Strength, Part 1
First of all, let’s start this little journey by mentioning The Gloom. Fallujah. Abu Ghraib. Bodies hanging on bridges. Prisoners standing on boxes.

Listen troops, let’s get this straight right off the bat: it’s only a catastrophe. It’s nothing more than a major disaster. I’m not being cynical, or arch, or “ironic.” I am deadly serious.

We have seen two months of what looks like non-stop catastrophe, and we will see more, and maybe worse, before we are through. Here is my well-reasoned, historically researched, deeply nuanced opinion: Tough shit. This war will be over when we say it is over, and not a second before.

When Santa Ana’s men ran up the red flag and his band played the Deguello – “The Throat Cutting” it must have made the men and women in the Alamo sick and weak in the knees. But it did not have the demoralizing effect that the Mexican dictator intended. Rather, it hardened the defenders. They did not run, and we are not going to run either, and Dan Rather and Ted Koppel and the rest can play all the goddam dirges they want to. The Alamo itself was a military disaster, a catastrophe. And when Sam Houston retreated from and kept evading Santa Ana’s army, he was called a coward and a traitor – afraid to fight, not tough enough to do what was necessary. Sam Houston was a deeply flawed man, but he had thick skin and that in itself goes a long way when you are planning deep. Sam Houston didn’t give a tinker’s damn about Glory or Honor. Sam Houston wanted Texas. Like the equally wily and patient George Washington before him, Sam Houston wanted to win. And they did win. And that is why there will be no major metropolitan area named Kerry...

Consider this:

If you genuinely, honestly believe you can compare George Bush to Adolph Hitler, it is only because you are so removed from exposure to the genuine horrors of the Nazi regime – routine street beatings, confiscation and destruction of businesses, homes and property, then deportation and extermination of millions of your own countrymen -- that you are functionally incapable of the most basic and fundamental level of discrimination. If you can compare Abu Ghraib to a Nazi death camp with a straight face then you have never been to either Abu Ghraib, or a Nazi death camp, or either – that is patently obvious, and it would be comically so if the stakes were not so monumentally high. Having never been exposed to genuine evil, you have literally no conception whatsoever of what it looks and smells and tastes like.

(Immigrant Americans from Poland or Russia or Cuba, or Iraq, for that manner, exhibit virtually none of this madness. They know what a real secret police presence feels like.)

Let me clarify this if I may. Senator Kennedy claims Abu Ghraib is simply Saddam Hussein’s torture chambers “under new management – U.S. management.” Taking him at his word – a somewhat iffy proposition right out of the gate – he apparently cannot see the difference between the humiliation and bullying of enemy combatants, which is shameful, disgusting and reprehensible, and the gleeful, mocking murder, torture and gang rape of over 300,000 innocent men, women and children -- which is something worse. So Senator, here is a helpful analogy which you may find useful: The difference is about the same as pulling over and leaving a young female secretary on the curb in the rain, which is shameful, disgusting and reprehensible, vs. leaving her trapped in the car at the bottom of a river while you look at the bubbles and ponder the political repercussions.

Which is something worse, Senator.