Can it be that it's been almost a decade since the first day of the Third Gulf War, the Cheneyan Mess-o-potamia?
Yep.
A good place to begin is here: with James Fallows. In it Fallows makes the point which I consider the most essential one that we as We the People should be contemplating:
"For a decade or more after the Vietnam war, the people who had guided the U.S. to disaster decently shrank from the public stage. Robert McNamara did worthy penance at the World Bank. Rusk, Rostow, Westmoreland were not declaiming on what the U.S. should and should not do.
After Iraq, there has been a weird amnesty and amnesia about people's misjudgment on the most consequential decision of our times. Hillary Clinton lost the 2008 primary race largely because she had been "wrong" on Iraq and Barack Obama had been "right." But Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Bremer, Rice, McCain, Abrams, and others including the pro-war press claque are still offering their judgments unfazed. In his post-presidential reticence George W. Bush has been an honorable exception.
I don't say these people should never again weigh in. But there should be an asterisk on their views, like the fine print about side effects in pharmaceutical ads."
I read the article Fallows refers to in the spring of 2003 and remember thinking "Yep. Yep. This is gonna suck." It prompted me to do something I'd promised myself I'd never do; march in a "peace protest". And, yes, it was as fucking worthless as the rest of them. All I got was the fucking T-shirt, and the caissons went rolling along.
But to me, the real damage we have done to ourselves over this has nothing to do with blood or treasure, but the formal codification of the Washington Rule that says you can harm your nation and your nation's People deliberately, intentionally, with greed and self-interest aforethought and pay no price - not a fucking penny or a moment of your liberty or even your social standing - for it.
We'll talk some more here about this when the anniversary arrives.
The rains are returning slowly; a little gusty spit this afternoon, with a drizzly day set for tomorrow. The shortening daylight seems determined to make the point nastily, slapping us on the back of the head to remind us that "standard time" will be here soon, as well, and the dreary part of the year wherein we wake and return home in darkness.
Poor little Peep; he was so angry tonight. Pestered his sister until reprimanded, then burst into tears and stomped away to his room. I tried to cuddle him in but he was full of spiky, angular resistance. Returning to the kitchen I heard a gust of new sobs; Mojo went in and emerged to inform me that he had, for some reason, yanked back on his foreskin so hard that he had really hurt himself. He spent the rest of the night with an icepack on his junk slowly regaining his sosiego. The new "Clone Wars" TV special coming this Friday helped with that.
It's hard being six-and-a-half, y'know?
We did have a wonderful time a couple of weeks back at the Timbers Kids Club game;playing soccer and the Peeper got to drill with the players and play munchkin soccer...when he forgets to be serious and spoiled he can really be a terrific kid.
Here's a couple more of the pics:Little girl was her usual happy, chatty, engaging self until bedtime. Informed that it was time to shut down the "Go Diego" computer game she ignored me, confident in her ability to charm the Daddy into abrogating his warning that continued gaming risked losing story time. So she played on, and erupted in the predictable tantrum when informed that she had lost her story time and would, instead, go right to bed.
"I WANT A STORY!!!" shrieked through the little house. From our bedroom where she was jammied, from the living room, where it substituted for the traditional "Nighty-night" with her mother and brother, from her bedroom, where I tried to cuddle her - looking back, gee, it seems like I spent a lot of time trying to clutch recalcitrant children to my breast, doesn't it? - and sing a lullaby...
Finally I laid her down on her Big Girl Bed, still rigid and shrilling.
"It's time for night-night, lovie." I said gently. "I WANT A STORY!!!" came the only reply from the teary little face.
"No, sweetie," I said, brushing her hair off her face, "It's too late for that. And it's time to stop screaming about it or you may lose your story tomorrow night, too."
Huge eyes. The shrieking stopped. In a little voice, Missy restated her demand: "I want a story..." but the hesitance was audible.
"Tomorrow night, dear, and that discussion is over, unless you want to lose even more story times."
Silence.
We kissed goodnight.
That girl is scary smart, and a great tactician. Knows the use of all her weapons, and when to hide the armory and sue for peace.
What the hell am I going to do when she's 17 and I'm 66?
1. 2,000 wild monkeys would raise the moral and intellectual tone of several of the infantry battalions I knew at Ft. Bragg, and, yes, I'm looking at you, 2/325 Infantry. Fucking White Falcons; like the Special Olympics except with more brain damage and fewer medals...
2. It says something about my opinion of the Bush Presidency that I actually didn't see this as a mockery of the man; I laughed because of the ridiculous monkey scheme (when he gets to the part where he dubs it "Operation Primate Speargun" I fell over laughing and still do - it's a perfect summary of the serious silliness of military "code names") and the naive idiocy of the guy who often seemed like a poster child for naive idiocy - "Heckuva job, Brownie", "Is our children learning?", that sort of thing. But the man seems like such an insignificant figure now, that the idea of mocking him as a political statement? Never really "got" that. Weird, neh?
3. But my old comrade Publius DID, and it pissed him off. He had some acid remarks about laughing at the criminal bastard, and he posted a link to Andrew Sullivan's piece over at the Atlantic. So I went and read the thing.
4. And so now I'm thinking, yeah, I knew that ol' Andy was a pretty sad little wad of fuck, a homosexual Republican in an era where homo-hating is as Republican as apple pie, still trying to pretend that his cheerleading for the Mess-o-potamia was anything but the pathetic excitement of a leather queen drooling over a Tom of Finland piece of war porn, but this..? This...I can't really describe the mess that is Sullivan's moral and intellectual train wreck. Somehow Dubya, the smirking chimp of a frat boy who spent eight years lying, posing and evading his way around the Oval Office with Dick Cheney's hand up his ass to make his mouth move...somehow this niddering of a nothing of a shell of a "man" is supposed to come clean, supposed to fall on his sword for the torture, supposed to take one for the team?
What fucking world does Sullivan live in?
And I realized that this, this pathetic tottering gelding of an idea, staggering along with its organs of generation ripped away, leaking blood from the orchidectomy and the lobotomy that had caused it to elide the eight years of war loving, crony capitalist pandering stupidity that the Fool on the Hill had presided over, this was the current state of the "moderate Republicans".
Christ. No wonder their Party is such a mess. It's Limbaugh or THIS..?
Thinking of options for the coming weekend; birthday Sunday, anniversary (seventh - copper and wool for you traditionalists, brass for the chic modern types) Tuesday. The "weekend spa/resort getaway is covered...but what about something personal..?
Hard to shop for the woman who is - and has - everything.
Here's an odd little item from the Daily Mirror by way of Alterdestiny:
Seems that in 1909, the African-American residents of what is today Coos Bay decided that they would rather their children be uneducated than sit beside a dirty little Chinky Chinaman. China boy. Little Chinese boy.
Whatever.
Mind you, the condition of a black Oregonian in 1909 must have been pretty wretched. What earthly loathing could have made the presence of poor little Gao Wai so unacceptable? This was a segregated school, mind you - the white people figured that the darkies and the yellas and the other gomers would be just fine as long as the nice white people didn't have to see them.
The human condition - never truly free of horrors like pestilence, war, famine, sickness and death - never seems to be awful enough to make people forget that there's someone that should hate more than other people hate them.
Sometimes I despair for my species.
Anyway, I think I still have a post in me somewhere in Praise of Women. But it's late, and I have an early morning. So; goodnight.
It occured to me as Mojo and I were driving home from the lovely Will and Meghan's Inauguration Party that I'd kinda-sorta been here before.
Y'see, I remember that day in August, 1974 - I was seventeen - when I heard on the car radio that Dick Nixon had resigned. I think I jammed on the horn of the Ford Pinto station wagon (and THERE was a chick magnet, let me tell you; I don't remember getting laid that year and I'd like to think the Pinto was to blame...) and shouted out the window with excitement. I wasn't a real political kid but my mom and my cousin were; they'd gotten me following the Watergate Hearings and by '74 if there was one thing I knew it was that Tricky Dick was a Grade A rat-bastard prick that hanging was too good for. But resignation would work in a pinch.But here's where the picture was different. There was none of the elation then that I feel from many of my friends today. I checked in on facebook when I got home and read many friends' comments about excitement and gratitude and happiness. And in a sense it is good; the election of a young man, a man who promises hope and change, is a good thing after the past eight years of stupidity, shame, war and wastefulness. I listened to President Obama's inaugural address and thought that it was a good speech. Full of many of the usual bromides of promise and hard work, hope and freedom, yes, but also somewhat realist and clearly thought through.
I don't think that things will change, not that much, and given the wretched economy and the fact that he's going to have to govern with Rush and Michelle and Anne and Newt and the other monarchist and Christopathic traitors meeching and shouting and praying for Obama and America to fail so that they can do their mean little "I told you the nigger was too stupid to govern!" dance I wouldn't have the Presidency as a gift.
But back in '74 we had Jerry Ford. Not the Jerry Ford we have now, overlaid with the moronic bumblings of Chevy Chase, but the pallid, competent timeserver from Michigan, an Organization Man, and one that we hoped, at best, would try and "do something" about the mess Nixon had left behind. Of course, what he did was pardon the sonofabitch, and so we've had to put up with the wretched refuse of Nixon's teeming execuive shores, the Cheneys and Rumsfelds and the like. Gaaah.
But as Nixon-pardoning, mediocre, and lame as Jerry Ford was, he was just lame and mediocre. His little country-club-Republican-lawn-jockey-kiss-the-wealthy's-ass-nightlight flckered feebly beside the neutron star blackness of Nixon's pure monarchical evil. So that when that power-sucking dark star imploded the light admitted, the remaining shadow cast by Ford was a little less dark than the black hole of Nixonism we had loured in before.
So perhaps that's the real best that we can say that about today; the darkness that was Bushism is officially gone. Our work now is to illuminate the shadowy corners that remain and relight the light of democracy and government of the People, by the People, and for the People.
"I must say, I'm a little envious," Bush said. "If I were slightly younger and not employed here, I think it would be a fantastic experience to be on the front lines of helping this young democracy succeed."
"It must be exciting for you ... in some ways romantic, in some ways, you know, confronting danger. You're really making history, and thanks," Bush said.
Fantastic?
Romantic???
I've always understood that part of Commander-in-Chief Codpiece's enthusiasm for war and killing had to do with the his lack of the most distant experience of it. But this...this...adolescent fantasyland he's describing, where the hard, grinding, thankless and brutal work of hunting some of the world's most vicious tribesmen for a chimera of "democracy" and "development" is transformed through some wierd conservative magic into romance and adventure? This, more than anything I've heard him say, exposes him as a hypocritical Blimp of the most revolting sort, a Vietnam draft dodger who now talks of "service" and Sacrifice" from his heavily guarded office, where he eagerly speeds glum heroes up the line to death.
If this is what he believes - and it does - we as citizens have no business trusting him being senior private in a two-man guard post at the far edge of the ass-end of an abandoned ASP, much less the CINC of the most powerful military in the world. If military life is his idea of romance and adventure I'm sure we should look further into why he missed out on all the fun back in the Sixties and Seventies...hmmm?
"He won't be employed in the White House for much longer. He is 62, too old, alas, to join the military. But a spot could probably be found for him on an A.I.D. mission, a Provisional Reconstruction Team, or, perhaps through his vice president, some contractor's expedition. He put our soldiers over there, and, as we all know, there aren't enough of them. If he pines for a taste, let him have one."
It's worth celebrating that exactly a year from today we will have a new Chief Executive. Unfortunately, it's also worth mourning that we still have another 365 days of this dildo.But, no, I mispeak. A dildo is a harmless instrument made of wood, plastic or metal capable, in the right hands, of providing innocent pleasure. This miserable bastard may well be the most malicious, ignorant and troublesome occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue since Buchanan or possibly Franklin Pierce, who provides pleasure to no one but the wretched C.H.U.D.s that populate the proto-hominid (a.k.a "Cheney") wing of the Republican Party.
I have lived through some pretty pathetic excuses for "leadership" in the past seven years. I can ever remember Bush the Daddy's weaselly single term, Reagan's amnesiac tenure in the Oval Office, Carter attacked by a rabbit...Christ, we've had some pathetic excuses for Presidents lately, eh? Reminds me of the old joke about the difference between the U.S. Army and the Boy Scouts?
Boy Scouts have adult leadership.
But the lamest thing I've seen emerge, blinking, from the Office of the POTUS in a long time was this idiotic parade through the Middle East. I was skeptical at the time of the Annapolis Conference that the Bush Administration would actually be able to accept a "win" if it couldn't dictate the exact terms. Pat Lang spells this out better here. And, sure enough, the combination of Dubya's typical short-bus-level inattention to detail and Dark Lord Cheney's utter subserviance to whatever crackpot expansionist Likud policy is being supported in Tel Aviv managed to ensure that whatever happened in Annapolis - as the saying goes about Las Vegas - stayed in Annapolis.
For all the recent hipwriggling little victory dances the Iraq war lovers have been doing in the wake of the dampened fighting actuated by the "surge", the utter lack of results from Dopey McFlightsuit's recent peregrination through the Middle East surely points out the difference between our capacities there today and where we were fifty years ago.In 1956, Dwight Eisenhower called off a Middle East war. That's right. Flat out called out his French and British chumlies and told them to put their little soldiers back in the box. And Israel? Back to the Negev, Moshe, and be thankful we don't cut off your supply of Sherman main gun rounds... Now?
Now we couldn't get four Arab soldiers to follow us to a brothel. Bush begged for a little more cheap gas; the Saudi oil minister told him, in effect, I got your cheap gas right here, jackass. The Deciderer's speech in Dubai, greeted with yawns of enthusiasm by his Arab hosts, was more of the usual balloon juice about "freedom" and "democracy" spoken from a podium in a land where women still can't drive and the "government" is whatever the Emir is whack about that morning. As well as more of his usual craven cozying up to Pharoah Mubarak I and his other aristocratic pals in Saudi and Jordan. I mean, we have to deal with these guys, I get it. But does W have to act like he's been pantingly tongue-kissing them out behind the VIP foyer? Ewwww...
Let's not forget the Bicycle Chief's commitment to the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, so vividly shown by the twenty minutes he spent in the Occupied Territories shaking hands with the Palestinian officialdom with the other hand over his wallet...
The thermonuclear - excuse me, nucular - level of political moronity this man has presided over during the past seven years would seem implausible if written as a novel or seen in a film. And we still have another year of this B-picture to sit through, unless the American political class unexpectedly grows the integrity to impeach the skeevy SOB and rescue the reputation of our republic.
What's sickening to me is that we, the People, now apparently lack either the capability or the willingness, or both, to BE sickened. That's fucking wrong.
This country was founded by people - let's face it, by men - who were so sickened by the arrogance, despotism and contempt of their sovereign that they we willing to risk their "lives, fortunes and sacred honor" to be rid of the royal pest. Have we - are we - so much less than they that today that we will suffer this wretched little man, this smirking, sneering, privileged patrician twerp, to undo in two piddling terms of office what the Founders fought and died to establish, and the hundreds of thousands who fought here died to preserve?
Do these words have no more import then the scribblings of a hoodlum on a bathroom wall:
Jefferson famously said: "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is it’s natural manure." Our present leaders consider that bullshit will serve.
Why aren't we furious about that? Update 5pm 9/20/07: Glenn Greenwald says it again, and better here.
I really didn't want to do a political post today: just ducked in quickly for lunch and reading my blogs jumped into this discussion over on Intel Dump.
Worth reading for the analysis of what a lying, skeevy POS our current "Chief of State" is, but what really made me rage at the innocent screen was the thought that more of my Army brothers and sisters will die or be maimed because this slimy patrician scumbag needs to keep his "legacy" intact. If there is a Hell, I can only hope that he will be reserved the hottest lava pool, there to be tortured by sadistic demons who laugh at his pitifully inadequate "legacy". It got me thinking of the last truly pointless, seemingly endless war that dragged on despite the horror and loathing of those on all sides. Hence the below:
I suppose that the past week has been a short lesson in how our so-called "government of law" has finally become a "government of men". To quote Andrew Sullivan:
"I have no reason to doubt that Libby is a very nice man, for a perjurer and a smear artist for the powerful. But the law must always count for more than mere friendship. Libby broke the law and undermined the judicial system; and Bush's commutation of the sentence is a clear declaration that the rule of law ends at the administration's edge. Thousands of other perjured felons could get a commutation, but they're not friends with George W. Bush and Marty Peretz. And so they have no chance. The bottom line for Americans is this: George Bush's friends do not go to jail. Your friends do."
If you read the Federalist Papers and the writings of the Founders you will hear quite a bit about the dangers of "faction". Faction was what the Enlightenment politicos called what would we call a "political party" today. I was talking about this with my father on Independance Day and he reminded me that the huge loophole that the men who established this republic left in the Constitution was the one that didn't anticipate a large group of people who would choose to put their own selfish interests and the interests of their group above the general good of the People. -- Lying to get us into war, lackeying to their corporate masters, subverting the laws and ignoring them with "signing statements", corrupting and perverting the Office of the Vice Presidency...Mr. Bush's commutation is almost not news, but rather shows, as clearly as anything that preceded it, the contempt that this group of people has for the People and the Constitution they wrote. -- Benjamin Franklin is famously to have said that he and the other Founders had given the American People "a republic...if you can keep it." -- To the credit of our forebearers, they kept it, more-or-less, for 200-some years. What's our excuse? -- Update 7/5/07 9am: Here's Ezra Klein at the American Prospect coming to the same conclusion. His money graph? Here:
"All of which means he is completely free. Save for impeachment, he is utterly liberated from the natural democratic checks on executive behavior. There is nothing that congressional Democrats or the electorate can take from him that he has not already taken from himself. And, perversely, that gives him extraordinary freedom of movement. Not on all issues -- he will never fix Medicare or solve the immigration crisis. But on Iraq, he is virtually untouchable. And in the arrogation of power to the executive -- a longtime Bush and Cheney obsession, which ranges from secret wiretapping without FISA approval to the commutation of Libby's sentence -- there is nothing standing before their consolidation of authority."
