swatties may have been arrested this morning for civil disobedience in philly. people are going back for more. the past few days i've felt largely too preoccupied with play stuff and grantwerk to have opinions about the war. now i wonder whether i have any opinions at all, after all. i can tell you that this scares me. who are we to think this won't matter? if america is honestly trying to protect itself and think of its own future self-interest (an understandable if morally questionable ideal) then this should matter. because the individuals who answered the survey questions that way have the potential to be as dangerous as saddam hussein. especially en masse.

i also found the letters section chilling. half of the letters mentioned israel, despite the fact that it doesn't feature in this war as a notable US ally (a select few, as papers report tirelessly, composed of britain, spain, & portugal, with australia sending troops). one posits:

America�s Allegiance:
With the same compassion that inspired the use of atom bombs on the populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Americans have now threatened their latest enemy, Iraq, with a 21,000-pound bomb, known as Massive Ordnance Air Blast, or MOAB for short. In Biblical times, the Israelites, having wandered 38 years after leaving Sinai gathered in great numbers to hear the word of God through the teachings of Moses, prior to their returning to the promised land and driving others out of the land of Canaan.
And the place they gathered was called Moab. Some coincidence, or is America�s allegiances showing?

another makes reference to

the driving force in the Bush administration behind the Iraqi campaign. This elitist group, comprising mainly devout Jews and Evangelical Christians ...

another says

we are forced to realize that this war has nothing to do with weapons of mass destruction and everything to do with the re-election of President Bush and appeasing the Jewish lobby in Washington to that end.

devout jews? who? he doesn't have a single jew in his administration, aside from mouthpiece ari fleischer. jewish lobby? who among the warmongers is jewish? who even in his electorate was jewish? 80% of jews go democratic. if you study jewish history, you see that people -- on the left and the right -- have blamed jews for occurances as random as the plague for centuries. those accusations are the kind neither proved nor contested until they become commonly accepted.

why would a jewish lobby want war? iraq didn't retaliate against the continental u.s. during persian gulf war I. it retaliated against israel because that's what it could reach. this becomes a fact of life for people in the region suffering the collateral damage of pgw II.
that hasn't happened yet. bombs, meanwhile, are falling in baghdad already. lana linked to a baghdadi blog.
i have to stop -- it's been hours and i have work to do. if i don't post about politics in the next week, it's not because i'm callous or because i don't care. i guess to sum up the attitude i'll have through next saturday, i'll quote skot:

Well, we're at war.

(Pause while washed by wave of despair.)

Yeah, fuck that. Let's make fun of things.