On the occasion of the 15th anniversary of the Iraq war, Iraqi novelist Sinan Antoon reminds us that "America Destroyed My Country." Our invasion made Iraq worse off, yet those "liberal" media personalities who cheered on the invasion the loudest still get paid, and some of our worst Americans have achieved a wholly unearned measure of redemption merely by drawing the line against our new President, who seems worse than Mr. Bush only because unlike Mr. Bush he's unable to maintain even a veneer of civilization. Perhaps, by attending the author's visit to Basra in the third-to-last paragraph, we can begin to appreciate the enormity of our crime -- not merely by observing how "exhausted and polluted" the city now is, but by noting all the good Iraqis who still struggle against despair, and who deserve better.
Ho hum, Dean Baker finds yet another push from the Washington Post to gut Medicare and Social Security. Key point: "It's also important to keep in mind that average wages are projected to be more than 25 percent higher in 2035 than they are today," which doesn't mean those wages will keep up with inflation, but does mean that doomsday predictions about Social Security's solvency (and, for that matter, doomsday predictions about pension funds generally) tend to assume that wages will stay exactly the same as they are now, which is actually a very, very difficult thing to accomplish, even when rich people make all the decisions in America.
Adam Johnson at FAIR notes how easily black kids become "juveniles" in "liberal" media reporting. It's good to see someone else reminding everyone that you don't treat kids like adults because they're incapable of adult decision-making, and I'm grateful that Mr. Johnson says calling kids "juveniles" is a way of effacing the fact that they're actually, you know, kids. This is, of course, all part of a broader pattern -- other black victims of police violence become "no angels" in "liberal" media reporting, and some black murder victims even get to have their arrest records broadcast on "liberal" media articles after their murder! But please, right-wingers, tell us again how racism is dead.
HUD Secretary Ben Carson tells a House subcommittee that his wife picked out the $31,000 dining set that violated federal law and brought an ethics firestorm down upon him. If the President's votaries heard anything, of course, they heard that it was his wife's fault, which I suspect is what most of them think about everything in their lives most of the time. They might have also applauded Mr. Carson when he said "I’m not a person who spends a lot of time thinking about how something looks," and thus received him into their hearts as One of the Good Ones. Really, the Administration does care how everything looks -- to their votaries.
Finally, on a sad note, the Senate failed to take up S.J.Res. 55, which would have ended U.S. involvement in the Saudi Arabian war on Yemen, by a 55-45 vote. Not precisely along party lines, either: Republican Mike Lee of Utah was a co-sponsor of S.J.Res. 55, and four Republicans voted with him in favor of taking up the resolution, which means what, class? A bunch of Democrats voted the wrong way, that's what! Ten of them, in fact, including four up for re-election in states the President won and -- as if to remind us that we shouldn't overpraise recent Democrat electoral successes in special elections -- Doug Jones of Alabama.
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