What a Day.

STS-114 returns with crew and vehicle intact. Gene William Mauch leaves us to carry on without him, and 15 years ago today, it was a bad day to be in Kuwait.

I didn't get up to watch Discovery land. Turns out it was both dark at Edwards AFB (bad TV), and it was being incessantly narrated by Charles Gibson (even worse TV).

Gene Mauch was the manager of the local 9 when I began to take interest in baseball. He loved the suicide squeeze when Rod Carew was on 3rd base, and he was the first guy to which I actively listened in order to confirm or deny my own observations; something I use Roger Ebert, Jacques Lemaire and Joe Soucheray for today.

With regards to the imperialistic invasion of Kuwait, the slaughter Kuwaiti citizens and the defiance of the emasculated UN, those events are worth remembering, especially since there are so many who continue to apologize to Saddam Hussein for his move from throne to spider hole.

Christopher Hitchens has some honest reflection around this:

The United States is awash in human rights groups, feminist organizations, ecological foundations, and committees for the rights of minorities. How come there is not a huge voluntary effort to help and to publicize the efforts to find the hundreds of thousands of "missing" Iraqis, to support Iraqi women's battle against fundamentalists, to assist in the recuperation of the marsh Arab wetlands, and to underwrite the struggle of the Kurds, the largest stateless people in the Middle East?

The answer, sadly, is that some people are so consumed by hate for the president, they will stomp and eat their own in order to keep some distance between him and success.