Why must we insist that Bales “snapped” before murdering Afghan civilians?

Robert Fisk examines the near-universal insistence that Staff Sgt. Robert Bales must have “snapped” before he killed sixteen civilians—mostly women and children—near Kandahar. If an Afghan had done the same thing, killing civilian workers in Afghanistan, he’d be labelled a terrorist. But since he’s on our side, we interpret his actions in the kindest possible …

Links for September 9th

Washington Post: Poll Finds Public Wary on Tax CutThe A1 headline in the Washington Post on the morning of September 11, 2001 was for this prescient story: "A majority of Americans say they are prepared to roll back President Bush's $1.35 trillion tax cut to help deal with the shrinking federal budget surplus and say …

Links for August 27th

MSNBC: Santorum—GOP not ‘anti-science’Good for Jon Huntsman for acknowledging that the first step to getting the Republican Party out of the intellectual wilderness is to stop being anti-science. (Anti-science is anti-facts, and being anti-facts doesn't work for long.) Unsurprisingly, Rick Santorum says that his party isn't anti-science. He claims, by inference, that Huntsman asserted that …

Talking heads controlled by the Pentagon.

An extensive investigation by the New York Times has uncovered that military analysts appearing on TV are being paid to parrot the Pentagon’s talking points, and have been doing so since the buildup to Bush’s war in Iraq. In the words of one former Fox News military analyst, “It was them saying, ‘We need to …