Sentential Links #110

After a couple of weeks without Sentential Links, the world looks darker…more evil…oh wait, that’s just the NFL team from New England taking the field again. Oops!

Anyway, here are some new links for your clicking pleasure! (More political ones than usual, by the way. My inner liberal is kind of annoyed right now.)

:: And such is the war in Iraq as seen through neocon lenses. Mistakes are always in the past. The current policy is always working. When the mistakes are being made, those who point out the mistakes are tarred as near-treasonous. Then, after another year or two of pointless, futile bloodshed, it’s conceded that mistakes were made in the past. But now we’re right on track. And the liberals, once again, just don’t get it. (I am so sick of “Victory is finally at hand!” talk, of “The Surge is working!”, of all of it. This war sucks, it’s not going to accomplish a damn thing other than the creation of lots of new terrorists, and it’s time for it to end.)

:: The Petraeus-Crocker testimony is the kind of short-lived event on which the Administration has relied to shore up support for the war: the “Mission Accomplished” declaration, the deaths of Uday and Qusay Hussein, Saddam’s capture, the transfer of sovereignty, the three rounds of voting, the Plan for Victory, the death of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Every new milestone, however illusory, allows the Administration to avoid thinking ahead, to the years when the mistakes of Iraq will continue to haunt the U.S. (Not a blog post, actually, but a good article nonetheless. This war has been four years of violence leading to nothing at all, punctuated every so often by some kind of moment that the pro-war crowd can use as fodder for cheerleading the continuation of the war.)

:: Anyone who has looked at a medical bill with his name on it and compared the cost to what he pays for the other necessities of life might experience a memorable moment of terror, even if he is at the moment protected by the blessing of insurance. Health care coverage is, for a lot of us, contingent on employment, and in this groovy entrepreneural era we have learned to think of job security as a joke. Having carried post-employment COBRA payments myself, I know how the nervous feeling increases as one drifts further from the corporate zone of protection.

:: We look, after Moore’s propaganda film, like people who can’t quite let go of the other propaganda we’ve had sowed in our brains since birth: That the government can’t do anything right, and the market does everything better. Ask yourself if that’s true the next time you find your COBRA running out. (We saw numbers printed on pieces of paper during and after Little Quinn’s life, numbers that bugger the imagination. We once thought that we should maybe bop out somewhere and buy a few extras of those plastic tubes through which we poured his every meal directly into his stomach — until we discovered that they cost over one hundred dollars apiece. Navigating the morass of medical professionals who were necessary just for that kid’s basic care was hard enough without placing those withering costs on our heads, or making us resort to some kind of shopping process, all in the name of “market competition”, as though procuring medical care is or should be akin to purchasing a new refrigerator.)

:: Sitcoms are still getting numbers. TWO AND HALF MEN still beats HEROES and 24. THE OFFICE and 30 ROCK manage to hold their own even though they’re in the death slot against GREY’S ANATOMY and CSI.

:: After making this comic, I doubt I’ll ever be able to watch them again, but I will give Peter Jackson credit for doing a tough job for a demanding crowd. (And so ends DM of the Rings. Bummer. Shamus is on to a new comics project now, though, so check it out.)

:: Today, Route 60 is nearly transcontinental after all, traveling from Virginia to Arizona, and Route 62 goes from one border to the other, but Route 66 gets all the attention and the big travel bucks from road-tripping tourists (“big” is relative, of course). Because history is weird that way.

:: We all manage. We do well. We make memories. Life goes on. But each of us — and most especially I — look forward to the return of the “unrelenting” 24/7/365 nature of what we do and what we have here in the little house in the tiny woods on the prairie. (One day I hope to feel like this.)

:: I am the entertained owner of three Buckeye pullets (young hens who don’t yet lay eggs). (There’s a specific word for hens who haven’t begun laying eggs? The things you learn!)

All for this week. Enjoy, mere mortals!