Associated Press:
The body of a 23-year-old Kenosha native arrived home this weekend after he was killed while serving his first tour of duty in Iraq.
Army Pfc. Timothy Hanson returned Saturday at the Kenosha Municipal Airport to a short ceremony of the United States Army Honor Guard with his mother Susan, father Robert and siblings Andrew and Jennifer.
Hanson was killed last week by enemy small-arms fire in Salmon Pak in southeast Baghdad, according to the U.S. Department of Defense. His family said he was shot in a tower while on nighttime guard duty.
We're closing in on 4,000 American military deaths in Iraq since we came rolling in in a cloud of dust. 3,923, at least. Apparently, no one knows the exact number. Add Pfc. Hanson's one to that and it doesn't seem like much. Just one more young man who'll never speak with his family and friends again. He'll never look out over that freshwater sea at the east of his city again. He's simply gone from our world, erased by a war in search of a reason for being.
Pfc. Hanson's not the only one gone, of course. On the other side of the globe, other families mourn their own losses.
Leila Fadel, Baghdad Observer:
Suheila Hammad held her daughter in her arms before dawn on Tuesday. Outside she heard the U.S. Special Forces and the Iraqi Army in her area just south of Fallujah.
First they raided a home two doors down, blew the doors out and went in looking for their target. The soldiers pulled the family out of the home and the second floor was destroyed, the family said. A picture shows a burned out room and shattered glass.
[...]
A few soldiers walked away speaking a language the families didn't understand. It was then that a bullet pierced the window where Suheila held her daughter Hadil. The bullet pierced Hadil's neck and passed through her, embedding in the wall of the room. No one came into the house and Suheila was too afraid to call out for help, she said.
Hadil bled to death in her mother's arms...
We don't have to look far for people who think this is all a good idea. In the comments at Baghdad Observer, we find a knuckledragger who thinks reporting this sort of thing means you hate America.
Ms. Fadel is obviously anti-American. the blog was a very well written smear piece.
I wonder who she would call to save her neck if she ever got kidnapped by islamists and threatened with beheading...
Posted by: round2go
I get the same sort of comments sometimes and I often wonder who they'd call to save them if they said it to my face. I am so tired of simpleminded neanderthals questioning people's patriotism. Americans are losing people, Iraqis are losing people, and if you so much as give a damn, you're anti-American. At this point, if someone made a comment like that to me at a bar, I'd have no problem giving them an aerial view of the parking lot out front.
Of course, there's not much danger of some right wing talk radio-inspired hater winding up face down in front of the local pub. They won't go fight the damned war they support, so it's unlikely that they'd have the balls it takes to pick a fight over it anywhere but online -- where they're safe from a poke in the mouth. Online, they can be as insulting and stupid as they want. That's the beauty of being an online Ann Coulter. There's no danger at all. Keyboard warriors don't suffer casualties.
You don't see them as often as you used to, but occasionally you'll still see a bumpersticker with a dumbass slogan like "These Colors Don't Run!" as if "we don't run from a fight" is a legitimate reason to fight on its own. They're tough guys, as long as they can be tough with other people's muscles and blood and lives. If Pfc. Hanson of Kenosha, Wisconsin has to die, if three year old Hadil Hammad of a town south of Fallujah, Iraq has to die, then that's just the way things have to be. You can't make an omelette without breaking a few eggs.
after taking a look at Ms. Fadel's picture, I've come to the conclusion that she's only a neophyte journalism student with absolutely no life experience...just a clueless broad who got a job for this rag b/c her rich daddy had connections... her case is just another example of how the rich, snooty left -- growing up detached from common society -- continue to mis-represent the truth in world events...
Posted by: round2go
Fight that war, man. Never mind that Leila Fadel is in Iraq and you're not. Everyone knows that wars are won and lost by braindead fools with laptops, who fight the war in the comment threads of blogs, who call into right wing radio shows, who hang on Bill O'Reilly's and Glenn Beck's every word. Wars are won and lost by internet trolls and right wing fanboys.
It seems pretty clear to me that round2go didn't come up with these ideas him or herself -- I think it's probably safe to assume "him." He picks this up from other trolls -- they all sound alike and none of them are smart enough to string a sentence together on their own. They rely on the hive mind to guide them. They attack anyone who stops for a breather or a moment's thought. There is no stopping in this war and there damned sure isn't any thinking. Reason is the enemy of America, as surely as al Qaeda, and if you stop and think about what it all means, then the terrorists have won.
I have to admit, I have a bad tendency toward letting trolls get under my skin. I excuse it by saying that I don't suffer fools gladly. But, in this case, it's justified. Round2go is what the pro-war crowd wants us all to be -- unfeeling pricks who mindlessly wave the flag while we're all led straight off the cliff. Don't like the war? You hate America. Think torture is an immoral war crime? You hate America. Got a problem with Blackwater murdering Iraqis and Halliburton committing rape? You hate America. Think that George W. Bush is doing an amazingly lousy job? You hate America.
And, if you give a good goddam about Pfc. Hanson or Hadil Hammad, you hate America.
In other words, think in anything other than bumpersticker slogans and Newspeak, then you hate America. That's what the right wing noise machine has brought us; divisiveness, robotic thinking, and idiocy. A democracy can't work this way. This is a how you run a kakistocracy -- a government ruled by its worst citizens.
Or by right wing talk radio and its fans.
--Wisco
Technorati tags: politics; war; Iraq; blog; internet; peace; morons; Bush; If you don't agree with Republican talk radio bullshit propaganda, you hate America
