re: #749 Killgore Trout

Yikes. The right wing blogoshpere in embarrassing itself really bad this morning. Between the Ham spending and smearing the soldier taken hostage I just can’t bare to watch it this morning.

There are serious issues with both - the ham/porkfest that is the ARRA spending needs to be addressed, and the reporting of same by the media and Drudge is wanting. How exactly should someone take news that $2 million is spent on ham, when the only information provided by the recovery.gov website is 2 lbs ham. No further explanation provided in that listing.

Others are even more dubious, such as hundreds of thousands of dollars to replace a door.

I’m having a new front door installed on my house next week. It’s not going to cost me nearly that much. In fact, it’s several magnitudes less. Unless this is an armored door with special locks and equipment, I can’t see how it would cost that much. Indeed, you could build a new house for that cost.

As to the soldier in Afghanistan, there are serious questions about the circumstances by which he came to be in the custody of the Taliban. The AP provides at least 3 different scenarios, and two provide blame for the incident on the soldier himself - either walking away from his unit (desertion), being drunk (stupidity), or falling behind from his unit (which is a responsibility of both his commanding officers and the soldier himself).

No one knows for sure which is the accurate story as to how he ended up in Taliban hands, but I hope that he remains safe.

As it is, his capture is a Taliban coup for propaganda purposes, and I hope that the military figures out where he’s held and rescues him and deals the Taliban a fatal response for their actions.