In America, no event is possible lest it be prefigured in cinema. A narrative not flickered into our brainpans by our trainers has no validity, is not even comprehensible. Let's see.

Jeniva Jalal, God rest her soul, is dead.

So is Marany Awanees.

Their crime?

Let's just call it, "DWI."*

News Item:

Baghdad has erupted in a torrent of bombs and violence.

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Car bombs
killed nearly 200 people in
Baghdad on Wednesday in the
deadliest attacks in the city
since U.S. and Iraqi forces
launched a security crackdown
aimed at halting the country's
slide into civil war.

In the Sadriya neighborhood, a car bomb killed 140 and injured 150:

A thick, dark plume of smoke rose at the scene of the bombing.


Fire fighters rushed to put
out flames on burning bodies,
while rescue workers tried to
retrieve bodies from the
blackened hulks of cars.

Fallujah, Abu Ghraib, Ramadi, Haditha, etc., -these incidents typify the cancer that is known as the US military culture. The recent revelations of US Army soldiers raping and burning a 15-year-old Iraqi and exterminating her family typify a military mindset endemic to US military culture yet foreign to American society, -and indeed, humanity.

This isn't going to be pretty. I've had it. I simply cannot  take anymore of the crap served up in the media day after day after day about "building democracy" in Iraq, "finishing the job" or "as they stand-up, we stand down."

Does anyone anywhere know even one person who woke up on September 12 and said: "What we need to do now is build democracy in Iraq."? Was there one person on the entire planet who looked at the smoking ruins and asked: "How many US troops do you think will be required to make the streets of Tikrit safe?" We frigging know that nobody involved in actually organizing this cockamamy catastrophe we've come to know as "Operation Iraqi Freedom" gave these questions a moment's thought. And now, every day we have supposedly sensible folks putting on their most serious faces in order to conceal their one true concern:

"I hope nobody figures out I never cared about Iraqis. Pretending I do is such a pain in the ass."

How bad is it? The current gabfest makes Richard Cohen seem like a portrait in self-reflection.