New Mexico’s five-man congressional delegation, as expected, proclaimed shock and dismay over those controversial AIG bonus payments, some of which reportedly were returned after the recipients and their families were threatened with painful deaths should they keep the money.
Everyone in Washington is scrambling to blame someone else for this situation while claiming a complete lack of knowledge about the bonuses. Now that is strange. Someone had to know, for how did it get included in the big AIG bailout, for which our congressmen voted?
We’ll probably never know but aren’t we missing the big picture here? Is our anger, expressed in letters and calls to our congressmen, misdirected? We are talking here about millions of dollars in bonuses compared with trillions of dollars in debts and deficits the government is building up hourly and no one complains, including New Mexico’s five Democrats who cheerfully vote for these “bail outs.”
Remember Pearl Harbor?
There was this from a California newspaper:
“Willie Bird’s Restaurant had a pretty good crowd on Sunday, so some aging Pearl Harbor vets at their monthly luncheon had to share the banquet room with another party—a motorcycle club.
“It was inevitable that something would happen between the old salts in their blue-and-white Pearl Harbor Survivors Association and the bikers in their black-and-red leather.
“When the corps of 13 Pearl vets, widows and supporters stood to pledge the allegiance to the flag, the six bikers—all women, all dressed in the colors of the regional Devil Dolls club—took to their feet, too. They remained standing for the survivors’ invocation, and bowed their heads.
“When the World War II vets finished their meals and asked for the tab, their server disclosed that the Devil Dolls already paid it. Huge hugs all around.”
March 26, 1945
Sixty-four years ago today, United States troops completed the capture of the South Pacific island of Iwo Jima from the Japanese. Next step was to be the invasion of the Japanese homeland, expected to cost hundreds of thousands of lives, American and Japanese.
But four months later, President Harry Truman ordered the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, ending World War II.
Iwo Jima, which cost Americans 28,000 casualties, dead and wounded, was the site of the historic photo of the flag raising on Mount Suribachi. There actually were two flag-raising ceremonies recorded on film. One by a U.S. Naval photographer and a second the next day, featuring a larger flag, by and Associated Press photographer.
It took 36 days of brutal, some hand-to-hand combat, to capture that tiny island. In addition to the American casualties, 20,000 Japanese died and just 1,000 surrendered as prisoners of war.
Young men fight wars. On Iwo Jima, 18-year-old Marines and Army GIs won that tiny strip of land in the middle of the Pacific despite incompetent intelligence, bungles planning and admirals and generals who raised flags but never fired a shot.