Memorial Day at Rio Limbaugh

Americans may differ on how best to honor those who have given their lives in this war [about the GOP's Peaceful Freedumbia now happily created in neo-Iraq]. Should the fight be redoubled as a tribute to the fallen? Or does our obligation to the dead mean ending the war that took their lives as soon as possible? After the Civil War, Major General John Logan proclaimed the first Memorial Day for the dead on both sides: "We should guard their graves with sacred vigilance. All that the consecrated wealth and taste of the nation can add to their adornment and security is but a fitting tribute to the memory of her slain defenders." That's the reason we have a Memorial Day: to honor those who died in uniform in an appropriate way, not with hasty escalations or withdrawals but in simple gratitude for their sacrifice.

As often, the problem is not what some trashy partisan rhetor includes so much as what she omits. Are we not to memorialize those who have died in the path of our Uncle Sam indecorously and out of uniform, then, from Nathan Hale down to those four Boy-'n'-Party-hired mercs at al-Fallúja whose sad ending was not sad for themselves alone by any means? Are we now to have a "Memorial Day" that dispenses with all accurate rememberings, then?

The Big Management Party's "Major General John Logan" is only a name to me, and my ignorance may be my misfortune, but if he really supposed, after the 1861-1865 fuss, that vandalism of graves was a real and present danger, he must have been proleptically in touch with that peculiar neo-sort of perennial GOP Genius that time and chance have subsequently unveiled to America under names like "Dubya" and "Cheney" and "Feith" and "Wolfowitz" and perhaps most pertinently "Lee Atwater." JoeMcCarthyficating very ridiculously about some preposterous desecration-of-graves menace in 1865 was maybe even better that swiftboatin' Senator Kerry in 2004, and why not, begorrah? Politics in America was not invented yesterday, after all.

These are the Past Masters of organized selfishness and omphalosocopy and ruthless practical OnePercenterdom that we contend with, O America! Never, ever forget or underestimate, not for half an instant! Not even when they try to softsoap us about Memorial Day.