Like clockwork

After having screwed the pooch on illegal immigration, after increasing the national deficit ceiling to $9 trillion, after admitting to an extensive domestic spying program, and after failing to show much measurable progress in Iraq, the Bush administration is predictably anticipating the 2006 elections with a bi-annual revisitation of the gay marriage issue.

Poll numbers for George Bush have been in steady decline for a while now, even in GOP stalwart states such as Utah. But that's not yet a cause for concern, because the embattled administration can reliably pull out their silver bullet issue of the Sanctity of Marriage, and thereby mobilize huge swaths of single-issue voters.

I knew this was going to happen. As November nears, expect to see well-publicized debates between our representatives on issues that are increasingly non-war-related. It doesn't take a Nostradamus to predict what these will be -- flag burning, gay marriage, and abortion.

In other knee-jerk reaction news, I'm mulling over the possibility of resigning my membership to the MilBlog ring.

In general, the reaction to the allegations of Marines slaughtering Iraqi civilians in Haditha has been reprehensible, and I'm uncomfortable with the idea of being associated with a group of people who in many cases are busying themselves with shrugging the incident off, making excuses for the Marines involved, or claiming that those killed were probably insurgents who had it coming anyway.

This prominent blogger says taking the Haditha citizen's accounts of what happened is stupid.

This one says he needs incontrivertible evidence before he'll even consider the possibility that "our troops" did anything wrong.

CDR Salamander says: Acknowledge, Accept, Analyze, Act -- and suggests a scale of "credibility" with those who have never deployed at the bottom and those who have faced hostile enemy fire at the top.

Greyhawk posted about the difference between "provoked" and "unprovoked," suggesting that since a roadside bomb exploded before the alleged massacre, then it actually was provoked.

Most have made the disclaimer that "the facts aren't all in," and that they're reserving judgment until such time as they are. Funny, the facts didn't all need to be in on things like, oh, weapons of mass destruction or Hussein's ties to al Qaeda before we started sending tanks over there. It's an interesting shift in the requirements for justification.

Personally, I think this "circle the wagons" reaction is disgusting. It's not only a blatant display of a collective refusal to acknowledge what seems to have happened, it's also a perfect opportunity for right-wing blogs to take pot-shots at their favorite straw man, the "Left-Wing, Pinko, Defeatist, Islamo-Fascist-Hugging, Hippie Media."

It's such a common anthem -- a story arises in the press that indicates our service members aren't the glowing paragons of virtue that appear in recruiting commercials, and the automatic reaction is to shoot the messenger.

I'm going to go through the blogroll and do a culling. This site gets about 50 hits per day, so I'm a pretty small fish in this pond, but I'm determined to eliminate any indication of support for bloggers who are not interested in truth, but only in advancing their own grassroots propaganda movement.

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