New lamps for old

Remember the queasy feeling you used to get when you saw Lyndon Johnson's flabby face saying "mah felluh Amuricuns" knowing he was going to announce another escalation of the war in Viet Nam? For those as old as I am, the reports of 20,000 troops scheduled to be "rotated" into Iraq this December brought a flashback today. It's hard to avoid the feeling of history repeating itself, even if the details are different.

It's hard to avoid the creep of rising despair and disgust when reading about how more than half of Ohio's 2004 ballots have been destroyed in defiance of law. Future historians may see the Bush era as a sort of dark ages, with little in the way of records or documentation to tell them what happened. It's hard enough for us to tell what happened while the Administration refuses to release records or to testify. Even former officials like Don Rumsfeld seem to feel that they have a perpetual right to be exempt from inquiry. Rummy seems to simply have ignored the request to testify in the Pat Tillman inquiry and the White House won't respond to a request for information about the death and perhaps the murder of an American soldier who they used as a poster boy for the war. Will they remember to forget this episode when next they chastise us for demoralizing the troops who are going to spend yet another Christmas in Iraq wondering if anyone will ask questions or get answers if they get shot three times between the eyes because they saw something or had the wrong beliefs?

Will I live long enough to see another generation of disillusioned troops return from a military disaster to be neglected by the government and lied to about why their sacrifice came to nothing? Will my grandchildren witness the scraggly gray haired veterans of Bush's wars sleeping in vacant lots next to the VFW hall grumbling about how Michael Moore lost the war for them? That's one of the curses of growing old. You can't see the present as anything new.