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The fight on the sandlot out back.  During the past week, former presidential candidate Gary Bauer, now of the nonprofit American Values, had this to say about calls for a timely US troop withdrawal from Iraq: "The radical Left in America wants America to leave Iraq because they believe that America is harming the Iraqi people, and they think America is a force for evil in the world." Now I think it's not accurate to say that the "radical Left in America" is alone in this assessment, but that's another issue entirely. What he also said in his statement last week evokes more of that Vietnam déjà vu all over again. We have to "stay the course." We can't just "cut and run." Bauer declared: "If we withdrew from Iraq tomorrow, and if we release all the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay tomorrow, no American can [seriously] believe that suddenly America is going to be safer." All a withdrawal will do, he said, is whet the appetite of America's enemies and bring the war back to our own shores.[1] Hmm, he said "back to our own shores." That is certainly the Bushevik party line:

Once is a novelty. Twice is an indulgence. The third time makes it a mantra (and therefore perfectly suitable as a poetic phrase of propaganda). And what this mantra signifies is that the US is willing to sacrifice the whole of Iraq and Afghanistan so as to distract America's enemies, but also to keep at great distance any suggestion to the American people that our government has anything but the best of intentions in the Middle East—by what our profligate government contractors are doing there, by what global corporate interests continue to do there, by the nonstop suicide carnage there, by what bombs, bullets, and bulldozers have done to the civilian population and their homes, livelihood, culture, and the tattered remnants therein.

1.  See Agape Press, June 30, 2005.

Okay, Blogger finally handed over the layout repair code and—lo!—my layout is fixed.

My post today resulted in some fried layouts in each of my recent posts, but the Blogger.com crew is working on a fix for my blog's formatting woes—the result, they say over at the Blogger Status page, of their new launch of "Blogger Images." The new code for the images apparently skewed the layouts of many other Blogger users. A patch is supposed to be revealed today.

2nd Day Miscellany.  Some statements and issues I have had to think about this past week:

1. US beef is safe to eat.
2. Marijuana is still an evil thing.
3. Reporting on the war in Iraq weakens our national resolve, discourages Iraqi cooperation and emboldens our enemy. [Rep Jim Marshall, 2003]
4. Reporting on the US policy favoring torture at Abu Ghraib could put US troops in harm's way. [Gen Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, 2004]
5. If you speak out against US treatment of detainees at Guantanamo, you are putting our troops in greater danger. [Karl Rove, 2005]
6. The Iraq war could very well require continued American involvement for five, six, eight, 10, 12 years. [à la Donald Rumsfeld, 2005]
7. If you openly discuss the Army's recent recruitment failures, you will harm recruitment. [Donald Rumsfeld, 2005]
8. The Gospel calls for liberal political policies. [Christian Alliance for Progress, 2005]
9. "The church best performs its service in the midst of political change when its attitude is so independent and ... so sympathetic that it is able to summon the representatives of the old and new order alike ... to humility, to the praise of God, and to humanity, and can invite them all to trust in the great change (in the death and resurrection of Christ) and to hope in his revelation." [Karl Barth, 1948]