Dying for Nothing

By Charley Reese

".....Of course, these days Memorial Day gets larded with politics and pseudo-patriotism. It's nauseating to watch a bunch of actors, entertainers and politicians who never heard a gun fired in anger put on a maudlin performance as if they really gave a rat's toenail for the dead......

War is mass murder, and no doubt part of the degradation of the human species is the fact that starting with the War Between the States, the human toll of war has increased exponentially. It's ironic that wars take the healthiest and bravest, while the unhealthy and the cowardly manage to evade them.....

The present war is a bad war. It is not being fought to protect freedom, let alone the American people. Poor Cindy Sheehan, who bravely protested the war, finally gave up. She felt betrayed by the Democrats, by the antiwar movement, but the saddest thing of all, she said, was that she finally faced the fact her son died for nothing.

And sad as it is to say, it's true. The politicians and some of the media chicken hawks like to fork the fertilizer talking about sacrifices for freedom (sacrifices most of them studiously avoid ever making), but it's just fertilizer......

Why did we go to war in Iraq? Because the president hated Saddam Hussein; because the Israeli lobby wanted us to; because the crazy neoconservatives had the insane idea that the Middle East could be democratized at the point of a gun; because oil companies and other corporations lusted for profit......."