I love Rackham, one of my favorite illustrators. Here's another good one of Brunhilde:
Posted on 06/21/2003 1:10:38 PM PDT by dixiechick2000
'Apocalypse Now' Music Fires Up U.S. Troops for Raid
By Alistair Lyon
BAGHDAD (Reuters) - U.S. troops psyched up on a bizarre musical reprise from Vietnam war film "Apocalypse Now" before crashing into Iraqi homes to hunt gunmen on Saturday, as Shi'ite Muslims rallied against the U.S. occupation of Iraq (news - web sites).
With the strains of Wagner's "Ride of the Valkyries" still ringing in their ears and the clatter of helicopters overhead, soldiers rammed vehicles into metal gates and hundreds of troops raided houses in the western city of Ramadi after sunrise as part of a drive to quell a spate of attacks on U.S. forces.
A previously unknown group, calling itself the Iraqi National Front of Fedayeen, vowed to intensify assaults on American troops until they leave Iraq.
A man with his face swathed in a red-and-white headscarf read the threat on a videotape received by Lebanon's LBC television. There was no way to verify its authenticity.
"If they want their soldiers to be safe, they must leave our pure land," the man said, disavowing any link to Saddam Hussein (news - web sites). He was flanked by three masked men with weapons.
Iraqi assailants have killed 17 U.S. soldiers since major combat was declared over on May 1, three weeks after the fall of Baghdad ended 24 years of Saddam Hussein's iron rule.
U.S. officials blame the attacks on diehard Saddam loyalists. Many Iraqis say the resistance is fueled by resentment at the occupation and the behavior of U.S. troops.
"The Americans are occupiers and aggressors," said Sayyid Ali, one of about 2,000 Shi'ites who protested outside the vast palace compound in Baghdad now used by Iraq's U.S. rulers.
"They were supposed to free us from the oppressor, now they are only occupying us," he said. "We want to form a national government. "We want freedom and justice."
There was no repeat of the violence that erupted on the same spot on Wednesday, when U.S. troops killed two Iraqis during a protest by stone-throwing former soldiers thrown out of work by a U.S. decree dissolving the Iraqi military.
SOUR PERCEPTIONS
"Under Saddam, we had no medicine. It was all in this palace," said Mohammed Obeid, sheltering from the fierce sun. "Now it's the same, except the Americans are in the palace."
The United States and Britain say their forces will stay put until they can restore security, revive the economy and arrange a transition to an elected, sovereign Iraqi government.
However, they have failed to find Saddam or his alleged arsenal of weapons of mass destruction which they cited as their main justification for going to war on March 20.
President Bush (news - web sites), floating a new explanation for the failure to find banned weapons, said suspected arms sites had been looted as Saddam's government crumbled.
"For more than a decade, Saddam Hussein went to great lengths to hide his weapons from the world. And in the regime's final days, documents and suspected weapons sites were looted and burned," Bush said in his weekly radio address.
A U.S. treasury official attending a meeting organized by the World Economic Forum (news - web sites) in Jordan for political and business leaders, said world donors must provide aid as well as debt relief to Iraq for postwar reconstruction.
SEARCH FOR SADDAM
The most important Iraqi captured by U.S. troops yet has told his interrogators that the deposed leader and his two sons survived the war, the New York Times reported.
The paper quoted unnamed defense department officials as saying the information came from Abid Hamid Mahmud al-Tikriti, captured earlier this week, fourth on a U.S. list of most wanted Iraqis after Saddam and his sons Uday and Qusay.
They said Mahmud's tips had ignited an intense burst of clandestine U.S. military activity aimed at capturing the trio.
There was nothing secretive about Saturday's robust sweep through Ramadi, 100 km (60 miles) west of Baghdad, by soldiers of the First Battalion of the 124th Infantry Regiment who psyched themselves up at a base on a musical moment redolent of Francis Ford Coppola's 1979 film about the Vietnam war.
Hit-and-run strikes on U.S. troops have been concentrated in Sunni Muslim towns such as Ramadi west and north of Baghdad.
One unit of troops dragged half a dozen men from their homes as women wailed. They seized weapons and a computer disk.
Officers said they aimed to capture five men from the Fedayeen paramilitary force, which put up some of the fiercest resistance to U.S. troops during their invasion.
The raid was part of Operation Desert Scorpion, launched on June 15 to crack down on militants and befriend civilians by helping with aid and reconstruction projects.
A U.S. military spokesman said on Saturday that 90 Desert Scorpion raids had captured 540 people.
The part of the movie about the Cav was well depicted, as I remember them coming into the Officer's Club at Long Binh, with a proud strut and black hats; these were brave men who earned the right to strut.
I love Rackham, one of my favorite illustrators. Here's another good one of Brunhilde:
"Siegfried discovers Fear."
And then all the trouble begins . . . . :-D
"I'm not making this up, you know."
Eeeeeek! Save me from Anna Russell (but not right away, I want to listen for a little while.)
LOL!
It still is tagged that way by some. This is how the idiots over at DU view the same story: http://www.democraticunderground.com/duforum/DCForumID71/6540.html
Drudge is an imbicile. Just one more example.
Highly recommended, though I'd bet almost anything that you've read it.
Please never link to them again. There's so much hatred and stupidity combined into one location that I hope I don't turn into a pillar of salt by having looked at it.
I'm going to have to go take a shower. Let's hope the stench will wash off.
He has lost his mind lately. He was blaming the President for crime in California. Berating callers for being concerned about terrorism. That with Beethoven's 9th was just idiotic.
Drudge is nothing to me anymore.
Have you ever seen Newman Levy's Opera Guyed? I'm afraid it's out of print (my opera humor is of an antique date, in this case around 1920.) He skewers the more popular operas in verse. The one everybody seems to know is his sendup of Thais, which can actually be SUNG to the tune of the Georgia Tech "Rambling Wreck Song" . . . "One time in Alexandria, in wicked Alexandria/Where nights were wild with revelry and life was but a game,/ There lived, so the report is, an adventuress and courtesan,/ The pride of Alexandria, and Thais was her name." But he also does a riff on Carmen that parodies Spanish flamenco, and his Walküre is done in the style of an old Yiddish comic monologue . . . "A schone mashpocha, them Hundings! That rosher Old Marcus Hunding, I never knew it such a feller in my life."
Worth reading if you can dig up a copy.
Have you seen IowaHawk's classic?
(That whirring noise you hear is Sig. Verdi revolving rapidly in his grave.)
Good one...I also vote for Led Zeppelin's Immigrant Song.
AAAAAAAAAAAA-AH!
AAAAAAAAAAAA-AH!
We come from the land of ice and snow...
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