The Guard can fill in... again.

A couple a things on the President's address...

First, I thought Bill O'reilly was the only guy foolish enough to think there were a bunch of guardsmen sitting around with nothing better to do than support border patrols.

Second, why is no one addressing the bait for our illegal immigrants - the employers who hire them. The closest the president's speech came was cracking down on false documents. C'mon, the employers who hire these folks know what they're doing. If a bartender is held accountable for buying off on a fake ID, then why shouldn't a corporation be held accountable too. We're subsidizing their cheap labor and perpetuating the problem as well as putting companies who won't hire illegals at a disadvantage, but God forbid we address that at the big business level! No, we're much better off picking on the bottom rungs of that ladder of corruption. I guess that's trickle down theory at its finest. Ignore the corruption of business until it flows all the way to some poor guy from Mexico who risks his life to be illegally employed at a buck an hour and then arrest him for it. So why doesn't the No Child Left Behind Act arrest failing students?

Third, what's with the amnesty double-speak? Having a job and a home and a history is NOT paying the price for coming here illegally. It's reaping the benefits of amnesty. Call it what you want, but forgiving illegal immigrants is amnesty. I'm the first to admit that we couldn't possibly arrest 12 million people, nor would we want to since most would make fine citizens if they'd follow the rules, but what the pres proposed in that speech was amnesty even though he only used that word to say it wasn't.

Fourth, other than that, it actually sounds like the president has considered some of the realities of this issue. I was pretty impressed by that and the multi-layered approach (except, of course, for the National Guard deal and the amnesty double-speak). Which brings me to...

Fifth: Although the National Guard has pulled almost half the load (45% of troops) in Iraq and Afghanistan, and although they're now being tasked with picking up the slack of some other organization that the top brass have neglected, and although the Guard has consistently done this on about a third of the salary and training time as their active duty counterparts, and although they've done this AND responded to local and domestic national issues, the majority of retiring guardsmen still can't collect a penny of retirement benefit for nearly thirty years after they retire. Active duty retirees collect the day they separate. Most national congressmen collect the day or the year they retire, but guardsmen, many of whom may have seen more combat and overseas duty than some of their active duty counterparts, have to wait until they turn 65. The amounts we're talking here are pretty pathetic, a few days worth of active duty pay per month, but over time, they add up. They (we) deserve it. Write your congressman. Either pay us like active duty troops, or quit using us like them. The unique combination of civilian and military experience that guardsmen offer the nation has to be worth that. If it's not, why would it be called upon so frequently these days?

Life is better for America, worse for Moussaoui

Zacarias Moussaoui's life sentence was the right thing to do. In fact, it goes a long way in restoring my faith in my fellow Americans. The jurors who had to sit in the same courtroom with that shithead for that long deserved a lot more revenge than they got from that verdict, but that just shows that 12 jurors who were "too stupid to get out of jury duty" are smarter, and more sincere in their duty, than the vocal minority lets on. Of course, when it comes to revenge, there's not enough on this earth for those who lost family or friend in the 9/11 attacks, but a jury's job, our justice system's job shouldn't have anything to do with revenge. And, contrary to what he would now like the world to think, I doubt that Moussaoui had all that much to do with 9/11. Thanks to the insight on his thoughts that he's offered us throughout his trial, I doubt that any terrorist organization worth their salt would trust him with much more that sticking a firecracker in an American Bullfrog's ass.

Aside from my liberal and pro-life belief that killing someone because they killed someone is wrong, or that any irreversible punishment to that extent smacks of more hubris than humans should possess, there are a number of practical reasons why this sentence is better (for us) than death... the primary one for me is that it's worse for Moussaoui.

This wimp thought he would die a martyr even though he didn't take the initiative to even risk, let alone take his own life. Getting sentenced to death is not the way of the martyrs Moussaoui's delusions led him to compare himself to. The martyrs he looks up to kill themselves... and others in the process. Moussaoui didn't have the courage or the strength of conviction to do that. Instead, he jumped on the vilest of bandwagons in order to catch his own 15 minutes. This verdict cuts him off at 13 and he won't ever get the remaining two. He'll probably die in prison before he unsuccessfully tries to gain more attention during his next appeal hearing. Let those our justice system has condemned do that dirty work, not us.

Martyrdom would have earned Moussaoui the famed 72 virgins according to some stretched interpretations of the Koran, or, more likely, according to one of the 2,000+ sayings of the hadith. But, those who are inclined to take such a promise so literally (radical fundamentalist "Muslims") are also probably inclined to believe that women's souls cannot enter heaven. So are these virgins young boys? Is that what Moussaoui was deprived of? Ok, so I digressed a little to say that... either way, this verdict puts the brakes on the martyrdom issue.

Still another reason the verdict is a great decision is because it tells the rest of the world what I've always known about America: once we're calmed down and back in our game, we will do the right thing. In spite of overwhelming individual desire (mine included) to see the perpetrators of the attacks die slow, horrible deaths, that jury, on behalf of the nation, showed the world that we know the difference between justice and revenge. Having done so, the jury dealt a serious blow to the momentum of anti-American sentiment. Our nation has wielded its power in ways that feed that sentiment, no doubt, but here's a sign that our people don't necessarily condone that. We're good people, by and large and those twelve of us proved it to the world on a high-visibility stage.

And the last reason I'll offer up (feel free to toss more in as comments) is the revenge that this verdict actually does allow. As the judge who presided over the sentencing said, "it's quite clear who won and who lost." This slimeball, who claims to hate America, will spend the rest of his life here, surrounded by Americans with even less respect for him than the jurors who spared his life even as they probably didn't think it was worth much. He loses. Game over. Sure, there's talk of moving him to a French prison for some strange reason. So be it. They can have him. He can rot there just as easily. Why not be imprisoned by a country who refused to join us in the war? That would add irony to the situation from both directions. Doesn't matter. With that much time on his hands, even a dumbass like Moussaoui may eventually figure out that there is no place for him in any version of heaven unless he repents. Based on his comments at sentencing, I'm not holding my breath for that. The only thing I'll be waiting to hear is whether or not he counts as one of those virgins in his cellmate's interpretation.