A Good Ass-Kicking

When wood is chopped, chips fly
--Josef Stalin

To the one we are the savour of death unto death;
and to the other the savour of life unto life.
And who is sufficient for these things?
--Corinthians 2:16

Our Generation has had no Great war,
no Great Depression. Our war is spiritual.
Our depression is our lives
--Chuck Palhniuk

Every person must choose
how much truth he can stand
--When Nietzsche Wept,
Irvin Yalom
__________________

Lately Ranger has been thinking that maybe the United States needs a good ass-kicking in order for us to clean up our act. Actually, we have had several since 1945.

The U.S. got its ass handed to it in Korea, the Republic of Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq, except we put them through the spin cycle, which morphed them into victories. It is difficult to put Gulf War I into the "win" column because it hard to say what we won. We did win Grenada and Panama, though we no longer control the Panama Canal Zone; good wins are so important!

The ass-on-a-platter incidents are doubly embarrassing considering the folks that we fought. Both were minor: The Chinese were a non-nuclear, newly-formed power, yet they fought us to a standstill with antique weapons. The Vietnamese fought us conventionally and we left the battlefield. Korea ended in an armistice and Vietnam with a total withdrawal.

As though the real story under the official war stories were not bad enough, now we must continue the still win-less fight through craven back channels. Last week's New York Times' “Secret ‘Kill List’ Proves a Test of Obama’s Principles and Will” showed the moral nullity of our new policy, couched instead in glowing encomiums to the President's strength.

Spin is all, and Chris Floyd exposed it well. From his, Hymns to the Violence: The NYT’s Love Letter to Obama's Murder Racket":

In any other age -- including the last administration -- this story would have been presented as a scandalous exposé. The genuinely creepy scenes of the "nominating process" alone would have been seen as horrific revelations. Imagine the revulsion at the sight of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld sifting through PowerPoint slides on "suspected terrorists" all over the world, and giving their Neronic thumbs up or down as each swarthy face pops up on a screen in front of them. Imagine the tidal wave of moral outrage from the "Netroots Nation" and other progressive champions directed at Bush not only for operating a death squad (which he did), but then trotting out Condi and Colin and Bob Gates to brag about it openly, and to paint Bush as some kind of moral avatar for the careful consideration and philosophical rigor he applied to blowing human beings to bits in sneak attacks on faraway villages.

Read Floyd's piece for an excellent dissection of this latest atrocity. It matters not that the executioner is a fan of Aquinas or Augustine (how did he come by naming those two?), the policy is just as winning (not) as the aforementioned engagements.