A Soldier, a Suicide Bomber, a Rove

A 23-year-old U.S. woman stationed in Iraq, a 22-year-old British suicide bomber in London, a powerful Karl Rove revealing the name of a covert CIA operative to a reporter in Washington D.C. -- these people are all wrapped up together in a very messy historical moment right now.

You know about Rove. Unless the Democrats get snobbish and try to overly explain the obvious (he's a two-bit back-stabber), Rove has already set in place his own demise, along with the lame duckness of his fair lady. Rove wanted to use Bush to change the world, and now his mastermind techniques are being shown the light of front page news.

We know little about the young man in London. It is only a theory -- but a very reasonable one -- that Shehzad Tanweer, from the northern city of Leeds, is one of the main figures in the tragic bombings last week. Why he signed on remains unclear. His friends and relatives say he was not political. But it is easy for a young man to want to change the world, and now maybe he has masterminded terror.

You've probably never heard of the U.S. soldier in Iraq (pictured in her collage above). Lainey Poche hosts an excellent website in which she shows what her life is like in Iraq. I don't know her. She tells her readers that she is stationed in Iraq with the Army National Guard out of Louisiana, HHC 256 Inf Bde. She has formed a community with her fellow Guards, and she shows the world over a thousand photographs of her life in Iraq and at home.

Had Karl Rove listened to experts like Joseph Wilson, instead of treating him as a political liability and thus outing his wife's secret identity to hurt him, we may not have gone to war in Iraq. Therefore, Lainey -- who obviously has many friends and family who miss her dearly -- would not be spending time with a gun and a flak jacket in Iraq. And an impressionable young British man would not have been made extraordinarily aware of, and fatally obsessed with, westerners who were attacking the homeland of his newly awakened belief.

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Some readers may have mistaken this site for a diet site. Sorry. That makes sense to me, though. "Fat," etc. But here the diet consists of the human side of politics, family life, and topics that you might want to bite into.

If you came here looking for diet tips and you found some off-the-cuff remarks about world politics, my bad.

Let's chew the fat. Let me know what you know.