I found this article on the front page of Sunday's Salt Lake Tribune. The headline read "Utahns and the War: Religious Divide." It went on to explain that if you're LDS and live in Utah 73% of you support "Bush's handling of the war." The nationwide approval rating, according to a poll commisioned by the Tribune said only 39% of people in the nation support Bush's folly in Iraq.What this says to me is that 39% of the country is insane. In Utah, however, we have a higher number of people who wear blinders on a daily basis, so the level of insanity, here in Utah is 73% of the LDS population and 30% of the non-LDS population.
What does Bush have to do next to convince people he's a bad leader and an immoral one? We live in a state where morality is placed on a pedestal but dissent against immorality in the form of Republicans is blasphemy. I read today in the New York Times that the budget proposals going through are going to "most likely" remove a third of all children from medicaid. That's moral? These guys need to be stopped, but we'll never do it if people can't see true immorality. It's immoral to see a booby on television, but it's okay to starve a child in poverty. It's immoral to see a suggestive comment on a film trailer, but killing Iraqi's is all in a day's work. It's immoral to get a blow-job and lie about it, but to lie about something like WMD and send in 2000+ soldiers to their deaths is just doing our part. It's a stain on your soul to watch an R-rated movie, but 100,000+ dead Iraqi civilians is cause to fly an American flag from the window of the Hummer. It blights the soul to drink alcohol, but reducing greenhouse gasses and protecting the environment and being good to the Earth sounds like communism. Christians are judged by how they treat the least among them, but not Republican Christians, poor people don't count.
Man. I'm not a fan of organized religion. My stay in Utah has cured me of the desire to seek it out.
6 comments:
It's immoral to send US soldiers to die, but it's moral to leave Saddam's genocide unpunished. A pount that liberals trivialize if it is ever raised is that Saddam's regime enacted genocide against hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians. Indisputable and almost always overlooked fact from liberals there. Saddam commit genocide. Genocide is a targeted and systematic elimination of people of one (or several) ethnicities. That is what Saddam did. That's right. His regime murdered hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. If Saddam's actions were ever allowed to be cited in American debates for what they truly were - genocide - there would be no debate at all. The truth is that an American who does not support the war does not give a damn for the persisting threat of genocide that Saddam represented against peasants in another country. The truth is that far too many americans don't give a damn about forgeign peasants. If you really cared about foreign civilians, you would do far more than point out that Americans leave children to starve - you would point out that too many Americans would have left Iraqi civilians open to the danger that Saddam might have slaughtered uncounted numbers more. If you really valued all human life equally (which you don't), you would be behind the rallying cry to finish out the victory over terror and tyranny. But you don't: because you value American life above any other life on the planet, which is an unequal love. It would seem you believe we can only love America. Many Republicans have a broader compassion, which sees the value in risking our lives to truly defent the lives of other nations. To decry the US invasion is to tolerate or side with genocide.
Peter Galbraith on the Iraq genocide
Human Rights Watch estimates as many as 290,000 civilians were killed by Saddam's regime
Many Iraqi voices in praise of US intervention
Victor Davis Hansen on "The Therapuetic Choice"
Well, then does that mean we're also guilty of the genocide of the Iraq people? As of the 2000 election we'd been responsible for the deaths of 100,000 Iraqi civilians at the most conservative estimate based on sound methodology.
Saddam was evil. But since when did two wrongs make a right?
Besides, Sadamm was being punished. Sanctions are punishment.
Think about it in terms like this: A child of yours breaks a window. Do you break his bedroom window and tear the heads off his action figures in retaliation? No you take priveleges away and force him to pay back the cost of the window. Otherwise you have to pay for the cost of the window he broke and the window you broke.
And if we needed to punish Sadamm so bad, why didn't we do it when he actually killed the Kurds? Instead, the Reagan administration sent Rumsfeld out to shake his hand.
No. I stand by what I said. I do care about human life equally, which is why I'm pissed off by the idea that we'd have to kill Iraqi Civilians and chalk it up to "colateral damage" to bring them "democracy." I care about the lives of the troops that have sacrificed their lives because we sent them into a situation we didn't know enough about. I care about the lives of everyone here living in poverty and without health care because we're spending all of our money on "rebuilding" Iraq, a country which we broke needlessly in the first place. There were better, less costly ways of going about change. War is not the answer and it wasn't a solution in Iraq either. It's just created a larger problem and more terrorists.
Annonymous--
If we are going to kill thousands and thousands of people to punish a guy, we're not any better.
If we're going to punish evil dictators that are killing their own people we have a lot of work to do, but I don't see Georgie boy going after anyone other than Saddam and Osama.
If we are going to punish evil dictators that are killing their own people, we better stop putting them in power over the democratically elected leaders -- can you say Pinochet?
Why not punish the evil dictators that kill their own people when they are doing it? Why reward them and build alliances and then 20 years after the fact come after them to punish?
I don't buy the punish Saddam theory. Sounds nice, but doesn't make it through careful scrutiny.
All life is important. According to Lancet back in April 100,000 have lost their lives. This does not count how many Iraqis have lost body parts to our bombs and survived. This does not count how many Iraqis have lost homes and livelihoods to our bombs. This does not count how many future Iraqis will suffer and die from exposure to the depleted uranium that we've rained upon the Iraqi landscape, or how many will suffer and die because of contaminated water. This doesn't count the many Iraqis that we are torturing and and kidnapping.
I'm saying that the questionably immoral stuff on one side is the stuff that gets the attention paid to it around here, even though it isn't a big deal. The stuff on the other side is the REALLY immoral stuff that gets ignored because most around here have blinders.
Oh, I get it. You are so right! the stuff on the other side totally gets ignored. Nobody EVER talks about it. Your post really cuts some new ground and explores some new territory that NOBODY ever has talked about before because everone ignores it.
Yawn.
I'm not saying it gets ignored everywhere, but the people around here, the ones guilty of it, do ifnore it. And I didn't say I was covering new ground, in fact I referenced a news article that had covered the ground previously.
Post a Comment