
Source: Southern Poverty Law Center
James Dobson spoke at a protest concerning the Ten Commandments issue in Alabama. Justice Sunday made feeble attempts to compare the fight of Dominionists to that of the civil rights struggle, and James Dobson drew the same parallels in Alabama. At the rally for the monument he invoked Rosa Parks in comparison with the movement to keep the Ten Commandmenets monument.
Dr. Dobson compared the movement to keep the Ten Commandments monument with the struggle of Rosa Parks in 1955. Saying it was “very, very ironic” that the rally was taking place in Montgomery, Ala., the heart of much of the Civil Rights Movement.
No, what is ironic is that the CCC has as its predecessor the White Citizens Council, a hate group steadfastly against desegregation and known also as the “uptown KKK”, and that it is the CCC and associates using the Civil Rights Movement to further their cause, claiming to be suffering the same victimization and prejudices.
Many of the key points Dobson made in his Justice speech were made also in his Alabama speech. He rides the same battle horse in both.
Americans United for Separation of Church and State reports that the CCC includes the Alabama Constitutional Militia, the self-described commander of which told The Huntsville Times they’re a “Christian militia.”
Also appearing at the Alabama rally was then Christian Coalition leader Ralph Reed.
Singling out the federal courts and the ACLU, Reed proclaimed that, “You will not, you will not drive faith in God out of our homes, out of our churches, out of our synagogues, out of our courtrooms and out of our public schools ever again.”
I should have known this. Neoconfederates. Unfailingly, a significant association is always going to come up with the Neoconfederacy. Talk about slow on the uptake here.
The fundamentalist takeover of the SBC has explicit parallels to the Christian Coalition’s takeover of the Republican Party in the South. An observer who witnessed both recalled to Bruce Bawer:
They used to be run by country-club types. Then suddenly you’d have two buses full of people show up from a church in Selma, or someplace, and you’d realize your candidate had lost and it wasn’t even close. It was five to one. Who were these people who had shown up out of nowhere? Economically, they were traditional Democrats. But suddenly they’d taken over the local Republican party….exactly how they took over the Southern Baptist Convention. They bused people in by the thousands. The moderates did a poor job of resisting it.
Justice Sunday was hosted by Highview Baptist of Louisville KY, a Southern Baptist Church, Al Mohler, President of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary at Louisville KY also speaking.
At Blondesense, discussion on how the soldiers who fired upon Nicola Calipari and Giuliana Sgrena have been cleared of wrongdoing. The news article is brief. Just states committed no wrongdoing and will not be disciplined. The comments section brings up a March 25th interview–Naomi Klein Reveals New Details About U.S. Military Shooting of Italian War Correspondent in Iraq–discussing how Sgrena said they were on a secured road for ambassadors and that the bullets were fired mostly from behind, the bullet that killed Calipari and injured her coming into the car from behind. The photos of the car showed only the right side (facing) and the front, not the rear. Italian investigators were never permitted to examine the car.
Last week it was the clearing, of responsibility for the abuse of detainees, of four of the five top Army officers overseeing prison policies and operations in Iraq. (See the Heretik for a rundown.)
No responsibility. No WMDs (announced yesterday). No responsibility.
The report, which refuted many of the administration’s principal arguments for going to war in Iraq, marked an official end of a two-year weapons hunt led most recently by former U.N. weapons inspector Charles A. Duelfer.
The team found that the 1991 Persian Gulf War and subsequent U.N. sanctions had destroyed Iraq’s illicit weapons capabilities and, for the most part, Hussein had not tried to rebuild them. Iraq’s ability to produce nuclear arms, which the administration asserted was a grave and gathering threat that required an immediate military response, had “progressively decayed” since 1991. Investigators found no evidence of “concerted efforts to restart the program.”
Administration officials have emphasized that, while the survey group uncovered no weapons of mass destruction, it concluded that Hussein had not given up the goal of someday acquiring them.
Source SFgate
No responsibility.
Anyway, investigation exhausted, no WMDs found. Bush goes strolling through the bluebonnets, hand in hand, with Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz and then off with Delay to Gavelston TX to grind some more on Social Security.
Bang bang. No responsibility. They do as they please. They manufacture their reasons. The reasons crumble and still no responsibility.
I’m sure most everyone has seen the photo of the Iraqi child whose family was killed at one of those many, many bang bang bang oops accidental checkpoint shootings. Happened some months ago, a powerful photo, is still popping up here and there. I had thus far managed to keep my seven year old son from seeing it. I stay away from sites showing the gore while he’s nearby. But last night he was standing there as I scrolled down Rox Populi’s site and there it was on the page. My son said, “What’s that?!” Sigh. I scrolled promptly past it and stopped and turned and hugged him and said I was sorry, I’d not intended for him to see it. And I explained it to him. He had turned away from the computer and told me to go away from that website so he would not see that “disgusting” picture again. I said well disgusting wasn’t how I would describe it. Sad and tragic and horrifying instead. “But what was all that red?” I told him. He became animated telling me all about a magical cartoon character and how he would never be killed in war, how he would do such and such movements with his arms, zoom, voom and he would be all right and never be killed. Then, “Write those people and tell them to take that disgusting picture off the page so I don’t have to see it again. Why did they put that picture there? Why do they want people to see it?” I explained to him that people put up the picture to show the tragedy, the horror of war, the innocent people who are killed (civilians being overwhelmingly the victims in Iraq), who are victimized (Iraq war is blamed for starvation). I said that they show pictures like that because there are people who close their eyes to how bad it is, who don’t want to know. I explained as briefly, as simply as I could.
“I know war is bad,” he said, “I’ll tell them. Now, write that website and tell them to take away that picture so I won’t see it again.”
