Quote of the Day

"Watch out for the 'lessons' coming this week. Make sure you don’t learn them."
--John Cole, on the farce that will be the post-Virginia Tech media 'debate'.

What he said. Just avoid the 24-hour news channels all together. As with Columbine and 9/11 and other large tragedies, we are told we must learn 'lessons', which would be good in theory if the people attempting to impart said lessons were not all stupid.

As Cole notes, the 'lessons' we learned from 9/11 have us stuck in Iraq (and, I'll add, have had our constitution and political system in crises). The mainstream 'lessons' we were told to take from Columbine were not those of Michael Moore, but rather the ones that were so hilariously lampooned in the 1999 'South Park' movie-- ie. the ridiculous scapegoating of Marilyn Manson. Etc.

I don't think people will go in that direction, but other silliness has already ensued.

I don't want to add too much more to this masturbatory frenzy of media/political vultures, but I will quickly plug two related blog posts I liked. The first is by Andrew Sullivan, who reminds us that the horrors of Monday afternoon is everyday life in Iraq. He further asks us to ponder who must be held responsible for that living massacre. Secondly, 'Atrios' laments the impulse of the "security" crowd to think that the appropriate response is to turn college campuses into a police state. As he notes, tragedy by nature cannot be prevented, we can only work to (sanely) divert it.

Now let's all please get on with our lives and let these families mourn in peace.