[Ramona_A_Stone]

Knowing the price of a war is highly important, but to understand value you also have to look at what we've accomplished and to do so would probably take longer than forty minutes.

I'm wondering why you think it would take longer than forty minutes. Is it because it would be a lot of circuitous rhetoric designed to sell and/or muddle one questionable achievement with endless questionable qualifications? Would it take longer than forty minutes to say we achieved ousting Hussein (the only thing I can think of that we have achieved so far, unless you count alienating the rest of the planet in the process as an achievement) and a lengthy dose of linguistic creativity to make a case for the world being a safer place as a result?

I guess I agree. It would take way longer than forty minutes to convince me we've achieved any bloody damned thing at all but spending 100B and a lot of American lives to destabilize, terrorize and further disenfranchise a population that inherently distrusted us anyway, leaving a posterity of more likely if not more vulnerable targets in the process.

the way they thrust these images upon the public is inconsiderate if not rude.

As you say yourself, knowing the price of war is very important, and I heartily agree in spite of my feelings about this war. Those who've never experienced it first-hand can't really fathom it, and several generations of Americans have never really seen its face.

Why then would you have dead soldiers swept under the public carpet, not mentioned for the sake of politeness? Do you think such a dishonest, antiseptic approach teaches anyone anything?

To me it would be far more rude to tip-toe around the dead and their families, to treat them as unmentionables when they died in pursuit of something they believed in, something that is supposed to be for the benefit of all.

This is so incongruous to the way a healthy, virtuous and just society should 'celebrate its heroes' that it, as Smith said, smacks more of insult than exaltation. It simply belies our collective neurotic doubt and fear, and mocks the insularity of our muttering administrators who are worried about their own appearance and maintenance of power, their own hides.

Rude my ass. If we had our priorities straight and actually believed in them, we'd be screaming all these names from the rooftops, even the ones who weren't popular sports figures at home.

The dichotomy of a democracy gung-ho for war but lacking a leadership and a media with the balls to embrace its reality is a symptom of the precise malady which makes our culture so despicable, and so frightening, to so many.