Freddie Mercury's Stunt Double

• Milwaukee has (division-race-wise) joined the choir invisible, and the possible wild card matchups are intriguing.
• Peter Van Buren (TomDispatch via AlterNet) explains the historical situation of Iraq and why the United States should have refused to have anything whatsoever to do with it.  Which reminded me that the late Steve Gilliard had written about military history and Iraq and extensively quoted gjohnsit of Daily Kos, who wrote:
  

  The first trick to learning from history is not to learn the wrong thing from history. For instance, Bush and the rest of the pro-war, right-wing liked to reference Neville Chamberlain before WWII as reasons to invade Iraq (and now, Iran). The Republicans are right to compare WWII and Iraq, but not for the reasons they think.
  If the Republicans weren't so ignorant about history they would have compared Yugoslavia to Iraq. No, not Yugoslavia in the 1990's. I'm talking about Yugoslavia during WWII.
  
  Like Iraq, Yugoslavia was artifically put together by the victorious allies after WWI, and combined several ethnic groups that had long, hostile relationships. They managed to live together for decades until Hitler decided that he didn't like their current government in April, 1941. Hitler invaded for no other reason than he wanted "regime change". Yugoslavia's army collapsed quickly. However, that was mearly the beginning.
  
  Hitler did not have enough troops available to contain any outbreak of ethnic strife, and Yugoslavia decended into civil war.
  

  In Croatia [in 1941] the indeginous fascist regime set about a policy of "racial purification" that went beyond even Nazi practices. Minority groups such as Jews and Gypsies were to be eliminated as were the Serbs: it was declared that one-third of the Serbian population would be deported, one-third converted to Roman Catholicism, and one third liquidated.
  - Encyclopaedia Britannica, 15th Edition

  In the end, three times as many people died in Yugoslavia during WWII as died in the Yugoslavian civil war in the 1990's. The trigger was the overthrow of the government without the military force to enforce its will on an ethnically diverse people. Republicans learned the wrong lesson from history. Saddam Hussein wasn't Hitler. Saddam was King Peter II.
  
  Well, not really. But you get the idea.

• Together for 72 years, married this month.  Is your marriage threatened yet?
• See if this sounds familiar:

  We are better, we are more entitled, we are different or at least less interested in the people around us, or the tribes or nations around us, because we’re worthier than they are. Our people are the prettiest, our language is the most musical, our clothes are the most stylish. And these people are barbarians or at the very best civilized but crude. We are deserving of resources just as I, as the individual, am deserving of the raise, or deserving of the job or deserving of the hottest girl at the party because I’m better than the other guys around me.

  It's an article on narcissism, individual and tribal.  (Sarah Gray interviews Jeffrey Kluger for Salon, excerpted in AlterNet.)