Maccabees' "Must Read"

Maccabee was right: Frank Rich's column, Supporting Our Troops Over a Cliff, is a Must Read. Maccabee's excellent diary on the column scrolled south last night. This is my attempt to resurrect it and put the column to good use.

Step One: Read his diary which contains generous, but fair,  excerpts from Rich's column.

Step Two: Read additional excerpts on the flip.

Step Three: Those who can get behind the Orange Wall email the column to your friends, representatives and local Newspaper Editor (with the request that they reprint it). If you do not have access, check truthout.org (they often post Rich's columns) or wait until tomorrow and access the column at The Progressive American.

More Rich below...

THE sunlight was brilliant in New York City on Memorial Day weekend, and the sailors deposited in town by Fleet Week looked brilliant in it. Nothing, including the atrocities of Abu Ghraib and Haditha, has shaken American affection for the troops. Nothing should. These men and women go to war so we can party on. Since 9/11, our government has asked no sacrifice of civilians other than longer waits at airline security. We've even been rewarded with a prize that past generations would have found as jaw-dropping as space travel: a wartime dividend in the form of tax cuts.

"It shocked me that the country was not mobilized for war," said Maj. Gen. John Batiste, who retired after his stint as a commander in Iraq and became an outspoken critic of Donald Rumsfeld. He told The Wall Street Journal that "it was almost surreal" that the only time some Americans "think about the war is when they decide what color magnet ribbon to put on the back of their car."

Should we feel guilty? Yes.

General Batiste's observation about the "almost surreal" disconnect between the home front and the war is damningly true, even in Washington. As the violence in both Iraq and Afghanistan spiraled before and after Memorial Day, Congress kept its eye on its own ball. In a bipartisan display of honor among thieves, Democrats and Republicans banded together to decry the F.B.I. for searching the office of a Democratic congressman, William Jefferson, who had been accused of hiding $90,000 in questionable cash in his freezer. Even more ludicrously, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales -- a man who damaged our troops incalculably by countenancing an official policy of torture -- finally threatened to resign on principle. The principle he was standing up for, however, was not the Geneva Conventions but the F.B.I.'s right to raid Mr. Jefferson's office.

Contrast these clowns with J. W. Fulbright, a senator who convened hearings to challenge presidents from both parties during Vietnam, changing the nation's course. The current Senate majority leader, Bill Frist, has proudly put on this month's legislative agenda constitutional amendments to stop same-sex marriage and flag burning. "Right now people in this country are saying it's O.K. to desecrate that flag and to burn it," he said on Fox News last Sunday, though it's not clear exactly who these traitors are. A Nexis search turns up only one semi-recent American flag-burning incident -- by a drunk and apparently apolitical teenager in Mr. Frist's home state, Tennessee, in 2005.

The marriage-amendment campaign will be kicked off tomorrow with a Rose Garden benediction by the president. Though the amendment has no chance of passing, Mr. Bush apparently still thinks, as he did in 2004, that gay-baiting remains just the diversion to distract from a war gone south.

Lets get this out.