Ian: I want to say thank you to the panel for selecting corrente /Leah, Lambert, Tresy, the farmer, Tom, Xan, and RDF as one of the blog links for this month. I really enjoy the strong writing there and always find something worth reading. I was looking at the links today and for the first time noticed that corrente was there and it really made my day because that's a blog that deserves a huge audience so I hope everyone will consider checking it out. If you're not into links, then at least mention it to some people you know to get the word out.
I'd like to highlight an entry from last week that I think demonstrates why that blog is so great.
This is from Friday and it's called "When Is A War Crime Not A War Crime?" Here's a sample of it:
The government has gotten quite facile in sidestepping accusations of war crimes lately...and why not? They've had plenty of opportunity for practice. From the Afghanistan massacre to Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay, they've been up to their eyeballs in deniablity.
When our daughter was going through her most obnoxious phase, we caught her smoking, and when we confronted her she tossed the cigarette onto the street and flatly denied having one, even though she knew that we saw it. This kind of brazen, give-a-sh*t lying is what Bushco does best, as Alberto Gonzales and Scott McClellan continue to prove almost daily.
But occasionally they get a little help from the other two branches of the dying tree of democracy. Yesterday, thanks to US District Court Judge Jack Weinstein, we now know that the deliberate application of deadly poisons like Agent Orange to vast swaths of a nation's countryside is not a war crime, no matter how many millions of soldiers and civilians it cripples, maims and kills, and no matter that the VA recognizes the 50 or so diseases caused by it, including numerous varied cancers and birth defects ("some babies were born without eyes or arms, or were missing internal organs"), and no matter that Vietnam vets successfully petitioned for recompense for exposure after the effects became so overwhelmingly obvious even the White House was having a hard time ignoring it.
This is why I love corrente so much. They talk about a complicated issue in a way that you can grasp it and relate to it. It's not a lecture, it's not a sermon. It's a down to earth, insightful way of discussing. I know that it's been said here that no one's trying to be an expert or impress everyone by citing this theory or that. Showboating Diane Chamberses (Cheers) never reach me.
Someone's who bound and determined to convince me not just that they're smart but that they're so much smarter than anyone else that ever lived is going to bore the hell out of me and make me run for cover. At corrente they take you through something in a concrete manner that has meaning.
So please know that if you're someone who wants to be talked to and not talked down to, corrente's worth checking out. I have no idea how to do links but if you could put them in, I'd appreciate it.
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Note: Every time we add links, we note them. Until . . . This month. My apologies. It was noted that they were up but there was no time to go through and highlight for which I apologize.
I also apologize that some links haven't made it up yet. (All blogs voted on by the panel were added.) It has been a busy month (work, blog problems with postings and then with posting that wouldn't post or did post and then disappeared -- thanks to our UK members who helped us out by catching a post that had disappeared, the neighbors that are thankfully now gone, helping The Third Estate Sunday Review and helping a member with a blog she's trying to get up and going). There were some additions that needed no introduction. Katrina vanden Heuvel's Editor's Cut, for instance, is something we cite often. But with that or anything other link -- new or old -- that you want to note, feel free to do so and it will go up. And yes, I can do the links to a post for you.
