Aren’t (most) European experts balking at helping with the investigations of Iraqi mass graves on grounds that the death penalty might be invoked against Saddam, as a result of their documentation? Apparently, the Yanks and Iraqis don’t understand that executing a sadistic mass murderer who brought woe upon his people is wrong and barbaric.

(I thought Ura was a joke- was she for real??)

BTW, I live in rural Utah. The line in “Raising Az,” I interpret as referring to our big families.

I just rented “The Big Lebowski” which certainly has post-modernism, nihilism, violence, stupidity and profanity enough to cover all bases. (I couldn’t think of a way to include Japan and mass graves in that sentence.) It certainly does illustrate how far removed from reality America has become.

How does the left deal with the mass graves? Just as it did with 9/11? Blame it on our foreign policy and culture. After all, we created Saddam, before we commited genocide by supporting economic sanctions against his regime (which all boils down to changing the subject). It’s all like arguing the minutiae of Nazi atrocities to the point that you forget the horror of the Holocaust.

We’re still figuring out the dimensions of this Holocaust and something tells me it’s already being denied. The Iraqis will assemble all the evidence, but it will never be enough for the Pomos of West. They’ll just keep raising their figures of how many the Coalition and the Sanctions killed to keep pace.

Both their laters, BTW (“Ladykillers” and “Intolerable Cruelty”), super-rewarded my second viewings.

“Shouldn’t you be doing your job?”

“Intimidating helpless women is my job.”

“Then go find one, and intimidate her.”

—Joel & Ethan Coen

Play with murder enough and it gets you one of two ways. It makes you sick, or you get to like it.

It’s also better than that particular Hammett story though that story includes the famous explication of “blood simple” and the great Laudanum chapter.

In other words, I know…hence the first word in the previous post.

Continuing off-topic, I like Miller’s Crossing, but I don’t consider it a classic because I feel the Coen brothers (mentioned further above) went one Hammett story, The Maltese Falcon, too far if you know what I mean.