Democracy for Vancouver

I took L. to see Iron Man yesterday, and it was nice to see a shoot-’em-up movie with at least a bit of a conscience, and not as a single-minded glamorization of war and all the glory the U.S. armed forces have to offer.

Because in the end, too often it ends like this:

A 2007 Battle Ground High School graduate, Andrew Jon Shields, was reported killed Saturday night in Afghanistan.

The Army announced that Shields, 19, an Army combat medic and airborne paratrooper, had been in Afghanistan for only about two months. A former track and football athlete, he had been serving with the 173rd Airborne out of Bamberg, Germany.

Details of his death were not available immediately, but friends believed Shields died in a suicide car bomb attack in eastern Afghanistan in the city of Jalalabad.

He was the son of Clark County Sheriff’s Deputy Jon Shields. The family was reported working with the Army on funeral arrangements. The family planned to make a statement later.

Because of my participation in tae kwon do, I know a lot of graduating seniors this year, and if any of them were to enlist and be killed before next year’s class has had a chance to graduate, I would be heartbroken and enraged.

As I am now.

We should have had this shit wrapped up in Afghanistan by now, and if we had not taking a fucking fool’s leap into Iraq, Andrew Shields would not have been killed before the first anniversary of his high school graduation.

Because he probably wouldn’t have needed to be there at all.

Afghanistan is now as dangerous and Taliban-riddled as it was before 9/11. Iraq continues to be the mother of all tar babies. But as far as Bush is concerned, all’s well:

We’ve removed two cruel regimes in weeks instead of years. In Afghanistan, coalition forces and their Afghan allies drove the Taliban from power in less than two months. In Iraq, with the help of the United States Air Force, our troops raced across 350 miles of enemy territory to liberate Baghdad in less than one month — one of the fastest armored advances in military history.

What movie has this guy been watching the last 7 years?

We are cursed with this stupid motherfucker for another seven and a half months.

How many more soldiers will die before we come to our senses?