Pretty much everything the Bush administration has pulled so far has failed to surprise me, except for how fast it happened and how much approval it’s met with at home. Afghanistan surprised me a little, since I’d expected him to march into Iraq directly. But Iraq itself, and reestablishing the budget deficit, and hurting education etc, no big surprise. Torture, though – I can remember when the United States used to be the good guys, and stand for things like democracy and human rights. I am speechless at the moment, so will spare you any more words on that, reserving the right to pipe up at a later date, though. Still, though – torture and rape, wasn’t that what the Iraqis were going to be “liberated” from? Has anyone involved claimed, yet, that they were “only following orders”? Because claims that “we didn’t know what was happening” are really ringing historical bells, with me at least.
Anyway.
Change of topic. Here’s a fun creativity exercise next time you read a book to a kid (Gamma is sick and I got the opportunity to read a few over the weekend): when you read the book, read each page in a different voice, which the kid(s) get to pick. Yesterday, for example, I read “The Aristocats” in the following voices, as far as I can remember:
- a mouse
- a cat
- a horse
- a cloud
- a stone
- a bell
- a horse
- a heart
- a cow
- a dog
- a fish
Then my wife asked me to do something so I had to quit, which was good because the dog voice really made me hoarse.
http://www.nydailynews.com/front/story/191957p-165862c.html
Just following orders…
“Wir haben es nicht gewust” or something like that.
Rings some very earie bells here too…
I just hope something good comes out of all of this… I have NO IDEA how though…
Well, that thumbs-up chick with the cigarette and the naked guy on a leash is a celebrity now…
Brian Kane says more here, and better:
http://www.briankaneonline.com/archive/001731.html#001731
(about torture, not funny voices, although I bet he can do that too)
reading aloud is bliss. i’m chasing the boy around the house with some regularity with the book we’re reading right now, because there are a zillion characters (well. 10) and i have a perfect voice for each one of them.
chapter books! with characters with personalities distinct enough to deserve voices! finally!
like a reword for all the times i had to read pretty but then increasingly tedious “the very hungry catepillar”, which is reportedly you know who’s favorite book.
reward. ahem.
Agreed, mostly. The big excuse i’m picking up from the grunt perspective is the “we weren’t trained properly” thing. That is, in itself, no excuse for totally inhumane treatment of POWs. But far more troubling is that, if it’s true, who the hell is so stupid as to place people with NO TRAINING in terms of handling POWs in charge of POWs? Does this mean we just don’t have people trained in that prior to a massive invasion? If so, that’s some wicked bad planning and reason enough to believe that the Bush administration has completely bungled the job.
I know that all soldiers (for sure officers) get training in the primary aspects of the rules stated in the Geneva Convention, so claiming they didn’t know about it is just stupid, and the fact that this didn’t get “cascaded” through the organization is only a half-hearted, lame excuse. The fact that they photographed themselves commiting, in essence, war crimes, proves their total idiocy.
Really, this needs to go up to the top, and motherf*ckers need to lose their jobs (it’d be nice if it were Bush). Maybe we should do a clean sweep like so:
fire the grunts
fire their CO
fire her CO
fire the head of the Division
fire the Defense Secretary
and ideally, fire Bush.
sh!t, i just realized how fried my brain is. newborn in the house and all… i’m speaking in strange voices and it’s not even for entertainment purposes — just pure mania
I enjoy reading your blog. Very funny. I have a question–what happened to raising hell blog? I miss that one.
didn’t you do a but voice too?
A butt voice? That was my normal voice!
Susan, I miss the Raising Hell blog too. Like many group blogs, it just petered out, and then the domain name expired and we decided not to renew. I’m still trying to figure out what to do with all the content, which I saved.
Oh, and Scott. Good luck with the newborn. Drink lots of coffee.
Thanks! Will do. My buddy just brought me a fat sack of Meinl from Wien the other day, so I’ve got that going for me.