Incident on a Baghdad Street

Three years past, but still sickening. If you have eighteen minutes and a tolerance for the banality of evil, here's the video:

Over on John Cole's site someone posted a response to the effect that requiring our Teeming Millions to sit through the footage might have a salutary effect, rather like having the local Germans marched through their friendly neighborhood extermination camps in 1945. Alas, I fear a significant fraction would simply giggle like our Brave Boys in their helicopter watching one of the wounded photographers attempting to crawl off the street ("C'mon...reach for a weapon...just try it!"). They didn't finally kill the photog until someone arrived in a van and had the effrontery to pick him up.

This is, mutatis mutandis, indistinguishable from sundry atrocities committed in Russia by the Beastly Hun during the late unpleasantness of the 1940s. The figures on the Baghdad street were, plain and simple, untermenschen, negligible existences to be erased as casually, and with as much satisfaction, as you or I might squash a buzzing fly. Some will say "Hey, this is war." In that case, I respond that we ought to shrug and respond "it's just war" when the charbroiled corpses of US troops—or contract killers—are displayed hanging from bridges.

A number of the US deaths in Iraq have been consequence of helicopters shot out of the air. If this crew had been among them, who among you is so wed to tribal loyalties that you would not agree that a rough justice was served?

I could almost see voting for Palin in 2012 on the grounds that this sorry ratfucking excuse for a republic, this savage, smirking, predatory empire deserves her. Bring on the Rapture, motherfuckers!