It is a beautiful day and I comb two newspapers looking for something positive to say to match the glorious swing of light in the leaves. I am not finding it today. My echo-location is not producing a laugh. If anything, I am shocked at how deep the issues go that we need to protest.
Here is a section of Jon Carroll's column today. It is not light, but is a small enough issue to handle. We can do this. Rumsfield has been offered a one-year appointment at the Hoover Institution, a right-wing think tank associated with Stanford University in a way no one understands.
I place you in the middle of Jon Carroll's column in the San Francisco Chronicle today.
Jon Carroll:
But all of this is beside the point. Donald Rumsfeld is not some guy who opposes sex education in schools, or believes that abortion should be illegal, or thinks that women should just stay home and make babies. He's a guy who ordered bombing runs on helpless civilians. He's a guy who sent American soldiers to their death. He's a guy who displaced 2 million Iraqi citizens. If the phrase "war criminal" means anything any more, then Donald Rumsfeld is a war criminal.
All war involves senseless slaughter, but that slaughter is often in defense of a comprehensible goal. If someone attacks you, you attack back. That's why the initial war in Afghanistan was a good idea. (Now the war in Afghanistan is underfunded and ignored - another Rumsfeld legacy.) But the war in Iraq had no comprehensible rationale. The rationales presented turned out to be exaggerations or lies. The prosecution of the war was carried out according to Rumsfeld theories about the utility of small armies, and those theories were not changed even as the death toll mounted.
Rumsfeld never let the facts interfere with his grand visions. Even when he resigned, he exhibited no remorse. Now other people, better people, will be left to sort out the grotesque mess he left, and America will carry the burden of his stupid invasion for the next 50 years. If he's not the worst person in the world, he's in the top 10.
I skip a bit of Jon and then continue with his words:
There is no necessity to be polite to Donald Rumsfeld.
Indeed, I think that Donald Rumsfeld should be shunned. I think people should turn their faces away from him when he comes near. I think people should avoid him on the street. I think people who come into accidental contact with him should say, "I shun thee." He deserves social discomfort; he deserves to realize that actions have consequences, and that the hermetic world inside the Bush administration is not the only world in the world.
Shunning is one of the first punishments and still used in small societies, it works. I think anyone with a conscience can approve this as the right punishment for Rumsfield since we are unlikely to do anything more to him. Let's let him know we don't approve of what he has done in our name and with our tax dollars.
Check out the whole column at:
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2007/09/27/DDKTSE1J7.DTL