Ho-Hum and the Wizard of Oz

Think of this as one of those columns that your local sportswriter submits when he can't come up with a full story line. One of the scribes around here refers to it as "emptying out the mail bag".

1) Ho-hum. The invading force that famously "doesn't do body counts" not only does them, but has detailed interactive maps showing where every poor Muslim wretch met their end, all 110,000+ of them.

2) Ho-hum. Over 70% of the Iraqis killed by the “precision” weaponry of the coalition and Iraqi militias are non-combatants.

3) Ho-hum. There are some 15,000 new "unexplained" deaths in Iraq, that is, on top of the 110,000 meticulously counted ones that they told us weren't being counted.

As I recall, 3,000 of "our" dead "changed everything". Good thing their lives are worth so much less. Otherwise, everything in the world would have to change at least four more times in rapid succession. And we can't deal with that right now. Agreed? So let's just not talk about it. Agreed?

4) Ho-hum. Picking off people at checkpoints for fun, or for the relief of nervous exhaustion, was, and probably is, quite normal in Iraq. Guess some Iraqi parents had some bad days trying to get home for supper. Ho-hum.

Iraqi kid: "Where's Dad?"

Iraqi Mom: "Sorry to tell you sweetie (motherly smile) He's dead because he looked at a 19 year-old from the US Army the wrong way at a check point. The kid decided it was time to waste a Haji. Don't worry though everything will be all right when his commanding officer comes by with the $2,000 they give to the families of collateral damage like Dad. Ho-hum.

5) Ho-hum. The crew of a US Helicopter gunship spied two Iraqis who were trying to surrender. Itchy fingers on the trigger, they called the unit’s lawyer on the radio to see what to do. After the esteemed jurist told them that, "You can’t surrender to an aircraft", the boys in the big bird let the two raised-arm terrorists (you know they were!) have it. Ho-hum.

6) Ho-hum. The US Army--that that oft-invoked agent of moral betterment for rural kids with no visible future, and on the other end, for dark people who don't love their children with the same intensity we do, and are thus in need of being taught a whole series of life lessons at the point of a gun—issued orders from on high not to report or investigate torture and wanton being killing carried out by the Iraqi Defense Forces, a group over which the self-same US Army had pretty complete operational control. Ho-hum.

The Wizard of Oz: Hillary Clinton, the heavyweight spokesperson of US foreign policy reacted to all of this by saying, in so many words, "Pay no attention to that Wiki-leaks man behind the curtain". .

Ho-hum. The guess here is that most people in the US media and the US population will do exactly that. (Not may little Totos sniffing around in either camp)

Ho-hum. I know, it’s time to get the kids off to soccer practice. I‘ll say a prayer that you get there safely in the SUV. Nowadays, you never know who might be after you…or why.