Biting

Saturday 28 July 2012 - Filed under Uncategorized

Charles Davis in Drone-Court Advantage:

During my time in Waziristan, I found the people of Pakistan understood this better than most self-styled progressives. For instance, I met a a young couple whose 9-year-old daughter, their pride and joy, had her life cut short because she made the mistake of hanging around men between the ages of 10 and 85. But her father — let’s call him Mohammad II — recounted to me that the real tragedy of his daughter’s death would be if it undermined President Obama’s political capital, and with it his ability to expand Americans’ access to quality, affordable health care.

“My daughter was a precocious child,” he explained to me. Insisting I refer to her as “Lilly Ledbetter,” her father recounted how she cried as much the day Obama was inaugurated as the day he had her killed. At the tender age of 7, she even had a blistering letter to the editor concerning the solvency of the Social Security trust fund published in The Washington Post, leading to a regular guest-blogging gig for Mother Jones’s Kevin Drum. Far from bitter, he said she would have accepted her own death as the unfortunate result of GOP intransigence, knowing the man who brought mandated health insurance to the masses had no choice but to dramatically escalate the drone war in her country lest Republicans argue he had not dramatically escalated the drone war in her country.This piece appears in TNI Vol. 6 “Game of Drones,” subscribe here for $2 and get the full issue

Lilly’s father then told a story that has stuck with me ever since. As she lay dying in a pool of her own blood and vomit, the overpoweringly putrid scent of death wafting in the air as her father cupped the intestines spilling out her mangled abdomen, the littlest Ledbetter faintly breathed her final words. And like the laudable columnist Ezra Klein, she was on message.

“It’s so cruel,” she said, whimpering as tears fell from her bloodshot eyes to her blood-smeared cheek, “what Mitt Romney did to that dog.”

It bites only because of the truth therein; progressives have been trying desperately to ignore the white elephant in the room in lieu of superfluous topics like Mitt Romney’s dog, or his defense of women seeking subsidized birth control.

Good, well thought satire is clearly in style again. I can only view that as supremely awesome.

2012-07-28  »  madlibertarianguy