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SHRIEKS AND GROANS
“I am tired and sick of war. Its glory is all moonshine. It is only those who have neither fired a shot, nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded, who cry aloud for blood, for vengeance, for desolation. War is hell.” — William Tecumseh Sherman, US Army general.
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THE END OF… SOMETHING
The United States of America is now, officially, no longer engaged in hostilities in Iraq.
It would have been nice to say the war is over.
But Congress had never declared our little affair in Iraq to be a war.
So I don’t know what it was. Nor do I as yet know why this holy land invaded that country.
Something happened for some reason. Whatever it was — and why it was — resulted in these scenes shot by Carolyn Cole for the Los Angeles Times.
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It is my duty as a writer, journalist, and essayist to inform the living people in the photos above that what they’ve experienced was not war.
I suspect they’d say it was hell.
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OBAMA AND CHENEY FIND COMMON GROUND, WILL WORK TOGETHER
Scrolling through Facebook yesterday I learned that both President Barack Obama and former Vice President Dick Cheney are Nazis.
Apparently, the party of Hitler has become very broadminded.
Working Together: Blacks And Whites, Democrats And Republicans
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It also must espouse something all right-thinking Americans want — a good productive bipartisan sense of cooperation among our nationally elected officials.
Just goes to show that redemption is possible no matter how heinous a person or group has been in the past. Who knows? Maybe, say, Donald Trump will experience an epiphany and begin to work tirelessly on behalf of the poor and the sick.
“I Want To Help All My Less Fortunate Brothers And Sisters!”
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Or North Korean strongman Kim Jong-il may call for world peace.
Anything can happen if both Obama and Cheney have been welcomed into the ranks of the Nazis.
Either that or the respective Facebook posters are full of horseshit.
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THE MORE TRUTHS, THE MERRIER
Adolf Hitler lives on as a cherished symbol — not of brutality, racism, genocide, and tyranny, but as the poster boy for whoever you happen to disagree with.
You see, breathless exaggeration is the semi-official national language of the 21st Century.
Here’s an example. Millworkers, stonecutters, and machinists have been on strike against Indiana Limestone Company in Oolitic for a month tomorrow. Early in the morning on December 2, a non-striking employee driving a pickup truck drove into the picket line at the entrance to the facility.
WTIU Report
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Upon first hearing sketchy details of the incident, a reasonable soul might wonder, Had a hired thug been ordered to mow down strikers with his pickup truck? Was he trying only to intimidate them? Or had it even been an honest accident?
And how about this? The pavement outside Indiana Limestone was either littered with crushed bodies of victims or one or two guys got bruised up a bit.
Let’s go to two different information sources to learn the truth.
The incident was reported shortly after noon Friday on the WISH-TV website. “A picketer was struck by a vehicle…,” the report began. It went on to say, “The incident happened around 6:30 am Friday and sent the picketer via ambulance to IU Health Bedford Hospital. He was treated and released.”
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Phew! That was a close one. Thank heavens it was no tragedy.
Right?
No so fast.
Here’s the scoop from a press release issued by Millworkers Local 8093 Tuesday: “… Union members… were peacefully picketing… when company thugs savagely attacked them, swerving a truck into their picket lines at a high rate of speed, hitting several of the strikers and sending one… to the hospital…. [The picketer] is still undergoing medical treatment and it is not known if he will fully recover from the injuries he sustained in the attack.”
Yeesh.
Labor Violence
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Somebody’s lying here. Not spinning. Not obfuscating. Flat out lying. It could just as easily be a corporate media outlet as it is an overexcited press release writer.
If the gap between labor and management is half as great as that between the two accounts of the incident, the strike may go on for years.
Too bad the two sides can’t learn to work together the way two prominent new members of the Nazi party do now.
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