"Take off that uniform!"

"But on this point I differ with the President: I believe that our military forces deserve to be treated with respect and dignity, and not used as stage props to embellish a presidential speech."

- Senator Robert Byrd (D-WVa) expressing his outrage over the President's "Independence Day" photo-op last week.

Tune in next week as I continue my ongoing examination of the death of shame....

Untouchable
OK. Now I'm satisfied.

Since there clearly aren't stockpiles of anthrax-tipped Scud missiles aimed at the "Children of America"(tm) like Bush said justified razing Iraq to it's foundation, and since the Shiite majority seems to have a difference of opinion on this whole "Democratic American puppet" thing, some people in the Administration are finally coming clean as to the point of this war.

It's "Shock & Awe", but not the way you think. It's entire purpose was to let potential terrorists know that America operates by the Chicago Way, - "you pull a knife, we pull a gun. You send one of ours to the hospital, we send one of yours to the morgue".

Hey, it worked for Nixon in Vietnam and Reagan with the Soviets, right?

Dixiecrats
A Country radio DJ in Colorado got suspended and was threatened with being fired for playing the Dixie Chicks against station programming orders last week.

What strikes me as the most interesting is that, according to the article, the majority of the fans actually want them to get airplay, but it's management/business that is keeping them off the air.

Could this whole thing just be an organized smear campaign from uber-Nationalist radio bohemoth ClearChannel? After all, they were the money behind a bunch of pre-war rallies across the country back in March.

Thieves In The Temple
Turns out ancient Mesopotamian artifacts weren't the only things that grew legs and walked out of Iraq last month. In this report from the Global Security Newswire, a team from the U.S. defense department found an Iraqi nuclear facility had been looted two weeks before they'd arrived on site.