I've been tired of the Operation Genoa storyline from the beginning.    No one stops to ask what should be the basic question: why would the U.S. military use an illegal poison gas in the rescue of some captured American soldiers?    It really doesn't make much sense.  

 Card's fictional scenario is pretty similar to the opening of the novel The Turner Diaries (something of a fictional bible to the neo-nazi/white power crowd).   The novel opens with teams of scary looking african-americans who have been sent to search for illegal guns (held by the whites foolish enough to comply…

The more I think about it, the more I'm offended by Maggie's trip to Africa, the worst kind of lazy manipulative storytelling.    I've known people who have visited Africa, who have lived parts of their lives in Africa, and I've known students from Africa — their experiences were not like Maggie's mini-moment of…