Taps

Monday is Memorial Day, when we Americans honor all those who have fallen in the defense of our great nation. This year's celebration may be tarnished by the Haditha scandal now coming to light, but rather than link to it or explicate further, I'll just drop a rather sobering link to today's Doonesbury, courtesy of Slate:

Taps Pt. 1

Cartoonist Gary Trudeau has been with the grunts all the way on this war, as he has with all previous U.S. wars during his tenure, notably beginning with Vietnam. The storyline following B.D.'s slow rehabilitation after losing a leg in Iraqi combat is a tribute to our surviving casualties.

He has made it a Memorial Day to list the fallen in the current Iraq War, and what cuts so deep in the simple list of names this particular Sunday is that even in small type the names are overflowing at least into next Sunday's strip, and that they are only from the last year, not the entire war -- just those soliders killed in Iraq since April 23, 2005.

The most shameful canard of the pro-Iraq War crowd is that if one does not support this War, one is not supporting the troops. Another through-the-looking-glass type paradox, as those who support the war, as least in our government, are actually the ones doing the greatest disservice to the men and women bravely fighting at their behest. Last of body armor, charges for loss of weapon after being shipped home sans a limb, inadequate preparation or for the immediate post-war situation, inadequate force size for self-protection...the list goes on and on.

Nettertainment supports our service men and women in Iraq and elsewhere in the world. We would even like to see their coffins arriving, not shunted away from press cameras like repressed memories. We feel the horrible loss every morning that a photo and obit of a slain soldier appears in our newspaper, usually in groups, and quite often as we have a military base in Southern California feeding troops into the conflict.

Another guy pegged as a liberal does more to acknowledge our troops in a meaningful, individual way than all the conservative daily strips combined (i.e. Prickly City and Mallard Fillmore).

Yep. Gary Trudeau, Patriot.

Remember our troops this Memorial Day.