Michael King looks at a shameful banner ad run by the Kerry campaign demonizing Halliburton while its employees are in the firing line over in Iraq. (In fact, if you know your history – the British East India Company, anyone? – the Kerry people even have the past wrong). It’s still amazing that the guy can simultaneously run on a platform of (1) demonizing companies that send American jobs to foreign countries and (2) threatening to take big contracts away from an American company and give them to foreigners.
King also notes that Doonesbury is about to have a character, former football star B.D., lose a leg in Iraq (I’m not clear what he’s doing there, but then if I read Doonesbury twice a year it’s a lot). I agree with King that while this could be a good storyline in less aggressively partisan hands – and probably good for the aging, decades-past-its-prime comic strip – Trudeau’s record doesn’t suggest a guy who’s capable of that kind of balance.
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What’s there to balance? Glad you and King are so open-minded.
The severe injuries that are occuring in Iraq get almost no play at all in the media here. Casualties are almost never elaborated upon, and I feel that most people assume guys listed as “injured” have shrapnel or bullet wounds and are patched up and sent home (or back out). The number of traumatic and life-altering injuries such as amputations and blindings, etc deserves more coverage and I commend Trudeau for taking up the task. Hopefully he’ll follow through on the fact that these guys are mostly twenty years old and now have their whole lives ahead of them without their legs with a governemnet that is not exactly steping up to the task of taking care of them.
1. Obviously, there are no 20-year-olds in Doonesbury. B.D. has been in the strip 30-odd years.
2. Focusing on the guy’s struggle is fine, even noble. But I suspect it will be used just as a prop to rip Bush.
3. I dunno, I’ve seen plenty of front-page stories in the NYT, USAToday and local papers on individual guys who came home maimed. It’s a tale worth telling, to be sure, but it’s hard to say it’s scandalously undertold. On the other hand, I’m not sure that the number of really severe injuries, as a proportion of total wounded, is any more (or less) than the proportion of such injuries in the various other wars of the past 60 years (ask Bob Kerrey, Bob Dole, Max Cleland or Daniel Inouye, for example).
4. I’m not so sure you can say the govt isn’t taking care of them, at least not any moreso than usual. It’s never enough, of course.