It's good to be The Man

60 Minutes had an interview this evening with Ben Barnes, who pulled political strings to get Dubya into the Texas Air National Guard during Vietnam. It's nothing particularly surprising, but I think this is just another example of how Dubya has gotten ahead in this world due to his family's money, power, and prestige, and not necessarily because of any particular talent of his own.

To be honest, I have a hard time relating to Vietnam. It's just something that's so very far out of my experience I think I have a hard time imagining what it must have been like to live in this country when so many men and women were dying overseas. It's even harder to imagine living through WWII, when there was actually rationing. Think about going to your grocery store to find that, no, they didn't have any butter that week, but here's your half loaf of bread. Then think about what it must have been like in London during the Blitz, when bombs fell in one part of the city or another every night for 57 consecutive days.

We have just passed the one thousandth fatality in the entire second Iraq war. This was reported by the national press as a significant milestone. Just to put this in perspective, in the same month that George W. Bush got into the Texas Air National Guard, two thousand Americans died in Vietnam.