©2007, UrbisMedia
Preamble: I don’t even want to write this damn subject anymore. I’m as sick of it as I am of Bush and his stupid war and his American jihadists. Then I watched a newscast of Bush’s photo-op in Anbar and I heard the well-screened “troops” that we are always urged to support issuing war-whoop “HOOAHs” every time their cowardly Commander-in-Chief said his war was going just fine and they were on their way to a winner. HOOHAH, my a**! You want to feel sorry for the gung-hooah guys, but there’s a point whether you wonder if some of them are getting-off on this war stuff. If I don’t’ write about this I’ll likely get pimples.
Then an old friend sent me an overlong PowerPoint of 911 pictures, a redundant visual reminder of the horror that one wants remember for what it was and not as an historically-twisted causus belli for Bush and his neo-cons. 911 has been perverted into a rationale for expending gobs of our treasury on the joke that is Homeland Security, and as a basis for that conjugally-challenged greaseball, [1] Rudolf Guiliani thinking he should be president of a country that badly needs a leader with a brain and a conscience. I want to care about 911, but I want to forget all the faux patriots and their flags that it brought out, and especially those who have exploited it.
So, no pimples for me and, not particular order of importance or logic:
PETREAUS: This guy seems as much of an over-starred PR guy as he is a product of PR. He is supposed to be some big intellectual-soldier—military genius and all that crap—according to the build-up on him. So was MacArthur, with whom he appears to share an oversized ego, but MacArthur at least went to fight somewhere. By the way, where was this genius for the five years we have been in this war? Petraeus was commanding officer at Leavenworth and pulled post-hostilities duty in Bosnia and Kuwait. Too busy studying for his Princeton Ph.D. What a joke! If people weren’t getting their limbs blown off and civilians weren’t getting massacred, it would be funny. One PR story that was circulated is that Petraeus was supposedly accidentally shot in the chest (apparently his only “combat” experience) and jumped up to do 50 push-ups. Wow! We’re saved; super-general is here! HOOAH! Or would that be HOOEY!
So now we are to assume that Bush, five years and half a trillion bucks and an army of fired generals on, has now found a superhero and a word, “surge,” that’s going to make it look like we are winning and save his legacy. As if we don’t know that the whole point of this is to dump Iraq on the Democrats—The Ole Dumperooski [DCJournal Archives, No. 38. 2], and Bush will say he was winning when he left for the ranch. It is not the politics in Iraq that is driving this; it’s the politics in Washington. Petraeus is just another ambitious toady who is going along so he will get another star. We are being had; this guy is a packaged product. He’ll have his fifth star, and it will cost a lot of blown-off arms and legs and casket flags. Bush is not going to back off. This is his last shot; he as been a failure at everything else he has done and he wants to go out on a winner, even if it is a deliberately-created ambiguity. He doesn’t care who dies in the process. He’s lied about everything else, this is just another lie. But in the end it will typical George Bush—a disaster.
So there is Petraeus, playing fast and loose with the stats in front of Congress, [2] demurring and temporizing, but generally playing Bush’s music. Lost in all of this is the notion that there ever was a real mission to this fiasco, as if there was ever any good reason for us to preemptively be there in the first place. Now comes the Pottery Barn logic, and the notion that there will be chaos and mayhem if we precipitously pull out. Chaos and mayhem is what we have now! It’s a civil war, stupid, and these people have been killing each other over succession to the Prophet since the 7 th century; they are not going to stop for some general who is a public relations product. We are not potential victors— we are collateral damage in a family feud! Forget the genius-general; we are stupid people who don’t read history, who can actually lose—like can’t find—$8Billion in cash, lose 190,000 Ak-47s and pistols, who destroyed all of Iraq’s physical and social infrastructure, tortured and massacred innocent people, and expect that they are going to give us a sweetheart oil deal. What part of the word stupid do Republicans not understand?
REPUBLICANS. Speaking of stupid, try this: there are three Republican candidates for president who have publicly declared—no, not that they aren’t gay, that’s later—that they do not believe in evolution. That would be the following idiots: Huckabee, Tancredo and Brownback, who believes that Adam and Eve had a pet dinosaur.
The Republicans are supposedly looking for another Reagan. Oh, great, we need another guy who sells weapons to our enemies for political advantage, who, by the way, is the real “Mr. Cut and Run” if you remember how quickly he pulled out of Lebanon after his general got 250 Marines blown up. Maybe Thompson is another Reagan—an actor with hardly any political substance, and ideological weather-vane. Thompson neither adds or detracts much from the sorriest bunch of jerks ever to disgrace the GOP. Oh, wait! Speaking of disgrace, should we have the next Republican “debate” in a public restroom? That way Senator Craig can be there, too; he’ll be the one tapping his foot and asking you to show yours and he will show you his.
And GUILANI. Another fraud. Where does this guy get off making a big deal out of going to “Ground Zero” on 911. He was the Mayor—THAT’S WHAT A MAYOR IS SUPPOSED TO DO! Any mayor would have done the same. So what makes this guy such a big deal. The very fact that he makes a big deal out of it betrays what a phony this guy is. The only thing he did is get there before Bush, but then Bush too a few days to make sure that nothing was left that might fall on him and give him a boo-boo. Cheney, of course, was taking another deferment and had gone to ground. So, do you want some guys who think the earth is only as old as the Bible, an ugly actor who used to be a lobbyist, A Mormon whose political positions change with the geography, or the self-proclaimed hero of 911?
By the way, they all would say “I am not gay.” But I bet Larry Craig could tell us if somebody in that bunch goes . . . well . . . you know . . . tap, tap, tap.
There, no pimples for me. HOOAH!
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©2007, James A. Clapp (UrbisMedia Ltd. Pub. 9.13.2007)
[1] I can call Guliani a “greaseball” if I want to. I come from the same ethic group, so it’s my privilege. If the little “wop” wants a piece of my action somebody please tell him where he can find me.
[2] http://www.mcclatchydc.com/227/story/19610.html