That took guts

I admire the people who turned out for the Iraqi elections today. We Democrats need to get our ideas straightened out so that they don't conflict with praising wholeheartedly an event like today's. Criticism has to be smarter than simple opposition of and attempts to undermine Bush. Things like this from Senator Kerry don't cut it:

No one in the United States should try to overhype this election. This election is a sort of demarcation point, and what really counts now is the effort to have a legitimate political reconciliation, and it's going to take a massive diplomatic effort and a much more significant outreach to the international community than this administration has been willing to engage in. Absent that, we will not be successful in Iraq.

Enveloping History

I've had some things to say on the topic of German WWII guilt in Memorials and Memory Holes. Via ALDaily is this excellently written article by Theodore Dalrymple The Specters Haunting Dresden.

On no city does history weigh heavier than on Dresden. It is 60 years in February 2005 since the bombing that forever changed the basis of the city’s renown. Overnight, the Florence of the Elbe became a perpetual monument to destruction from the air, famed for its rubble and its corpses rather than its baroque architecture and its devotion to art. And then came communism.

You meet people in Dresden who, until a few years ago, knew nothing but life under Hitler, Ulbricht, and Honecker. Truly the sins of their fathers were visited upon them, for they brought neither the Nazis nor the communists to power, and there was nothing they could do to escape them. For such people, the sudden change in 1990 was both liberation and burden. Avid to see a world that was previously forbidden them, they took immediate advantage of their new freedom to visit the farthest corners of the globe, the more exotic the better. But the liberation brought with it a heightened awareness of the man-made desert of their own pasts, seven-eighths of their lives, truly an expense of spirit in a waste of shame. Never was Joy’s grape burst more decisively against veil’d Melancholy’s palate fine.

He goes on to talk about how the bombing of Dresden is used by Holocaust deniers and anti-semites to equate the two sides and, as if on cue, this story from Reuters today German Far-Right Fracas on Eve of Auschwitz Ceremony includes this,

The far-right National Democratic Party (NPD) provoked outrage on Friday by walking out of a minute's silence for Nazi victims and referring to Allied strikes on the German city of Dresden in 1945 as a "bombing holocaust."

"I'm not Mahmoud Abbas, but I could play him on TV." The irony that the Mueller-Stahl screen capture was taken from Jakob der Lügner has not escaped me.

For Brennan and the Trinkteufel

A bit of bingeing can be good for you - from spiked-life. No pun intended.

It is the grown-up thing to do: stand on your own two feet and get legless

My name is Mick, and I am a secret binge drinker. So secret that even I didn’t know I was one, until I looked up the official definition of a “binge” and discovered that I am a menace to society.

I was watching Dateline or some other fear-mongering news magazine the day after Christmas and discovered that I too was a Binge Drinker and had binged in front of my young niece and nephews on Christmas no less. I've since called their parents, my brothers, to beg forgiveness and attempt a start at reconciliation. They did not oblige and I've been excommunicated from my family who understandably cannot bear the disgrace of having a Binge Drinker among their members. Blogging may be sparse as I attempt to find an internet connection out in the cold and lonely winter snow. Oh how I rue the day of my first drink.