As my mother and I enjoyed a round of harumphing about how we were going to miss finding out who got voted out of the Amazon because some trigger-happy goon in Baghdad tawt he taw a missile coming (Mountain Standard Time meant that TV news went on full splash coverage alert halfway through Survivor), something became abundantly clear as we surfed through the channels.

This ain't my mommy's war. Or my granny's war. Or even my Gulf War.

"My god, these people would have been taken out and shot for blabbing like this during World War II," my mother exclaimed as we watched the parade of armaments on screen, complete with information on how far our missiles can go, how they're guided, what their payloads were, even which company made them (cynically, we both agreed this vital information - presented on ABC in a subtly larger typeface than the rest of the data - must be part of President Bush's economic stimulus package. Hey, we're going to need some more Tomahawk Missiles pretty soon, so call your broker and buy all the General Dynamics you can afford!). This after watching a report earlier in the evening about how some military experts were worried that Hussein would blow up his own dams so the floodwaters would impede coalition forces' progress, prompting us both to cry out "Oh yes, let's give the bastard some more ideas!!"

After a couple of hours of last night's coverage, I almost feel like I could build a stealth bomber out of household materials, which really just makes me wonder how much our enemies have learned. Obviously our leadership is assuming that some folks in Iraq can see what's being broadcast, else why would Dubya bother addressing the Iraqi people directly?

So does this just mean we're so confident that we just plain don't care what the Iraqis know about what we can do? We're so badass that secrecy is not a concern at all?

Or is it part of the much-vaunted "shock and awe" campaign?

Or is it, as my more paranoid coffee buddies posited this morning, just that the media is so rife with America-hating "pinkos" (believe it or not, people out here in Red America still use those terms... and by the way, for obvious reasons, don't ever refer to Red America as Red if you're actually spending time here) that they're happy to give Saddam whatever information he needs to "teach us a lesson?"

Whatever it is, it's just plain weird.