Happy Happy Joy Joy

Making up cutsie-pie videos about the sickness of sending parents to war is enough to make me fucking wretch. Most kids get to see their parent’s come home in a box from these assignments or so out of their heads with unquenchable rage and misery they’ll wish they had. There are no happy fucking endings in war.

@FlyingChainSaw:
To be fair, kids I don’t mind. It’s when adults do the same thing and by, ahem, expectations should know better.

Awww … I don’t blame either of them. The kid? It’s her dad. The dad? It’s what he’s been ordered to do. Blame the civilians who started it. And we know who those people are.

@blogenfreude: I’m with you. I’ve watched this clip several times today and by the end I’m a blubbering mess each time.

Random fact: my sister used to be a substitute teacher at this school about 10 years ago. (It’s on an air force base, her ex was stationed there at the time).

TJ/Just nominated Stinque in “Best Large Blog” for the 2009 Webbies.

Hay, did you guys know we have an authority of 500? We totally do. Does anybody know what that means?

@Tommmcatt is hunkered down in the trenches: You will respect mah a-thar-a-tay!

tj/ “The Prisoner” on IFC tonight, two episodes.

This is just emoporn for the war. No kid should ever have to wonder if a parent is going to return from war, much less have their tragedies splattered on the web like this, and yes having to live in that kind of fear is a horror no little one should have to endure or have paraded around.

@JNOV:

Seriously, though. What is “Authority”?

@FlyingChainSaw:

I thought it was sweet.

@Tommmcatt is hunkered down in the trenches: I dunno but I saw a tortured kid who was spent too fucking long being brave and being without dad for all the wrong reasons and it just made me want to bite through Cheney’s throat and disembowel Caligutard.

@FlyingChainSaw:

Not to be fresh, darling, but everything makes you want to do that. Well, most things, anyway.

And you forgot to mention shitting in the wounds.

@redmanlaw:

Aren’t they doing a new version of that with Ian McKellan?

@Tommmcatt is hunkered down in the trenches: Actually, I have no idea what Technorati ratings are based on, but ours has just gone up to 515. So somehow we have jacked up into a bigger weight-class.

I smell FRAUD! FRAAAAAAUD!

P.S.: if the Rules Committee hearing is any indication, the GOP is going to bring the crazy tomorrow. They’re talking about doctors being thrown in prison for not going along with Obamacare. (Of course, it may just be that Virginia Foxx (R-Sticks) is in play here.)

@Tommmcatt is hunkered down in the trenches: Starts 11/15. Live blog? Be seeing you.

@FlyingChainSaw: As a vet, I agree.

TJ/ PA liquor laws are bullshit!

@Tommmcatt is hunkered down in the trenches: True, I had a tea with lemon yesterday and it didn’t make me think of immolating or torturing Cheney or Caligutard, well, hardly at all.

@Tommmcatt is hunkered down in the trenches: ::shrug::

@FlyingChainSaw: “I saw a tortured kid who was spent too fucking long being brave and being without dad for all the wrong reasons…”

Frankly, that’s why I was sobbing. That and I felt like it was some sort of weirdly personal moment that I was repeatedly watching a little girl’s face collapsing and contorting as she realized she could put her brave little girl mask down and be daddy’s little girl again. And that return to innocence was why I was crying. And then I was appalled that this incredibly personal and intense moment was being recorded, yet I was more appalled I was watching it.

Ergo, blubbering mass of tears.

This is Pure Patriot Pron.

Not that I didn’t start to tear up when the little girl’s face broke realizing her daddy was there.

Shit, I don’t know what to think about this, but instinct tells me it is just wrong on so many levels. I could only watch it 1 and 1/2 times.

This is haunting me. After a wonderful, simple dinner I retreated up to the computer room. I caught the last of Rachel because I so seldom take that opportunity, but it was only for fifteen minutes or so.

I put on Sean Hannity for background noise, thinking there was little else news-y to choose from, but after just a few minutes I couldn’t take it anymore and I actually switched to Project Runway. Which at least, as background noise, I can ignore.

But I keep thinking about that little girl and her dad.

What kind of programming makes a little girl proud that her dad is abroad in Iraq, representing the US American culture via violent force?

What kind of programming made her dad volunteer to go there?

I deeply don’t understand the people who serve in our military. I’m all for repeal of DADT, but most of the time it’s very hard to find much sympathy for anyone who would pledge allegiance to the Flag.

I really don’t understand why anyone would voluntarily put themselves in a position to potentially follow orders to do something morally repugnant, just because such orders come from those in charge of the country in which they happened to be born.

…not that most of us don’t voluntarily put ourselves in positions to do morally repugnant things, just by participating in a profoundly in-egalitarian economic/ecological System. Pretty much any work you can do in our system has some component of moral repugnance.

You have to be a hard-core forager and squatter to really reject the dominant culture. Most of us find some way to compromise what we know to be true sustain severe cognitive dissonance in order to get through the day. And to provide for our families beloved creatures.

For those who understand the deep wrongness of the way things are, those who can’t bring themselves to wish for short-term economic growth that will somehow float all our ships (at the cost of the sustainability of humanity), our predicament is a real conundrum.

I don’t wish any particular person — much less specific segments of humanity — their ultimate demise. But I understand that the culture I belong to is fundamentally unsustainable. One way or another, there will be corrections.

DEVELOPING HARD: Health Care Debate set for 9:30ish kickoff tomorrow morning.

One hour of Rules Committee blather, then vote on rules of debate. So the debate proper begins around 11ish. Four hours on the bill itself. Twenty minutes on the abortion language. Vote on that. One hour on fake Republican bill. Vote on that. Ten minutes on motion to recommit. Vote on that. Then final passage — probably around 6pm or 7pm or so.

Unless Steny needs to twist some more arms, in which case we get a vote around New Years or something. And unless there isn’t a bullshit motion to adjourn, or seven or eight motions to suspend the rules and pass bills telling Americans how good cupcakes are.

Gavel-to-throwing-of-gavel coverage here. Unless I get really bored and fall over dead from a stroke.

@chicago bureau: Thank you, I will glue myself to CSPAN tomorrow.

But can anyone tell us what they will finally be voting for? Does a real public option survive?

That’s about the only thing I can bring myself to care about anymore. I will cry myself to sleep tonight about the complete defeat of any possible Socialist takeover by Government of healthcare 18% of the US American Econofme.

Curses Michele Bachmann! You may have won this battle, but you have NOT WON THE WAR! Nyah ha ha!

@Pedonator, CB: I’m going to the range early, wine and cigar haze notwithstanding, then taking Son of RML fly fishing.

@Pedonator: TV sucked tonight after The Prisoner was over. We cranked up the Sinatra channel on Sirius, built a fire outside, drank wine and smoked cigars. My friend’s GF had a cigarette. A martini now would be perfectly excessive.

@JNOV: The vestigial blue laws, y’mean? When I was in school we’d always hit up Bella Italia for a late-night booze fix, but that’s probably out of your way.

@Pedonator: Does a real public option survive?

I haven’t heard of any significant change from the announced version of the House bill. We remain well and truly fucked.

@mellbell: Haha! I know Bella! But, yeah, it’s out of my way since I moved off The Main Line.

@Pedonator: I did it for the Navy’s meager GI Bill, because my BF joined, and I didn’t want to follow him around the country as a military wife without marketable skills, and because we hadn’t been in a war since Vietnam. Then came along the 1st Gulf War. Holy shit! My ex was on a carrier in the Gulf, and I was stationed at a Navy hospital in SD and later Camp Pendleton. The 1st GW was the first time female soldiers were deployed in “semicombat” roles, and it was the first time married couples with kids were deployed at the same time — a major no-no, but “The Needs of the Navy/MC/Army/AF” outweigh their rules very often.

There were days that my alarm went off at Oh-Dark-Thirty, and I’d lie in bed looking at the ceiling thinking, “I’m 22 years old. I’m in the Navy. I’m married and pregnant. I live in CA. HOW THE HELL DID THIS HAPPEN?”

I served with people who were pretty gung ho about the whole military thing, but most of us enlisted folks wanted to get out of the ghetto/hinterlands/needed money for college and never thought we’d see a war while “we did our time” like a fucking prison sentence.

The sad thing is, when you’ve been conditioned to be a soldier or a sailor at such a young adult age, when you finally *do* get out, sometimes you can’t adjust to the civilian world, so you go right back in, especially if you didn’t learn any marketable skills while you were in.

My ex repaired and maintained FLIR cameras on S3s. Not too many civilian planes have FLIR, so he was kind of stuck in the Navy for 20 years even though he knew more about aviation electronics than most. But he didn’t have a degree, sooooo…

@chicago bureau: I’d rather follow the action here than watch the BS on C-SPAN. While I’m waiting for the painter to show up. Yesterday it was the electrician, who figured out that the handyman my wife had hired had majorly screwed up the wiring to our living room. Maybe I should just live in a yurt.

@JNOV: Law enforcement choppers have that kind of gear. Useful for SAR and looking for escaped convicts at night out in the country, but yeah. It’s like being a flight deck guy – not much demand for that in the economy.