So it goes

I don’t know, but I think there might be some irony tucked away somewhere in here:

Segway company owner dies after rolling into river

Associated Press/AP Online

LONDON – A British businessman who last year bought the company that makes the two-wheeled Segway personal transporter has died in an accident on one of the vehicles.

Police in West Yorkshire said Monday that 62-year-old James Heselden and a Segway were found in the River Wharfe near Boston Spa, in northern England.

Police said a member of the public had reported seeing a man fall over a 30-foot (9-meter) drop into the river on Sunday.

Heselden bought control of the New Hampshire-based Segway company in December.

He made a fortune through his firm Hesco Bastion which developed a system replacing sand bags to protect troops.

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Rodeo Clowns

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton added her disapproval at a dinner in observance of Iftar, the breaking of the daily fast during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.

“I am heartened by the clear, unequivocal condemnation of this disrespectful, disgraceful act that has come from American religious leaders of all faiths,” Clinton said.

Of course, Clinton was not referring to the latest Predator drone attack gone awry in Af-Pak; no, instead she was referring to the Koran-burning publicity stunt dreamed up by a crackpot preacher in Florida.  Because what are a few lives snuffed out by an errant Hellfire missile or two compared to an egregious act of cultural insensitivity?

Elsewhere in the article, General Petraeus and White House Secretary of Misinformation, Robbie Gibbs, worry that “images of the burning” might “inflame public opinion and incite violence” and thus put “our [sic] troops in harm’s way.”  Though apparently neither is concerned about the possibility that the presence of a couple hundred thousand US troops in muslim lands and a policy that involves the killing of actual muslims might be inciting and inflaming and putting the troops in harm’s way.

Here we have yet another example of thoroughly corrupt public officials attempting to convince us that empty symbolic gestures are somehow more significant than concrete realities—or, maybe more to the point, attempting to distract us from those realities by making a big stink over largely inconsequential events.*

*In this light, the Clinton bit is particularly layered with irony.  Here we have the US Secretary of State condemning of an act of nonviolent symbolism during a symbolic appearance the ulterior purpose of which is to convince muslims that actual violence being committed by the US against muslims is not actually anti-muslim violence.

Self-Hatred

Over at TNR, Andrew Bacevich writes what I think would be a fairly uncontroversial critique of the “withdrawal” from Iraq, saying, essentially, that it’s another political gloss job, much like the so-called surge, meant to obscure the fact that the war/occupation was a clusterfuck and to prevent the US as a nation from learning the right (or any) lessons—e.g., that maybe using military force to attempt to transform foreign societies into little Americas is a fucking dumb idea.

But anyhow, forget about the article itself, because as usual some dipshit in the comments section steals the show.  Here we have (dim?) bulbman1066, trotting out that tired neocon bugaboo, the self-hating liberal:

Saddam Hussein may have been a bad man, but he was anti-American, anti-Western and anti-Israel, which is enough to make the likes of Andrew J. Basevic regret his fall.

Whatever happened to the heroic Democratic Party of FDR, Truman, Acheson, and JFK? Today’s Democratic foreign policy is feeble, cowardly, cynical, utterly devoid of honor and decency. Its leitmotiv is the self-hatred of of the nabobs of academia and the mainstream media. Obama’s speech reflects this. You could see it in the bored, skeptical faces of the military personnel among those whom our pathetic excuse for a president was addressing.

Really?  Do people actually still believe this shit?  Did they ever?  I thought it was just a cynical ploy used by the warmongers to sell the ever-gullible American public on a war that had nothing to do with national security.*  But then again, I hate America (and Israel, too, apparently), so what do I know?  I have an idea, though.  Next time we decide to invade a country, let’s tie a bulbman1066 to the hood of every Humvee and Bradley Fighting Vehicle on its way in.

*Never mind the moronic nationalistic tripe that equates one’s feelings toward the country they happened to be born in with one’s feelings about him or herself.