"Low Life Scum" Considered

By William Boardman -- Reader Supported News [2.1.15]

Prisoner of Warmaking
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"Please allow me to introduce myself
I'm a man of wealth and taste""
-- "Sympathy for the Devil," The rolling Stones

Would you want to change places with a despised war criminal? Seriously, would you want to live as a guilty monster, unwilling to see yourself clearly even in a mirror, at the end of a career of criminal cruelty that has made you hated by millions if not billions of your fellow humans, never knowing if those who politely fawn on your excellence don't secretly despise you behind your back? Would you really like to change places with John McCain or Henry Kissinger? With Dick Cheney or George Bush or Donald Rumsfeld or any of hundreds of other predators still at large?

Would you really want to be one of those people with so little essential humanity that you're incapable of feeling and expressing the slightest guilty conscience for even the most extreme of your crimes against humanity?

These questions arise amidst reaction to the scene at the Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on January 29, when the committee decided it would be useful to hear from a nonagenarian former secretary of state and unindicted war criminal named Henry Kissinger. As reported by the Associated Press in the New York Times, this appearance of a former government official, who was an architect of American failures from Viet-Nam to Chile, left unasked the question: why would the Senate leadership today want to hear from a man so steeped in making war -- and losing?

The question of war or peace is a question the Times and most of the mainstream media would rather not consider, even though they're covering a Congress that has been noisy with war drums for months, or years now.

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