Women Soldiers in Harm's Way

The Village Green's post on women soldiers in today's war coincided in a timely way with a recent Newsweek cover story on the injured in harm's way at Walter Reed. The person chosen for the cover portrait is a wounded woman, with two legs gone. She is shown on a chair, sitting on her bandaged stumps. Until this war, the government had resisted sending women up to the front lines and imminent danger, even though the Civil Rights Ats of the 1960s have accomplished much in giving equal rights to women including the right to serve the nation on equal terms.

But there has always existed a fear that the public would not condone the idea of women returning home in caskets or physically damaged. A nation raised to believe that women belong on pedestals would not like to see its mothers and sisters returning from war as damaged goods. But in Bush's war it's been proven that the great American public has not risen up in protest. Women are returning to parents, husbands, children, and friends with horrifying and multiple injuries, physical and psychological, and apparently nobody cares very much that they were sent into harm's way in the first place. Another prized American value gone down the drain? It also goes without saying that our nation does not prize its male soldiers much either, based on the short shrift they are receiving from our government and the Veterans Administration. Strange, don't you think?

Hillary Made a Mistake When she Voted for the Iraq War: She Should Amit That

Fellow blogger, Long Live the Village Green, defends Hillary Clinton who yesterday defended her decision to vote to go to war in Iraq back in 2002. In answer to an audience member's question as to whether she's ready to admit that her vote was a mistake, she said that it was the administration who made the mistake, not her. But the administration, from its point of view, was not making a mistake. It cleverly and consciously fed a tissue of lies to gullible senators who sopped it up because they felt their political lives were threatened. Below is a list of senators who had the guts to vote
against the measure. If you follow Hillary's logic, it was these anti-war senators who were making the mistake at that time by voting against what she felt were plausible reasons for going to war. Hillary must own up to her error in judgment. If millions of us out here in the hinterlands could see from the get-go that invading a sovereign nation on pretexts was wrong, who looked at Colin Powell's aluminum tubes with disbelief, who understood that Saddam had no fangs, then she should have too. She's paid to know these things.

From Democrats.com:

"Although we spend a lot of time talking about what – and who – got us into this quagmire, let's take a moment to look at the names and the words of the Senators who defied bullying by Team Bush and had the wisdom and courage to vote "nay" on October 11, 2002.

"Here are the brave ones:

• Daniel Akaka (D-HI)
• Jeff Bingaman (D-NM)
• Barbara Boxer (D-CA)
• Robert Byrd (D-WV)
• Lincoln Chafee (R-RI)
• Kent Conrad (D-ND)
• Jon Corzine (D-NJ)
• Mark Dayton (D-MN)
• Richard Durbin (D-IL)
• Russell Feingold (D-WI)
• Robert Graham (D-FL)
• Daniel Inouye (D-HI)
• James Jeffords (I-VT)
• Edward Kennedy (D-MA)
• Patrick Leahy (D-VT)
• Carl Levin (D-MI)
• Barbara Mikulski (D-MD)
• Patty Murray (D-WA)
• Jack Reed (D-RI)
• Paul Sarbanes (D-MD)
• Debbie Stabenow (D-MI)
• Paul Wellstone (D-MN)
• Ron Wyden (D-OR)