Author: hankkalet

At least one major national newspaper is starting to call the violence in Iraq what it has been for too long: a civil war.

Here is the lead from this morning’s LA Times story:

Iraq’s civil war worsened Friday as Shiite and Sunni Arabs engaged in retaliatory attacks after coordinated car bombings that killed more than 200 people in a Shiite neighborhood the day before. A main Shiite political faction threatened to quit the government, a move that probably would cause its collapse and plunge the nation deeper into disarray.

By way of contrast, this is what The New York Times offers:

Defying a government curfew, Shiite militiamen stormed Sunni mosques in Baghdad and a nearby city on Friday, shooting guards and burning down buildings in apparent retaliation for the devastating bombings that killed more than 200 people the day before in the capital’s largest Shiite district, residents and police officials said.

Militia fighters drove through neighborhoods in Baghdad and the provincial capital of Baquba, firing at mosques with assault rifles and rocket-propelled grenades on the Muslim day of prayer.

The vengeance attacks unfolded while lawmakers loyal to the virulently anti-American cleric Moktada al-Sadr threatened to boycott the government if Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki met with President Bush next week in Jordan. Mr. Sadr controls one of the biggest blocs of seats in Parliament, and on Friday he reiterated his claim that the American presence was the root cause of the rising violence in Iraq.

The Washington Post comes closer, but refuses to acknowledge that we have entered the abyss:

In a wave of reprisal killings, Shiite militiamen attacked Sunni mosques in Baghdad and other parts of Iraq on Friday, defying a government curfew and propelling the country further toward full-blown civil war.

Why this is the case is difficult to understand. The internecine violence has been a chief characteristic of the war for a long time now, and it seems naive to pretend that this kind of factional brutality is something other less than civil war.

I think the American people, who have shown by their November vote that they want a change of course in Iraq and in the United States, understand what they are witnessing from afar.

South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Pres
The Blog of South Brunswick

This is from yesterday, but I was still recovering from the tryptophan to get anything on the blog. But here is another county heard from on the House Intelligence Committee debate.

Salon’s Joe Conason signs on in favor of Rush Holt for chairman.

South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
The Blog of South Brunswick

This war we’ve dragged ourselves to continues its murderous and seemingly ineluctable slide into chaos. Even as this nation pauses, as it readies to ponder turkey and football, to remember that earliest of moments as the ideals we would eventually claim for our own were coming into being.

This Thanksgiving, as Bob Herbert reminds us, too many families will have an empty chair at their table, a loved on across the ocean or no longer with them because of the violence raging in the desert. We should remember this as the turkey roasts, as we sip our beer and wine, as we smell the pies baking for desert.

Those of us who are whole and together should give thanks for what we have and the sacrifices that the men and women are making in our name, knowing that they are doing what they have been told is their job and reserve our anger and blame for another day a set of leaders with no more regard for the men they send into battle than they have for the truth.

Happy Thanksgiving.

South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
The Blog of South Brunswick

This week’s Dispatches is on the Lawrence Township plan to explore a local “clean elections” law.

South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
The Blog of South Brunswick

I am one of those music listeners who really dug the Killers‘ first CD, Hot Fuss.

The singles — in particular, “Somebody Told Me” — were both edgy and accessible and the rest of the disc had a nice retro vibe that reminded me of my early 20s, when WRSU (Rutgers) and WPRB (Princeton) were alternating on my car radio. The mix or guitar and synthesizer — and Brandon Flowers’ voice — made for as strong a debut as was released in 2004.

Fast forward two years to the release of Sam’s Town, the Las Vegas band’s newest, and that thrill of finding something new has given way to the worst kind of sophomore slump. While most second discs fail because they try too hard to recreate the vibe of their predecessor, Sam’s Town collapses under the weight of an unearned pretension.

This is a serious record — or it tries to be — or maybe it isn’t. It is hard to tell. Glimpses of the band’s first disc sneak through (On “This River is Wild,” for isntance), but mostly this is an album that suffocates under its own weight, an album that attempts to speak in the serious voices of U2 and Bruce Springsteen, that appropriates the stadium-ready sound that U2 has perfected but manages to be as empty as a fading balloon.

Stephen Thomas Erlwhine, on allmusic, explains it a whole lot better than I do:

Every time they try to dig deeper on Sam’s Town — when they bookend the album with “enterlude” and “exitlude,” when Flowers mixes his young-hearts-on-the-run metaphors, when they graft Queen choirs and Bowie baritones onto bridges of songs — they just prove how monumentally silly and shallow they are. Which isn’t necessarily the same thing as bad, however. True, this album has little of the pop hooks of “Mr. Brightside,” but in its own misguided way, it’s utterly unique. Yes, it’s cobbled together from elements shamelessly stolen from Springsteen, U2, Echo
& the Bunnymen, Bowie, Queen, Duran Duran, and New Order, but nobody on earth would have thought of throwing these heroes of 1985 together, because they would have instinctively known that it wouldn’t work. But not the Killers! They didn’t let anything stop their monumental misconception; they were able to indulge to their hearts’ content — even hiring U2/Depeche Mode producers Alan Moulder and Flood
to help construct their monstrosity, which gives their half-baked ideas a grandeur to which they aspire but don’t deserve. But even if the music doesn’t really work, it’s hard not to listen to it in slack-jawed wonderment, since there’s never been a record quite like it — it’s nothing but wrong-headed dreams, it’s all pomp but no glamour, it’s clichés sung as if they were myths. Every time it tries to get real, it only winds up sounding fake, which means it’s the quintessential Vegas rock album from the quintessential Vegas rock band.

And it is why it is the year’s most disappointing disc. At least so far.

South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
The Blog of South Brunswick