Memorial Day Notes

• I had to wake this morning hearing NPR talk about this day being for those who died "defending their country." I wish NPR wasn't helping the myth that our war dead were killed while defending our country? How were Korea, Vietnam, Haiti, Grenada, Panama, Kuwait, and Iraq defending our country? Couldn't they just say" killed in conflicts while serving in the US military?"
  

• Yesterday Linda Wertheimer presented a piece on Memorial Day/Decoration Day in which she said, "We do what every country does in war time: we count the cost, primarily we count the cost in lives--2654 when I checked this morning." This fails to mention that the dead we count are only US/ally deaths. In this particularly nasty Iraq War we'd have to go about a hundred times higher to count the dead of Iraq who've been slaughtered in this US campaign. The racism of not counting "them" never ends...