Battle Hymn of the Republicans GIs Death Tally in Iraq Exceeds 3,500 Pierre Tristam / Candide’s Notebooks, June 8, 2007
The Associated Press had the death tally at 3,501 Thursday, Iraq Casualties had it at 3,504. The death toll of the last two months is the highest of any two successive months since the war began. The rate this month risks adding up to a third straight month of 100 or more soldiers killed. As always, the tally pales in comparison with Iraqi losses and suffering. As far as Iraqis are concerned, one day’s toll usually exceeds any month’s toll for Americans. And the beatings go on. Meanwhile, the imbecilic cheerleading of delusions goes on, too.
V. S. Naipaul Flatters Himself (As He So Often Does)
“That idea of ruin and dereliction, of out-of-placeness, was something I felt about myself, attached to myself: a man from another hemisphere, another background, coming to rest in middle life in the cottage of a half-neglected estate, an estate full of reminders of its Edwardian past, with few connections with the present. An oddity among the estates and big houses of the valley, and I a further oddity in its grounds. I felt unanchored and strange. Everything I saw in those early days, as I took my surroundings in, everything I saw on my daily walk, beside the windbreak or along the wide grassy way, made that feeling more acute. I felt that my presence in that old valley was part of something like an upheaval, a change in the course of the history of the country.”
