Bits & Pieces
Bits and pieces from this reporter’s notebook.
Da-deet-da-deet-da-deet-deet....Ya just gotta wonder if anyone really knows what’s going on with our war against the Tali-bin-Laden. His eminence gris, Donald Rumsfeld, said he thought we might have trouble catching Osama, then he said we would track him down, and then he said he wasn’t sure. All in one day. This, from the man in charge of our military.
Da-deet-da-deet-da-deet-deet....Our military has been dropping all sorts of ordnance on Afghanistan, though apparently to little effect. The military says they are — hrumph, hrumph — confident that they are hitting their targets. What targets? The Taliban seems in relatively fine shape — for Afghanistan. They have a military, and enough operational control despite the bombing, to wage a war. Haven’t we seen this before? Remember how our warships pounded the German defenses in advance of hitting the beach at Normandy, and how fierce was the German fire still. More recently, the Soviet Union thought their superpower superiority would win the day in Afghanistan, and they are no longer a country, let alone a superpower.
Da-deet-da-deet-da-deet-deet....The over-trumpeted Northern Alliance — they even get capital letters — are supposed to be the locals we will back to win, if they can. They weren’t able to without our help. They’re not doing very well at the moment, either. And one of the anti-Taliban mucky-mucks we were hoping might be their leader got himself caught and executed. Does anyone think our side is winning?
Da-deet-da-deet-da-deet-deet....And before we leave the subject of the psycho-denizens of the world’s most backward country, I have to ask in a spirit of etymological curiosity, are the Taliban a collective noun? Do we say the Taliban is or the Taliban are? Are they a singular mega-monolith of evil, as the White House would have us believe, or pluralistic? If we slaughter the Taliban, will we have eliminated evil from the Earth?
Da-deet-da-deet-da-deet-deet....On the home front, where war of another sort is playing out in the mail, the cues are even more ridiculous. We have a chief of homeland security, a term which raises new standards of meaningless, who is clueless to answer the critical questions, and powerless to stop the assault. We might or might not eventually track down the anthrax posters. They may have left the country, or not. Even if no one else gets sick, they have already done tens of billions of dollars in damage to our economy.
Da-deet-da-deet-da-deet-deet....And finally, another casualty of the new war is the soon-to-be ex-head of the American Red Cross, Bernadine Healy. Apparently the board of directors thought she wasn’t being completely above board — not the first time she's been so impeached — about how she said donations would be spent. Where concerned citizens thought their hard-earned was going to relatives of the deceaseds, in fact some was going into the regular ARC coffers to cover operating expenses. Consider that $100 million was allocated to pay travel for 35,000 Red Cross employees to help with the disasters in New York and Washington. That’s a lotta bandages and aspirin, especially since they claim a total 37,000 workers. Who was it who said the first casualty of war is always the truth?
And that’s SetonnoteS...I’m Tony Seton.
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