05.12.06 - 12:28 p.m.

I haven't paid much attention to The New Republic (to which I subscribe) for months. It comes every week. Every week I deposit it beneath one of my end tables, where it lives with shoe catalogues and garden catalogues and Amnesty International catalogues (they seriously have a catalogue. Fortunately, they do not sell torture devices.) and public-radio-supporting catalogues full of the sort of things that appeal to public radio listeners. I catalogue the catalogues on the theory that, one day, I might want to buy something from one of them, which is never true. I can't buy shoes without trying them on, and I'm not that interested in ordering plants for the garden from a source unknown. I'd rather wander around Hatcher's, spend some time with the koi, admire the expensive weeping cherry trees and lust over the hanging baskets, then spend more than I intended to spend because I have-to-have something-or-other.

This week, though, they caught my attention.

The cover isn't a clever cartoon with an eye-catching, punny headline. Instead, there is light text on a black cover, no images in sight and a powerful editorial.

TNR or Darfur

We can't do anything about Darfur because we are fools: overextended in Iraq, we have spent whatever political capital we have in the world fighting a "war on terrorism" and destroying - in great good part - our reputation by flouting our obligations under US law and international treaties in regard to the manner in which we treat detainees as well as their right to an impartial judicial review process. We kidnap Lebanese-born German nationals from Macedonia, cart them off to Afghanistan, torture them for four months, realize we have the wrong fucking person and then drop them off on a mountaintop in Albania without even a good luck or a compass pointing the way home. Even with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the expenses associated with Hurricane Katrina, our government now spends less as a percentage of gross domestic national product than it did in the 1990s. Nevertheless, thanks to (ongoing) irresponsible tax cuts for the wealthy, we are running record deficits.

We choose to fight a war against a brutal dictator with no plan for the aftermath and make our case not based on genuine and potentially righteous reasons, but rather on lies and exagerrations regarding the alleged "threat" said castrated dictator poses to peace in the region and our time. As a consequence, we lose whatever international credibility we have and are overextended and cannot intervene where necessary to stop genocide. Meanwhile - hey! American Idol is on television, and if American Idol isn't your cup of tea, there is - doubtlessly - an anti-Bush rally somewhere that you can attend, to party with the puppets and chant no blood for oil and be a pacifist.

Blah. I'm not a pacifist. Genocide calls for military intervention. Period.

How fucking hard is that as an equation? Why don't we fucking care?