“It just seems the smaller the town, the bigger the turnout,” he said later.

“The first casualty of war is not truth — that expires during diplomacy — but the country.” -that sagacious Upstater, Bill Kauffman.
Nothing better evinces this than Chris Jones’ “The Things That Carried Him”, from the May 2008 issue of Esquire, to which I again direct you.

The Maryland Corner: “Redeeming Roger Taney”

(from the forthcoming issue of The Terrapin Times, the first installment of our new feature, dedicated to important political figures, past and present, on the Right from Maryland, tentatively called The Maryland Corner)

Americans have a way of spinning history to bolster our national mythology. JFK’s foreign policy was nightmarish — to speak nothing of [...]

“Soldier of Misfortune”

From Tuesday’s Post:
[Iraq] was a war with its own original sin: the Bush administration’s failure to provide enough troops. To make up the shortfall, the government chose to outsource responsibility for deciding who can kill and die for the United States to for-profit companies that employed tens of thousands of soldiers-for-hire: mercenaries, or private security [...]

Veterans Day

Thank you.
John has a couple of great links posted here. One of them is the tear-jerker from Esquire, about burying a soldier from Indiana who died in Iraq, which I’ve posted before. Please, read them all. Also, my thoughts on why we need to pull out of Iraq, inspired by a night of darts.

A must read: “The Last Tour”, in The New Yorker, on the psychological horror that is war

William Tecumseh Sherman, one of our most revered criminals of war, remarked, “War is Hell.” I don’t think he quite had this in mind.
From the towed car, park rangers had already deduced who they were. They had called Kellee Twiggs, Travis’s wife, in Virginia. She had missed a call from her husband earlier that afternoon, [...]

More Israeliphilia? Or: I thought Pakistan was our ally, too!

From today’s Washington Post:
HYDERABAD, India, Sept. 6 — International negotiators revoked a 34-year-old ban on nuclear trade with India on Saturday and backed a contentious nuclear energy agreement between the country and the United States.
As I’ve discussed before, “the West” (lovely white-washed replacement for “Christendom”, eh?), fearing that the mad Persian might unleash upon the [...]

August is the cruelest month

John Zmirak, one of my favorites, offers a thoughtful plaint, recalling dreadful Augusts of the last one hundred years, at InsideCatholic.

Elsewhere in the conservative web-log sphere, re: Georgia

Over at the GW Patriot, Patrick has ignited quite the debate, wherein I have, perhaps not so judiciously, involved myself. He writes
As if we are not already too involved in parts of the world we need not be, the conflict in Georgia has quickened the pulse of many-a-neocon over the past few days. Like they [...]

NY _Times_ reports: “Russia Orders Halt in Georgia as Fighting Continues”

MOSCOW — President Dmitri A. Medvedev of Russia announced Tuesday that he had ordered a halt to his country’s military operation in Georgia, although he did not say that troops were pulling out and he insisted that Russian forces were still authorized to fire on enemies in South Ossetia.
I happily report this, having begun to [...]

A brief note from Wendell Berry to George W. Bush

Wendell Berry in “Fidelity”, in “The Body and the Earth”, in The Agrarian Basis for an Authentic Culture, part III of The Art of the Commonplace: “It is impossible, for instance, to conceive that a man could despise women and yet love his wife, or love his own place in the world and yet deal [...]