Ah, classy American consumerist approach to having a family. Single woman apparently decides a child is the appropriate lifestyle accessory and proceeds to import a child from afar -- the trendy thing to do, don't you know, even though plenty of American kids in foster care are desperately looking for loving homes. Alas, single woman gets more than she bargained for, as Russian child appears to come with certain bugs not covered by the warranty. Can't be bothered to try to find a solution, and regretting the whole sordid affair much as if buying an iPod in the wrong color, single woman decides the product just isn't all that it was cranked up to be and proceeds to ship a 7-year old boy alone with a one-way-ticket back to Russia, a note pinned to his chest that basically says, "my wanna-be mom decided I sucked, so here I am."

"I am sorry to say that for the safety of my family, friends, and myself, … I no longer wish to parent this child. As he is a Russian national, I am returning him to your guardianship."

That's damn classy, Ms. Tenneessee parent-of-the-century.

Let's see: first of all, evidently your idea of parenting was something akin to a rent-a-pet for the weekend. Convenient when it augmented your lifestyle, but not really something you could get into for the long run. Second of all, you didn't even bother taking the poor kid to see a shrink before you kicked him out again? That's really giving it the old college try -- NOT. Seriously, your love for your "son" was so limited that when it turned out he wasn't just coos and smiles and straight A's you just couldn't be bothered, but decided to ship him out of your life?

Hopefully Ms. Hansen will never be allowed to adopt again, and unless she genuinely realizes what she did to an already traumatized young boy and has some serious second and third thoughts about what "having a child" really means, I would hope she never has children of her own. Heck, it would start with finding a partner, and even that apparently is tough for her -- perhaps that says more about Ms. Hansen's interpersonal skills than it does about the Russian boy she played with for a bit.

I guess he was lucky she didn't drop him off at the local Catholic Church as a donation to the priests, but shy of that, this is simply an epic fail. Poor kid. I'm sure he was not easy, and all the explanations about his condition may well be true -- but if you commit to adopt him, then you adopt him warts and all, and if you genuinely have the kind of compassion required to adopt, then you deal with his issues, you don't just throw him out like last year's failed fashion.

Bitch.

The irony is perhaps lost on the Obama faithful who still think the Hope & Change is just around the corner, if we just wait long enough and give Sir Change-a-Lot a chance to show how he's really different than any other bought-and-paid for politician. But the fact that Obama is now faced with replacing the most liberal judge on the SCOTUS does give him a chance to make his mark -- for the better, or worse. As it is, Stevens barely balances out reactionary, medieval pricks like Roberts, Alito and Scalia, so the choice of his replacement really will determine the ideological bent of the Court for, perhaps, decades to come. If Obama doesn't have the courage to appoint someone of Stevens' caliber, then he will in effect have facilitated a further lurch towards the right.

Obama? Courage? Please. He couldn't even sack up to defend his appointment of Dawn Johnsen to head the OLC. Some say it was because he was afraid the Republicans might call him names, others more cynical commenters speculated that Johnsen's vociferous objections to Bush's policies of torture, unwarranted eavesdropping etc. run counter to the Obama adminstration's apparent desire to continue (and expand) all those practices, so the surprise was not so much that he dropped her like a hot potato, but rather, the fact that he even bothered to feign interest in a dirty 'effin hippie like her in the first place.

And so Obama's total inability to defend "looney lefty" things like the Constitution and civil rights appears destined to manifest itself yet again when he makes his choice for Stevens' seat. As Bloomberg points out today, "Obama Shuns the Left as White House Mulls U.S. High Court Slot." Pretty much says it all. It'll be the Lieberman wing of the Democratic base (i.e. neo-cons who just haven't been invited to hang out with the cool kids in Eric Cantor's club house, but really want to join) that gets to appoint this one, and it'll no doubt be someone with the moral integrity of a repentant child molester by the time Obama has compromised with the Blue Dogs and the Republicans, who by now have realized that when they say 'jump,' Obama doens't ask 'how high,' he's already made the leap quite voluntarily.

Why, by the time he's done, he'll sure have Changed things for good: Roe v. Wade may be history, all our endless wars ticking along, the 4th Amendment revoked, "clean coal" and offshore drilling destroying what's left of our surroundings, while gays and other "undesirables" further marginalized, while the American Taliban will be firmly entrenched at all levels of Government with little chance of opposition. And by the time Obama abandons the sinking ship to whatever golem Sarah Palin and the mouthbreathers conjure up for 2012 it'll be time for the middle class to start paying the increased premiums to Blue Cross/Blue Shield and friends as they commence the officially sanctioned plunder of tax payers under the guise of "health care reform."

Still not sure how to even begin to deal with the leaked video of the killing of the two Reuters journalists in Iraq. On the one hand, others are obviously doing an eminently better job than I analyzing the whole thing, and really, it's too depressing to even begin to rant sarcastically about this. But two quick thoughts I wanted to get off my chest as I prepare taxes for this year and reflect on all the wonderful things I'm evidently getting for my hard-earned dollars: 

1) Amidst all the hand-wringing among the wingnuts and the mainstream media (who, remember, cheered this war on because it was going to be shock & awe and clean and sweet & all-American fun from start to victorious finish twenty minutes later, and only bad guys would die because we have smart bombs and we're there as liberators and yada yada yada) there is little or no reflection on the fact that the military went to great lenghts, not only to cover up this incident and dismiss it, but to outright lie -- knowingly -- about the facts on the ground, both to the families of the dead (and I think all except the most dipshitty commenters would concede that the two journalists in question were not, in fact Al Queda second-in-commands and deserved to die) and to Reuters, who employed the jornalists. We saw this same M.O. with Tillman and countless other little oops'es, where the myth of the military's infallability might genuinely be challenged with some tangible, factual evidence: when the going got rough, the evidence conveniently went missing, even though various army spokeshacks would categorically state some wildy innacurate version of the story as indisputable.

Thus, just as with the Pope and his pedophilic employees, the scandal is not only in the doing, it's even more so in the hypocritical, deceitful denial and cover-up of what took place. And as my respect for the mainstream media continues to wane (look at NPRs pathetic coverage of the wikileaks story, or CNNs wholesale abdication of any semblance of journalistic integrity in enabling further whitewash of the military's role in trying to make the inconvenient matter disappear), my interest in an outfit like Wikileaks can't help but grow exponentially.

2) While not on the same grand scale, this does remind me of the My Lai massacre that took place during the Vietnam war: an atrocity committed "in our name", killing for the hell of killing, destroying the village to save it from itself, etc. It was always striking to me how My Lai was described -- rightly or not -- as a tipping point in the public's perception of the war; along with the infamous naked girl running from the napalm attack, it became the symbol of everything that was wrong with the US engagement in Vietnam, and marked the beginning of the end of the public support (or at least indifference) that would otherwise have allowed the war to continue forever (the way, apparently, we're fine with Obama continuing Iraq and Afghanistan forever).

My point being: the implications of the Apache footage may be as atrocious as My Lai, but it will never have the same impact, even though it could and should. It clearly doesn't disturb an audience of Fox News viewers that American helicopter pilots attacked unarmed civilians trying to rescue wounded civilians. it doesn't disturb them that the children of a good samaritan get shot in their own neighborhood because an over-eager yahoo with a 30mm canon wants to get his war on and is given permission to do so by an army whose rules of engagement seem to be "if it doesn't look like a US soldier, you can blow it away with impunity, no questions asked, no risk incurred." Nobody is going ask for a follow-up on this; yesterday we saw Obama spokeshack Gibbs deliver the classic "while he's supposed to be deeply concerned, he really doesn't give a shit" line on behalf of the President. Somehow, morally, we as a nation have gotten to the point where this sort of thing doesn't outrage us. Janet Jackson's boob at the Superbowl? Definitely. Moveon calling General Petreus a traitor? Certainly. But this incident and the subsequent behavior of our armed forces? Not so much.

And so, while it was painfully refreshing to hear General McChrystal declare the perhaps soon-to-be-infamous words "We've shot an amazing number of people and killed a number and, to my knowledge, none has proven to have been a real threat to the force . . ." that statement really should be a wake-up call for all the hawks who claim that we're doing our best to limit civilian casualties and that we're fighting a just war both in Iraq and Afghanistan. We're clearly not. We're indiscriminately killing mostly civilians, further alienating the very populaton we're suppsedly trying to save from itself, and at the same time, even when we do kill "bad guys" they're really not bad guys in the sense that they're much of a threat to us. Which does raise the point, then, again: why exactly are we tax payers still paying for this pointless exercise in bloodshed?

As an aside, there's just something juicily ironic about the fact that Colin Powell is directly involved in both of these: he helped cover up My Lai, and he helped sell of the crock of lies about WMD in Iraq that got us into that mess. Way to go, Colin, back-to-back epic failures to bookmark your career as a soldier.