1/3 of Female Troops Victimized

According to a story by the AP, a soldier who filed for conscientious objector status, Robert Zabala, "...said he was troubled during boot camp in 2003 when a fellow recruit committed suicide and a superior used profanities to belittle the recruit. Zabala said he was "abhorred by the blood lust (the superior) seemed to possess," according to a 2006 court petition for conscientious-objector status."

"Another boot camp instructor showed recruits a "motivational clip" showing Iraqi corpses, explosions, gun fights and rockets set to a heavy metal song that included the lyrics, "Let the bodies hit the floor," the petition said. Zabala said he cried, while other recruits nodded their heads in time with the beat."

This is the inhumanity - the perpetrator mentality - that is cultivated to fight the war in Iraq. God help us - and these guys - when they all come home with no one to kill. Killing is probably the ultimate high for those who "enjoy" it.

Certainly the high alert under which they all live is the ultimate stimulus for the human nervous system and withdrawal symptoms from that "stimulus" - not to mention post traumatic stress syndrome - will make it difficult for all who fought in Iraq to adjust to peace.

As for women soldiers, add this on to their psychological burden: nearly 1/3 of females troops have been victims of rape or attempted rape by male American troops. Some have died of dehydration rather than risk venturing out of their barracks for water at night.

Rape of female troops is the ugliest elephant in the room that no one bothers to mention.

This debacle has gone on too long and has decimated too many lives. Just bring the troops home.

Now.

Ex-Aide Says He’s Lost Faith in Bush

There may be a temptation to sneer at Bush campaign strategist Matthew Dowd for his "born again" ideas about creating a political campaign that "appeals to more than 51% of the people" and his statement, now that his enlisted son is going to Iraq, in which he says he feels "a calling of trying to re-establish a level of gentleness in the world."

Surely many are thinking that his loss of faith in President Bush comes a bit late considering the nation has been decimated by partisan politics and destructive leadership for over six years.

So what did it take for this about face?

A few personal tragedies and the probably that his own son will, at the very least, be traumatized by what he experiences in Iraq, if not mutilated or killed there. This combination of personal events has managed to wake him up to the callous inhumanity he helped foist upon us and the world.

But, at least, he has seen the light.

Unlike Karl Rove or Rumsfeld or Cheney or Bush himself, not to mention the multitude of the selfish and the brain dead who remain encrusted in the Bush camp, he has seen that things have gone downhill very fast and that the nation is hemorrhaging as a result of the Republican agenda.

In truth, the mishmash of ideologies which the American public was sold as a patriotic and conservative "platform" proved to be a schizophrenic misanthrope - something that has worked to divide citizen against citizen even as it has indebted us beyond belief, shackled us like slaves to corporate desire, worked to eliminate institutions and agencies created for the public good such as public schools, social security, PBS and FEMA, enmeshed us in an unwinnable war and continues to destroy our dollar.

Meanwhile, the Republicans have increased the size of government, spied upon us, shredded our Constitution and put us on Amnesty International's list of nations that employ torture.

Of course we know that the list of all Bush has wreaked upon us goes on and on and on, not the least of which is the 90% of our environmental regulations that have been changed - with just a flourish of Bush's pen - with just one result being the ongoing destruction of the Appalachian Mountains and, so far, about 1000 miles of streams below them.

Forget the increase in the amount of mercury that is being released in the air which has resulted in warnings that most of our fish are too toxic to eat.

Maybe, in the final analysis, Bush will prove to have been the disease that almost killed us, but which woke us up to how we better start living our lives and running our politics.

Raise a glass with me in sincere hope that Matthew Dowd will not be the first, nor the last Republican strategist to decide that dividing the nation to win an election, for the purpose of plundering the nation, isn't quite all it's cracked up to be.