The Republic of T.

Guess who finally took his finger out of his ass and stuck it in the breeze.

Rarely have I seen or heard a candidate do a 180° so quickly, and then act as though the skid-marks and the smell of burning rubber aren’t obvious to just about everyone. But then came candidate John McCain (circa 2008).

On Monday morning, as Wall Street was absorbing one of the biggest shocks to the financial system in generations, Senator John McCain said he believed the fundamentals of the U.S. economy were “strong.”

Hours later he backpedaled, explaining that he meant that American workers, the backbone of the economy, were productive and resilient. By Tuesday he was calling the economic situation “a total crisis” and decrying “greed” in Wall Street and Washington.

McCain’s sharp turnabout in tone and substance reflected not only a recognition that he had struck a discordant note at a sensitive moment, but that he had done so on the very issue on which he can least afford to stumble.

As economic conditions have worsened over the course of this year and voter anxiety has increased, McCain has had to work to counter the impression – fostered by his own admissions as recently as last year that the economy is not his strongest suit – that he lacks the experience and understanding to address the nation’s economic woes.

We could take comfort in the idea that a president doesn’t have to know much about the economy. (Or foreign policy, for that matter, but that’s another discussion.) Or at least he doesn’t have to be an expert in the subject, so long as he surrounds himself with knowledgeable experts, and heeds their advice. Much depends, then, on the experts the president leans upon, their agendas, and their track records.

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*Sigh*

It’s almost too easy, but it’s hard to pass up the hypocrisy in John McCain’s latest statement.

Continuing with his attempt to convince American voters that Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama is little more than a celebrity, Republican opponent John McCain suggested today that flying off to attend a benefit concert headlined by Barbra Streisand is at odds with the man of the people style campaign Obama has been running.

According to Jonathan Martin’s Politico blog, McCain chided Obama during an appearance before a blue collar crowd in Youngstown, Ohio, using the opportunity to drive a wedge between the Illinois senator and the working class.

“He talks about siding with the people just before he flew off for a fundraiser in Hollywood with Barbra Streisand and his celebrity friends,” McCain said of his political rival. “Let me tell you, my friends, there’s no place I’d rather be than right here with the working men and women of Ohio.”

Said the presidential candidate married to a beer heiress, before he hopped on her private jet — because it’s really the only way to get around in Arizona — and flew of to one of their seven homes, so Cindy could change into another $300,000 dress, and John could change into a fresh pair of $520 loafers.

Right. Real “man of the people,” that one.

Here are some of the people writing about some of the stuff I wish I had time to write about, for September 17th through September 18th:

• The BRAD BLOG : Mark Crispin Miller: Why They Chose Sarah Palin – To understand how Team McCain intends to get away with stealing this election, we must recall how Team Bush got away with it four years ago. (Those aren't two different teams.) The plan for stealing this contest has everything to do with the ostensibly surprising choice of Sarah Palin as McCain's VP. Here's why…
• House of Race Cards | Views | TheRoot.com – We've seen all this before, in every Republican campaign since 1964, and we're seeing it again, and none of that should surprise us. The surprise would be if the better angels of our nature prevail and the cynical strategy is rejected. That would be a shock, all right, and, yet, it could still happen. In fact, I think it will. That's because white America, like the rest of America, is changing.
• Passionate Prose — Letters to the Editor: How racism works – What if John McCain were a former president of the Harvard Law Review? What if Barack Obama finished fifth from the bottom of his graduating class? What if McCain were still married to the first woman he said “I do” to? What if Obama were the candidate who left his first wife after she no longer measured up to his standards?
• Sarah Palin and the Wrong Way to Battle Sexism | Reproductive Justice and Gender | AlterNet – There's a big difference between identifying sexist acts and undermining patriarchy, the system of power and privilege that reinforces and grounds particular stories about how men and women should behave, how sex and gender should be expressed, about who is rational and who is emotional, who's a "fighter" and who's a "babe." These narratives are refracted and reinforced by the media and by people speaking from podiums, most certainly, but they aren't the work of a few bad eggs.
• CQ Politics | Political Insider – Obama vs. Palin – If you want to know why Gov. Sarah Palin drives liberal Democrats crazy — and is helping Sen. Barack Obama raise money at a record pace — here's an excerpt from an viral email making its way around the country.

• Laughing at: Someone linked to this article, but because as I enter day four or five of not writing, it’s clear to me that I’m not a wri … #

• Laughing at: “Anti-Theft Lunch Bag Deters Sandwich Thieves [Office Culture]” http://tinyurl.com/6r3vsz #

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Here are some of the people writing about some of the stuff I wish I had time to write about, for September 12th through September 15th:

• Drilling Mania | NDN Blog – At the root of the primitive appeal of drill, drill, drill is a desire to return to our oil-soaked past. While Americans seemed ready to flirt with renewables, with push coming to shove, they have sought the safety and security of the girl who brung us to the party: oil. There is only one problem with this desire to return to the inexpensive, American produced oil and gas of our past. It is fantasy.
• Daily Kos: Small Town Values – When you look at something like the web page of Levi Johnston with it's proud declaration of being a red neck and it's joyful talk of "kicking ass," you're looking at a culture that's sick. When a candidate for vice-president denigrates the value of community service, you're looking at a culture that's sick. When you drop in on a GOP meeting and find boxes of "Barack Waffles" decorated by racist stereotypes and buttons bearing phrases like "If Obama is president, will we still call it the White House?" you're looking at a culture that's sick. It's sick, partly because it's a culture that's based on the assumption that some Americans are more equal than others, partly because it's a culture that denigrates education and achievement, partly because it's a culture that prefers convenient fictions to uncomfortable facts. But mostly because it's a culture that's forgotten what small town life teaches most clearly — that none of us can make it on our own, that we have to depend on our community for both acceptance and support, and that the best way to ensure that the community will be there for you is by being there for others.
• Truthdig – Reports – Palin Falls Short of VP Standards – Consider this parallel: Does anyone believe that if McCain were president and had selected Palin under the 25th Amendment to fill a vacancy in the vice presidency Congress would have confirmed her? Not likely. In fact, it is even less likely that McCain would have even attempted to do so, for he would have embarrassed himself. While the Constitution does not expressly set forth qualifications for the vice presidency, it strongly implies them — and Palin falls short.
• Truthdig – Reports – For Palin, It’s a (Christian) Man’s World – Sarah Palin may be a governor and a vice presidential candidate, but in the hyper-masculine world of the Christian right, she is subservient to a male hierarchy that claims to speak for God.
• Country First — In These Times – Republicans have simply taken the famous parable to heart — the one about patriotism being the last refuge of scoundrels. As a political strategy, it’s not stupid. Following the Bush-DeLay-Abramoff era, many Americans rightly think Republican politicians are scoundrels. And so those politicians are trying to make sure “this election is not about issues,” as John McCain’s campaign manager said this week, but about a hideous hypernationalism only Joe McCarthy could love. Employing flag pins, war stories and Bible-thumping social conservatism, former P.O.W. McCain and Christian fundamentalist Sarah Palin hope their red-white-and-blue phantasmagoria will hypnotize America into voting Republican.
• t r u t h o u t | A Palin Theocracy – Given McCain's age and state of health (his medical file was nearly 1,200 pages long), Palin would indeed be a heartbeat away from becoming president. But what would a Palin administration really look like?
• Cousin John, where did you go? – St. Petersburg Times – A part of me is made very sad to write this article. As I've said, my family has followed John's life and career with no absence of pride. If there ever were a Republican we might consider voting for, it would have been my cousin John. But, as he continually demonstrates in this campaign, my cousin John is long gone. "Straight talk" has been replaced with "flip-flop." Saddest all, this is the same man who, when campaigning in 2000, told a crowd of supporters, "I don't think Bill Gates needs a tax cut. I think your parents do." My parents, John, need some help after the economic destruction Bush has wrought in the last eight years, but it's clear you're not the one who'll give it to us. America's working families no longer recognize you, nor does your own.
• Op-Ed Columnist – She’s Not Ready – Op-Ed – NYTimes.com – For those who haven’t noticed, we’re electing a president and vice president, not selecting a winner on “American Idol.” Ms. Palin may be a perfectly competent and reasonably intelligent woman (however troubling her views on evolution and global warming may be), but she is not ready to be vice president.
• This is Your Nation on White Privilege | Red Room – For those who still can’t grasp the concept of white privilege, or who are constantly looking for some easy-to-understand examples of it, perhaps this list will help. White privilege is when you can get pregnant at seventeen like Bristol Palin and everyone is quick to insist that your life and that of your family is a personal matter, and that no one has a right to judge you or your parents, because “every family has challenges,” even as black and Latino families with similar “challenges” are regularly typified as irresponsible, pathological and arbiters of social decay.
• Palin and the Bush Doctrine – The central fact is that coherence, clarity and rationality were not, in fact, what sold the Bush doctrine in the first place. I don't mean to the PNAC crowd or the national security establishment that included Condi, Colin and most of Congress. I mean to the press and public. They were won by lies, dissemblance and the entirely emotional appeal to USA FIRST at all costs–that and the costs of treading against it. So, even if Palin looked like a moose in headlights, even if she eventually confused preventive and preemptive war–it might not matter. Palin ultimately hit the right emotional notes–the same rah-rah points that secured the Bush doctrine in the first place. 1) Islam=evil; 2) Defend the country at all costs. Duty before actual security; 3) the President is right and has to be trusted and supported.
• The Washington Monthly – The big deal about the Bush Doctrine was that it changed our position radically. We used to affirm, along with all other countries, a right of what has normally been thought of as preemptive war: the right to respond to an imminent attack against us, when we have credible evidence that it is imminent. When a country is obviously on the verge of mounting an invasion or a strike against us — when its troops are rolling towards the border, or its missiles counting down — we have never thought that we had to wait for that country to actually attack before we did. But we did once claim this right only in response to evidence of an imminent attack, not to a general sense that another country was in some way threatening. The point of the Bush Doctrine was to change that: to say, as Bush said at West Point: "If we wait for threats to fully materialize, we will have waited too long." It was, basically, the acceptance of preventive war: war waged not in response to evidence of an imminent attack, but in response to the possibility that a country that was not attacking us now might attack us at some point in the future.
• Michelle Haimoff: The Divided States of America: One Nation Under Two Gods – If we can't get agree on the major issues because we think we are saving each other (and what better intention is there than that?), then we will never be ideologically or theologically compatible as a country. We're trying to colonize each other when the only way to respectfully coexist is to compromise.
• Diana Meehan: Myth America – A moral reformer who's a fundamentalist? A politician who's absent from the office a lot? A crusader who doesn't tolerate dissent? This is George W. Bush. Sarah Palin is George W. Bush in lipstick, hairstyle and heels. That's her myth.

Here we go again. I should have known when I resorted to the last resort. I’ve deal with carpal tunnel syndrome time and time and time again. I’ve tried wrist braces, creams, ointments , and every remedy I can find at CVS. Friday, I broke out the Capzasin. Every time that happens, I pretend that I won’t have the same reaction — a tingling that eventually turns into a burning sensation that I end of trying to get rid of any way possible. So, by the time I got home on Friday, I was washing it off with dish detergent, and then laundry detergent.

After about five or six washings I got some relief. Then I resorted to a remedy I looked up online, poured milk over my arm, and massaged it in like it was soap. That worked, and I was able to sleep without feeling like my arm was on fire. But that only solved one problem.

There was still my right arm, which often hurts from the wrist down to the elbow, along with occasional numbness and tingling in the fingers. I’ve tried different remedies. When it comes to wrist braces I alternate between the CarpalMate and the Smart Glove. In the ointment department I’ve had the best luck with Tiger Balm, though I’ve also tried one homeopathic remedy called Topricin, though I can’t tell how well it’s working most of the time.

So I did an Amazon search for “carpal tunnel” in hopes of finding another ointment remedy, but I saw a mouse or two among the results. Then it occurred to me: it’s my “mousing arm” that’s giving me trouble. So maybe I need a better mouse. I’ve got it narrowed down to a few, and I’ll probably buy at least two — one for home and one for work.

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It’s getting more and more interesting to hear conservative pundits talk about the McCain campaign.

When Karl Rove is saying your political ads have gone too far, you know you must be doing something dishonest.

The former Bush chief strategist, appearing on Fox News Sunday, said that John McCain had stretched the truth in his recent round of attacks against Barack Obama, in the process opening up the Arizonan to a round of effective counter-attacks.

“McCain has gone in his ads one step too far, and sort of attributing to Obama things that are, you know, beyond the 100-percent-truth test,” said Rove. “Both campaigns ought to be careful about… there ought to be an adult who says: ‘Do we really need to go that far in this ad? Don’t we make our point and get broader acceptance and deny the opposition an opportunity to attack us if we don’t include that one little last tweak in the ad?’”

I can only repeat what I’ve said before.

And I just gotta say, when Peggy Noonan has to serve as a voice of reason… Well, it’s the political equivalent of Courtney Love showing up at your intervention and suggesting you ease up on the pipe just little a bit.

Except now it’s Karl Rove in the Courtney Love role. (I can’t think of a male celebrity equivalent.)

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• Curious about: Why anyone with as much money as Cindy McCain would have to steal to support an addiction. ( http://tinyurl.com/3pddml ) #

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Well, I know what I’m reading for Parker’s bedtime story tonight, if I can convince him: Where the Wild Things Are. Why? Because the author, Maurice Sendak, just came out.

Maurice Sendak’s 80th year — which ended with his birthday earlier this summer and is being celebrated on Monday night with a benefit at the 92nd Street Y — was a tough one. He has been gripped by grief since the death of his longtime partner; a recent triple-bypass has temporarily left him too weak to work or take long walks with his dog; and he is plagued by Norman Rockwell.

…Against all probability, some of the nightmares that have relentlessly pursued him since childhood — like the 1932 Lindbergh baby kidnapping — have been laid to rest. A couple of weeks ago a dealer found one of the tiny reproductions of the kidnapper’s ladder that were sold as souvenirs at the New Jersey trial.

“I was floored,” Mr. Sendak said. He traded one of his drawings for it. “That ends my obsession with the case,” he said.

His fascination with the kidnapping, like many of the other details of his life, has been repeated endlessly over the years in the hundreds of interviews he has given. Was there anything he had never been asked? He paused for a few moments and answered, “Well, that I’m gay.”

“I just didn’t think it was anybody’s business,” Mr. Sendak added. He lived with Eugene Glynn, a psychoanalyst, for 50 years before Dr. Glynn’s death in May 2007. He never told his parents: “All I wanted was to be straight so my parents could be happy. They never, never, never knew.”

…A gay artist in New York is not exactly uncommon, but Mr. Sendak said that the idea of a gay man writing children books would have hurt his career when he was in his 20s and 30s.

Sendak is matter-of-fact about having to stay in the closet for the sake of his career, but I found that kind of heartbreaking upon reading it. Fifty years together, and you have to keep it a secret?

A heterosexual children’s author would’ve had a fiftieth wedding anniversary bash, and probably wouldn’t even have made news. A heterosexual children’s author whose spouse was dying of cancer would have been able to reach out for support, and even to mourn publicly.

I can’t help thinking about Del Martin’s passing last month, after marrying her partner of 50+ years, and thinking how much things have changed and how much they still need to change.

[Via Mombian]

If I didn’t laugh, I’d cry. Thanks to my husband, I got a laugh out of this.

I read him his headline: “Palin Open to War with Russia.” His response: “Then she should go.”

In her first sit-down with a national news media outlet since becoming the Republican vice presidential nominee, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin responded to a series of specific questions about foreign policy and national security with a series of general answers that put her firmly on the side of doing “whatever it takes” to protect the nation. And she left open the option of waging war with Russia if it were to again invade neighboring Georgia and the former Soviet republic were a NATO ally.

“We will not repeat a Cold War,” Palin said in her first television interview since becoming Republican John McCain’s vice presidential running mate two weeks ago.

Palin told Charles Gibson of ABC News that she’d favor including Georgia and Ukraine, both former Soviet republics, in NATO despite opposition by Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. Asked whether the United States would have to go to war with Russia if it invaded Georgia, and the country was part of NATO, Palin said: “Perhaps so.”

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Here are some of the people writing about some of the stuff I wish I had time to write about, for September 11th from 17:06 to 17:30:

• Greg Mitchell: Losing a Friend on 9/11 — And the Losses Since – It's always amazed me how so many people out in Middle America — and so many politicians — could invoke 9/11 to sell or accept war, torture, wiretapping and all the rest yet the citizens most opposed to all of those measures had experienced 9/11 and the human loss more than anywhere else, here in the New York area. Now even more families mourn even more lives lost in Iraq. One reason most New Yorkers opposed that war: We actually had more reason than others to learn about the facts of the attack and who did it to us.
• denialism blog : Another anniversary – I fear for this anniversary. Like everyone else, my memories of 9/11 are vivid. It is a shared experience for Americans, but as time goes on, it is losing its shared meaning. Some of this meaning will, I'm sure, continue to be shunted into political ends, even more so with the election coming up. I have no interest in 9/11 "Troofers", the conspiracy theorists who have all kinds of outlandish ideas about the attacks. I don't need them—the real truth is more frightening.
• Paul Rieckhoff: Seven Years Later: Why Is There Still A Hole at Ground Zero? – New York is the city I love most in the world. I lost friends on 9/11. I pulled bodies from the rubble there. I, along with almost two million other troops, were sent to war because of what happened there. And I am sick and tired of walking and driving by it and seeing a stalled construction site.
• Steve Rosenbaum: The 9/11 Generation – I don't remember JFK's assassination. I have a dim memory of watching a blurry TV when we took our first step on the moon. But on 9/11 I can tell you precisely where I was, what I was doing, and what I thought and felt. So can you. You and I are members of the 9/11 Generation. Your children and children's children will think of you that way.
• Can Any Candidate Clean Up Bush’s Massive Post 9/11 Mess? | ForeignPolicy | AlterNet – The events of the past seven years have yielded a definitive judgment on the strategy that the Bush administration conceived in the wake of 9/11 to wage its so-called Global War on Terror. That strategy has failed, massively and irrevocably. To acknowledge that failure is to confront an urgent national priority: to scrap the Bush approach in favor of a new national security strategy that is realistic and sustainable — a task that, alas, neither of the presidential candidates seems able to recognize or willing to take up.
• 9/11…Seven Years Later | culturekitchen – Seven years ago today, I was sitting in the same place, the NYU medical center (though a different part of the building). It was here in the NYU medical center that I heard the planes hit the WTC and wondered what those sounds were. It sounded like exactly like a semi-truck going too fast down the highway and hitting some bumps…that is what the 9/11 attacks sounded like. I looked up both times I heard that noise, looked out over the FDR highway and East River of NYC, saw nothing but the usual traffic, thought nothing more about it. It was only much later that I realized I had heard the planes hit. My wife was under the WTC in the subway when the first plane hit. She knows this because the people who got on the next stop were in shock, in tears…they had just seen it happen. Not on TV, not hearing it second or third hand. They had just seen a jumbo jet slam into the WTC…live. My wife was among the first to know it happened because she heard about it from witnesses who were getting the hell out of there.
• The Bilerico Project | 9/11 Remembered: A Flight Attendant’s Story – It all started normally enough. The crew of 6 (four flight attendants and two pilots) met for the early morning flight, expecting a short trip to Tampa and back. The plane was full of people, mostly bleary-eyed from having to make it to the airport on time. We did a quiet, low-key service, chatting with the few passengers who were awake, then went to our respective galleys to rummage up some breakfast for ourselves. Then it happened.
• Pam’s House Blend:: Remember – So many lives lost in an act of terrorism, so many more lives lost in an unnecessary military action that had nothing to do with that day of horror.
• Rep. Dennis Kucinich: Remembering 9/11 and Moving Forward – It is not simply 9/11 that needs to be remembered. We also need to remember the politicization of 9/11 and the polarizing narrative which followed, locking us into endless conflict, a war on terror which has wrought further terror worldwide and which has severely damaged our standing worldwide as an honorable, compassionate nation. As we were all victims of 9/11, so we have become victims of the interpretation of 9/11. Our government's external response to 9/11 was to attack a nation which did not attack us. Indeed on the first anniversary of 9/11, the Bush administration issued a well-publicized stern warning to Iraq which was part of a campaign to induce people to believe Iraq had something to do with 9/11.
• at-Largely: It’s 9/11! Bring On the Death Porn! – As a New Yorker, while that day and weeks and months that followed will always be with me, I'd long grown numb from the Bush administration's and Republicans Party's branding of 9/11 for their own despotic aims: an America in which democracy has been gagged, waterboarded and renditioned to a dank faraway cell for its own protection, while our "heroic" protectors of freedom fight against a noun — terror — and something that's been around since the dawn of time — terrorists. For a brief moment, however, during the Republican National Convention's "9/11 tribute" film, I was viscerally reminded of the lengths to which our current leadership will go to terrorize their own citizens into handing over their liberties for another four years. I watched the towers fall again, that deceptively blue sky, the dust and smoke and people running for their lives. An impeccably edited piece of GOP death porn.
• Robert Koehler: An Embedded Prayer – Do we know yet that we must move, as a nation, to a new dimension of discourse and understanding, not just politically but in all ways? Do we know yet that there is no security in militarized fear? I would wish, at least, for a president, and a media, who understand this and have the courage (the faith) to stand up to the institutional interests that thrive on such fear. Without this, we have . . . the war on terror.
• Open Left:: 9/11: Citizenship, Service and Politics Matter – The greatness of America is that we can fight over this day, over the sacrifice and the shame. The challenge of America is that it will take a real accounting of what our leaders have done in our names. It's not the exploitation of fear that is wrong; fear is a powerful motivator and in some ways it is always the motivation behind how humans behave. It's not the politicization of national security that was wrong, politics never stopped at the water's edge, that was a fantasy held by irresponsible Democratic politicians. It is the sheer theft and murder made explicitly tolerable by George Bush and his Republican mafia, and the enablers in the press and in some parts of the Democratic party. And when you juxtapose that with the greatness of those public servants – teachers, doctors, soldiers, diplomats, police – and their sacrifice for our rights as Americans and as humans, it becomes clear that the meaning of 9/11 is that politics and citizenship matters.
• New Statesman – Our murderous comedy of errors – Try to laugh, please. The news is now officially parody and a game for all the family to play.

Ed. Note: I don’t have the obligatory 9/11 recollection post in me today, in part because of it’s dual significance to my family, since a one year ago today we began what turned out to be a painful period of loss.  I’ve posted my recollections previously, and you can read them the post about gay 9/11 victims. Today, I’m going to dedicate to pointing out significant news items and blog posts from others.

Seven years later — and five years after invading a country that had no connection to 9/11, didn’t have weapons of mass destruction, and had no ties to Al Qaeda — the children of Iraq who haven’t been blown up in their homes have suffered such loss and poverty that they’re forced to abandon their educations and enter the workforce to support their families. If they’re lucky they won’t be forced into Iraq’s booming child sex trade, or Syria’s for that matter. That is, if they survive the latest cholera outbreak.

Yet we have no regrets. In fact, we’d do it again.

Is it any wonder they suffer with PTSD, too?

The increasing number of Iraqi children affected with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is one of the saddest, and least known, legacies of the Iraq war.

A new clinic for their treatment just opened in Baghdad. That it is the first of its kind says a lot about how this problem is being addressed. Until now, as related by journalist Lourdes García Navarro, hundreds of children suffering from PTSD have been treated by Dr. Haider Maliki at the Central Pediatric Teaching Hospital in Baghdad.

… Children have been the victims of the Iraq political situation for several years. It began with the United Nations sanctions imposed on Saddam Hussein’s regime, and continued with the U.S.-led wars against the country. The victims have mostly been children. According to some estimates, almost two million children had to leave school and start working in the streets to supplement their families’ meager incomes.

PTSD in children can affect their brain and lead to long term effects that will alter their development. Researchers at Stanford University School of Medicine found that children with PTSD were likely to experience a decrease in the size of the brain area known as hippocampus, which is a brain structure important in memory processing and emotion.

Stress sustained over a long period of time is likely to cause more serious effects. An estimated half a million Iraqi children had been traumatized by conflict, according to a 2003 UNICEF report.

[Photo via James Gordon @ Flickr]

Ed. Note: I don’t have the obligatory 9/11 recollection post in me today, in part because of it’s dual significance to my family, since a one year ago today we began what turned out to be a painful period of loss.  I’ve posted my recollections previously, and you can read them the post about gay 9/11 victims. Today, I’m going to dedicate to pointing out significant news items and blog posts from others.

Seven years later — and five years after invading a country that had no connection to 9/11, didn’t have weapons of mass destruction, and had no ties to Al Qaeda — our soldiers are coming back suffering from PTSD, to find mental health care lacking, and VA employees who avoid giving them the diagnosis they need to get the treatment they need, in the name of lower disability disbursements.  No wonder there’s a suicide epidemic among Iraq veterans.

On Sept. 8, an altercation between a 22-year-old Fort Hood soldier and his commanding officer, a 24-year-old lieutenant, ended when the soldier first shot and killed his officer and then turned his gun on himself. Both were assigned to the 1st Cavalry Division, which had returned from a 15-month tour in Iraq in December. The division is currently in training to redeploy back to Iraq this winter for another 12 months — which in all probability will turn out to be the as good an explanation as any for the tragedy.

Then on Sept. 9, a VA report acknowledged that suicide rates for young male Iraq- and Afghanistan-era veterans hit a record high in 2006, the last year for which official records are available. Last week, the Portland Tribune reported that in 2005, the last year for which complete Oregon data has been compiled, 19 Oregon soldiers died in combat in Iraq and Afghanistan. That same year, 153 Oregon veterans of all ages, serving in various wars, committed suicide.

After five years of war in Iraq, Marine suicides doubled between 2006 and 2007, and Army suicides are at the highest level since records were first kept in 1980. Reported suicide attempts jumped 500 percent between 2002 and 2007.

The Defense Department says the numbers may be partly attributable to better compliance with reporting requirement.

[Photo via Lion @ Flickr]

Ed. Note: I don’t have the obligatory 9/11 recollection post in me today, in part because of it’s dual significance to my family, since a one year ago today we began what turned out to be a painful period of loss.  I’ve posted my recollections previously, and you can read them the post about gay 9/11 victims. Today, I’m going to dedicate to pointing out significant news items and blog posts from others.

Seven years later — and five years after invading a country that had no connection to 9/11, didn’t have weapons of mass destruction, and had no ties to Al Qaeda — the outgoing U.S. Commander says we’ll never declare victory in Iraq.

The outgoing commander of US troops in Iraq, Gen David Petraeus, has said that he will never declare victory there.

…In an interview with the BBC’s Newsnight programme, Gen Petraeus said that when he took charge in Iraq “the violence was horrific and the fabric of society was being torn apart”.

A handing over ceremony by US troops to the Iraqi military at a base in Baghdad (09/09/08)
Gen Petraeus said the Iraqis were standing up as US forces stood down
Leaving his post, he said there were “many storm clouds on the horizon which could develop into real problems”.

Overall he summed up the situation as “still hard but hopeful”, saying that progress in Iraq was “a bit more durable” but that the situation there remained fragile.

He said he did not know that he would ever use the word “victory”: “This is not the sort of struggle where you take a hill, plant the flag and go home to a victory parade… it’s not war with a simple slogan.”

[Photo via James Gordon @ Flickr]