america supports you! kind of! when it makes them look good!

it made me livid to know that my government thought the best way to honor those who died in the september 11 attacks was to have a parade touting the unfounded war said government used those tragic deaths as a jumping point for. the only factual link between the attacks and the iraq war is, of course, the government itself, and its dogged refusal to admit that the one only led to the other by way of the president's and the administration's callous self-promotion and nonsensical propaganda. anyone who didn't believe it was hogwash before should know by now not just that it absolutely is, but that the people who were pushing it never took it seriously themselves; four years of being beaten about the head with the idea that bush was the only man who could keep our nation safe, but when he was actually faced with a disaster, a chance to prove to the nay-sayers that he's meant any one word of it, we watched that "america is safer and stronger under my leadership" house of cards fall so fast it took us days of rewinding and slow-motion just to figure out what had actually happened (and it was more than could be summarized in a single hour-long broadcast; thank you, atrios, for the links). no one was working to make us safer here on our own ground, and the only reasons they wouldn't have bothered to construct anything better than this cardboard façade we've finally seen blown to bits are that they didn't believe they'd ever need anything more substantial, or they didn't care in the least about what would happen to american citizens if that need did someday arise.

well, i think the fact that the president and his cheerleaders don't care about their citizenry was pretty well proven when they chose to go forth with this "freedom (from the burden of conscience) march" instead of redirecting the funds to the victims of the hurricane, who suffered as much, if not more, from a lack of leadership and capable personnel as from the hurricane itself. no one has apologized, and no one is about to apologize, but they're happy to hand us plastic dogtags and t-shirts--as long as we'll promise not to try to call them on their shit. sure, we support you, america... but we will arrest you if you hop that fence. it's not a police state, it's tough love.

of course it is. and when mistakes like this are squashed under the loving foot of the war machine, it's only being done for our own good:

Army Kept Truth of GI's Death From Family
By ROBERT BURNS, AP Military Writer
Sunday, September 11, 2005

(09-11) 04:10 PDT WASHINGTON, (AP) --

The Army said Saturday it knew for more than a year after 1st Lt. Kenneth Ballard's death in Iraq in May 2004 that he was not killed in action, as it initially reported. The family was not told the truth until Friday.

On Memorial Day in 2004, the day after Kenneth Ballard died, the Army informed his family that he had been killed by enemy fire while on a combat mission in the south-central Iraqi city of Najaf. In a casualty announcement from June 1, the Pentagon said Ballard died "during a firefight with insurgents."

The Army disclosed on Saturday that Ballard, 26, actually died of wounds from the accidental discharge of a M240 machine gun on his tank after his platoon had returned from battling insurgents in Najaf.

the delay in informing the family has been blamed on an "oversight," but how in the world was that sort of mistake made in the first place? couldn't be that "killed by insurgents" is the default cause of death on the form letter. the united states government and/or military would never use such a cheap, patriotic-heartstring-tugging tactic to pacify grieving, angry families. things like that couldn't happen in my country.

"of course they couldn't," the department of defense says. "we're a good country, we love you, we're protecting you. what, you don't believe us? that's not very fair; aren't we throwing you a parade?"


postscript, 8:24 pm, 9/12/05: americablog makes mention of some of the thank-you gestures extended by our good, loving country to the out-of-tune members of the marching band.