Amid the Memorials, Ambiguity and Ambivalence

[usta in Portland]

Stella is a powerful thinker...

not to say fantasist. She has a command of the purplest of prose too and isn't even a little shy to make the bold and hitherto unrecognized connection. And her view taken from such a neutral perch and couched in such carefully conditioned terms. It is absolutely true that the country split into two irreconcilable camps regarding the nature of our enemy. I remember this-we had to count off in 2s and one group was designated to know the true nature of our Islamic foe(very bad) and the other to be stooges for the coming Caliphate. Gosh, the excitement of being picked to defend America, to make the most far reaching assumptions about the nature of evil in the Islamo-facsist states; the sheer aesthetic beauty of the Axis of Evil (an improbable 3 way axis but all the more appealing because I had never realized North Korea was Islamic) And then the secret meetings of small groups where it was revealed of the coming of BHO. It all fell into place and we struggled manfully against the very idea that such a creature could ever exist in our USA and yet as the years passed and we fell into darkness his apotheosis was realized.

By the way I looked up the motto for the magazine "The American Thinker" and it is as follows: The American Thinker-we do the thinking so you don't have to.

 

[usta in Portland]

Or simply vulgar...

depending on your POV and your sense of the propriety of personal life remaining personal and private.

"Blake would have loved Mike" sure he would! How comforting for her. What is this, a script for Real Housewives of 9/11?

 

[ColonelHaiku]

http://www.americanthinker.com/static/about_us.html;

 

[Matthew]

could contain too many more hack cliches:help:


Not being over concerned with 'patriotism' as a defining character of anything(except an accident of birth and the inability to realize that) I will align myself with those who would just as soon we all shut up about the whole matter.

I think I will just ponder on the 2 million dead Japanese civilians fire bombed to oblivion by Curtis LeMay's air force. While we are wallowing in pointless pity about brutal, arbitrary death why not pick a big one?

Patriotism is not about where you were born necessarily. Patriotism means different things in different places. In places like France, Germany or China it's about an ethnicity and culture. In places like Israel it's about a religion. The US is unique in that patriotism is about the political ideology of limited government. The US may be the only county on earth founded on a political ideology rather than a race, tribe, culture or religion. I think that may be why patriotism in the US is such a controversial subject.

As far as brutal, arbitrary death goes, that is all a "legitimate" part of war. In war anything and everything is a legitimate target. That's why they say war is Hell. It's also why it's good to avoid war. Operating war under some sort of "law" or "rules" is absurd and makes wars more likely, longer and better tool for the political class to use to manipulate the people. If every war was fought like WW2 and the wars before there likely wouldn't have been many major wars since then. I'm not sure very many people would have supported the Iraq war if they knew we were going to carpet bomb Baghdad back to the stone age. Also, Americans should fully expect an country we are at war with to target anything American using any means necessary. To expect anything different is foolish.

 

[usta in Portland]

It's obviously attuned to how some crackpot...

Iranians think. Maybe the Birthers would resonate with the general drift of this kind of thinking if not the actual conclusions-I know the Holocaust denyers do. And then there are those who think the moon landings were staged. Well, just no end to the variety of morons in the world.:help:

As far as 'personal tragedy' is concerned - it's personal, so it should be kept that way. When one dangles their grief out in the breeze just to get themselves noticed and contribute to the circus of media attention that they decry in nearly the same breath, well, what is there to say about them-that they lack judgement? That they have become vicitims of the Kate+8 life-as-public-commodity mentality. That they are inauthentic? Tasteless? Badly brought up? Insensitive? That they show a bizzare notion of propriety by feeding the voyurestic tendency of some by graphic description of a loved one's dead body. I know what I think about this.
I know there is a market for this emotionally gruesome sort of exposure, so it must be good.

 

[usta in Portland]

Can't argue the points....

as I don't think the word means much of anything because it seems capable of meaning just about anything.

 

[usta in Portland]

Very good advice there.

She really should have been more circumspect.

 

[usta in Portland]

And to add to your definitions...

Here are some more:

http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/topics/topic_patriotism.html


Entertaining and rather prove my other point a little too well, I'm afraid.