"James Carroll's column appears regularly in the Globe."

A phrase which should induce uncontrollable shuddering amongst sensible folk. Or at least an overpowering urge to reach for a barf bag.

The tedious apostate attempts to medicate his evident dismay about recent Coalition military successes with a discursive sequence of questions about the war and American policy in general. Think of it as the Socratic method meets the Metamucil-gobbling "Every War Is Vietnam--We Hope!" crowd meets the Royal Society for the Promotion of Moral Equivalence. Here's a Whitman's sampler:

Can aggressive war be waged by those who grasp the bottomless tragedy of the human condition, how every story -- whether one person's or a nation's -- ends in death? How every untimely death wounds the absolute, and how unnecessary death is itself the mortal enemy?

I'm not in a mood to let the NIONs of the world have the moral high ground right now. They don't deserve it. God knows they haven't earned it. In fact, this faux moralizing brings out the side of me that identified with the protagonists on Molly Hatchet album covers.

So, I'll keep it simple: Here's one question lobbed back at the Carroll Claque:

Why did you side with the captors, and not the captives?




[Second link via Mark Sullivan]