Steve Gilliard’s terrific jeremiad here about the nature of the Keyboard Kommandos got me thinking: What will history judge to have been the very worst of all the lies George Bush has told to the American People?
Because Bush desperately wanted to be a War President, and war is about loss.
The loss of things large and small. At the end of the day, it’s about killing and crippling your enemy while he does the same to you. About bleeding him of what sustains him and what he loves while he murderously reciprocates, and whoever falls or dies first, wins.
It’s about funerals, and mortar attacks at funerals. And orphans and widows and grieving mothers. Missing limbs and missing friends.
I am not anywhere near fool enough to pretend that war is ever going to go away, or that unilateral disarmament under the pretense that the world is a safe place would ever led to anything but unilateral defeat. War is part of who we are, and keeping it at bay was why the dirty business of politics was invented in the first place. (Which is why, in the end, Politics Matters, and trying to shoo it away as something too base and icky to touch with your bare hand has never worked and never will.)
Hell yes I want a strong military, but undergirded by a sane, pragmatic, intelligent and humane foreign policy. And domestic policy. And trade policy. And energy policy. Because unless you're going to war againt The Bowery Boys, or Granada, it's never something you “wage”; it's something you unleash on the world. And while grownups understand that sometimes – as with WWII -- war is unavoidable and necessary, other times – as with Iraq – it is not.
Iraq was entirely optional, and there’s a special place in Hell for men that go to war by choice, or for ideology, or oil, or Oedipus, or for the fucking sport of it, or because their Neocon Horoscope said it would be a good day to go knock off a dictator that we no longer have any use for and install another drone government.
And below the fire reserved for those that make a war that they didn’t have to, there’s an even lower, darker spot for those that unleash war incompetently. Who spend American lives and treasure recklessly, like a royal wiping his ass with ermine while his subjects starve, because he’s been schooled that that’s his God given right as a Kennebunkport manor-born punk.
But even now, Wormwood is hard at work finding a general contractor – possibly Halliburton – who will undertake the job of excavating a brand-new bedrock sub-basement below the others maleboles for men who have the fucking nerve to unleash war both recklessly and by choice, and who repeatedly looked the public in the eye and lied to get the ball rolling.
Grownup adults see Dubya for what he is; a lazy, detached, emotional deadbeat. A rich, dim, cruel child who’d kick a neighbor’s dog to death and then make Daddy’s bank foreclose on the neighbor’s house should he dare to complain about George Junior being a wretched little shit. The abyss that divides us from the Freeper GOP is that we look at this reckless, compassionless failed state of being as something appalling in any human, and uniquely dangerous and tragic in a President, while the residents of LGFylvania view it as inspirational.
As a kind of anti-Buddist state of Perfect Reptilian deEnlightenment.
Their own, debased Anavrin, towards which they mediate every day, sitting in the basement, repeating their Pinhead Mantra: “Iiiiiimgonnakillsomefaggyass. Iiiiiimgonnakillsomefaggyass.”
What we sometimes forget is that since before the days of Reagan, the hard core in the GOP – especially Rapture Conservatives – have never dreamed of Peace, but have forever masturbated to the fantasy of making War with impunity. Which is an entirely different thing. Their gated-community/bunker Security Fantasy of creating that perfect Christian city on a hill, protected against the barbarian hordes by God’s Own Reservoir-Tipped Condom Of Joy (“Like thousands of tiny fingers urging you to cash that Social Security check and send in your Love Offering right now!”)
Of being able to rain hellfire on the enemies of Christ anywhere on the face of the Earth without putting their own puffy asses at risk.
It’s the subtext of their rabid droolings every time disaster visits us.
Every hurricane is the Almighty’s Wrath for not making being gay miserable enough. Whole towns better fuggedaboud askin’ their Godfather God for a fuckin’ thing ever again now that they let Evolutionists put their grabby, Scientific hands all over their innocent children and forever sully the flower of their fucktard loins. And, of course, 9/11 happened because feminists and gays and the ACLU pissed Yahweh so completely off that he lifted his Big Daddy Kilt of Protection and let the planes through.
It is an integrated and fully-consistent continuum of filthy magical thinking that reaches its purest form in the cesspit-rat-insane personage of "Soldiers are dying in Iraq because of Fags" Fred Phelps, who in the end really does very little except take the standard Freeper/Rapture rhetoric that powers the diseased heart of the GOP and cranks it up to 11.
These people don’t fear or dread or even respect war or warriors: they lovewar, they pray for war…they just don’t think they should have to pay for it. Squatting in their basements in shitting-their-underoos-terror of smart women and every brown person who ever lived, they jerk off to a clammy vision of going to war like Dirty Harry goes for coffee. Walk in, get hassled by some smelly hippy, and unload the hand-cannon they sleep with into every longhair and darkie in the joint.
Followed by the applause of a grateful crowd, and then maybe into the alley for a quick hatefuck of that blond who had x-ray eyes when it came to seeing him in High School, but is now somehow there, and so grateful at being saved from being taught Evolution that she’s practically humping the barrel of his still warm magnum.
A ouchless, pushbutton war that we can fund with sofa change. A war of “candy and flowers”. A cake-walk war where Freeper Joe gets to roll-by-proxy into Baghdad and be feted and fellated as a liberator.
A CNN glory war where shopping and tax cuts and jello-shots can all continue unperturbed behind the great Wahabi Christian Shield. Our own “Masque of the Red Death” plague city where we will be kept safe and warm and stupid regardless of how many people beyond the wall are suffering and dying to keep us in comfort.
This was the war that Dubya very carefully and deliberately sold to America to get us into Iraq. Which is why, even though Bush’s War is destroying our military, there is no talk of a draft by the Right’s loudest cheerleaders. Why, even though the prices tag for this disaster may well top out in the trillion-plus-dollar range, there isn’t the slightest whisper anywhere of rolling back even by a single percent the Bush tax-cuts for the richest human beings in history. Which is why the tone of the hardcore GOP is getting as shrill and desperate and out-and-out deranged as a DT alky who's sold his blood and spent every dime in his kid’s piggy bank and is now down to his last six ounces of Night Train.
Because Bush didn’t just lie about nukes and terrorists. About training camps and imminence. Fleets of mobile death-labs. Anthrax-spraying crop-dusters possibly just minutes away from our fair shores.
Didn’t just practically scream that we gotta go to war Right Now! Can’t wait another minute or think another thought because terrorists are practically chalking “Death To America” on the nuclear warhead that Saddam is even now selling them. GO NOW! NOWNOWNOWNOW!
Like dangling Lucy Liu’s panties in front of me and telling me that I can cure cancer, but only if I’m willing to drop everything and have a week of wild, fiery, illegal-in-seven-states sex with her immediately, Dubya pried open their pointy heads and used their worst nightmares to sell Iraq to the mouthbreathers as their most depraved Wet Dream Come True. And who would now rather the world perish in fire than wake up and deal with the consequences of using Iraq as their inflatable fuck toy.
Which is why, in the end, I believe this will go down in history as his greatest, most infamous and most unforgivable lie: That he lied to this country about the nature of war itself.
Because the problem with hawking wingnut stroke-mag delusions as a predicate for war is that, in wet dreams, the bill for the satin sheets, or marching bands, or Rosario Dawson’s stilettos, or the army of pliant fembots never comes due.
But in the real, bloody world where adults live and die and dream, it damn well does.
This from Riverbend.
15 comments:
Manifest destiny for the 21st century. Like you said, they dream of war.
Oh Drifty:
I live for your wise words...well, maybe it's just profound appreciation for your deep thought..
Or maybe it's both.
Hell yeah! Such gorgeous prose. I am not at all worthy.
Interesting you mention Fred Phelps; have you seen his bio? The guy is a veritable poster child for criminal insanity. I posit that many others of this mindset are the same thing, simply on a less obscenely grand scale.
I haven't said it lately, and I certainly haven't said it often enough, but you're a treasure, Drifty.
Drifty,
Brilliant. I had just finshed that post of Gilliard's, and now this. Hell of a day.
About waging war, from our dear Constitution, Article I, Section VIII.
The Congress shall have Power...
To define and punish Piracies and Felonies committed on the high Seas, and Offences against the Law of Nations;
...
To make Rules for the Government and Regulation of the land and naval Forces;
Law of hunh??? Ah, yes. There were things considered settled even before Congress met for the first time. Some of them were summed up in a set of tomes by one Emmerich de Vattel, The Law of Nations.
The third volume deals with war. A few bits,
CHAP. III.
OF THE JUST CAUSES OF WAR. (141)
§ 24. War never to be undertaken without very cogent reasons.
WHOEVER entertains a true idea of war, — whoever considers its terrible effects, its destructive and unhappy consequences, will readily agree that it should never be undertaken without the most cogent reasons. Humanity revolts against a sovereign, who, without necessity or without very powerful reasons, lavished the blood of his most faithful subjects, and exposes his people to the calamities of war, when he has it in his power to maintain them in the enjoyment of an honourable and salutary peace. And if to this imprudence, this want of love for his people, he moreover adds injustice towards those he attacks, — of how great a crime, or rather, of what a frightful scries of crimes, does he not become guilty! Responsible for all the misfortunes which ho draws down on his own subjects, he is moreover loaded with the guilt of all those which he inflicts on an innocent nation. The slaughter of men, the pillage of cities, the devastation of provinces, — such is the black catalogue of his enormities.
--------------------------------
§ 33. War undertaken merely for advantage.
Whoever, without justificatory reasons, undertakes a war merely from motives of advantage, acts without any right, and his war is unjust. And he, who, having in reality just grounds for taking up arms, is nevertheless solely actuated by interested views in resorting to hostilities, cannot indeed be charged with injustice, but he betrays a vicious disposition: his conduct is reprehensible, and sullied by the badness of his motives. War is so dreadful a scourge, that nothing less than manifest justice, joined to a kind of necessity, can authorize it, render it commendable, or at least exempt it from reproach,
--------------------------------
CHAP. XI.
OF THE SOVEREIGN WHO WAGES AN UNJUST WAR.
§ 183. An unjust war gives no right whatever.
HE who is engaged in war derives all his right from the justice of his cause. The unjust adversary who attacks or threatens him, — who withholds what belongs to him, — in a word, who does him an injury, — lays him under the necessity of defending himself, or of doing himself justice, by force of arms; he authorizes him in all the acts of hostility necessary for obtaining complete satisfaction. Whoever therefore takes up arms without a lawful cause, can absolutely have no right whatever: every act of hostility that he commits is an act of injustice.
§ 184. Great guilt of the sovereign who undertakes it.
He is chargeable with all the evils, all the horrors of the war: all the effusion of blood, the desolation of families, the rapine, the acts of violence, the ravages, the conflagrations, are his works and his crimes. He is guilty of a crime against the enemy, whom he attacks, oppresses, and massacres without cause: he is guilty of a crime against his people, whom he forces into acts of injustice, and exposes to danger, without reason or necessity, — against those of his subjects who are ruined or distressed by the war, — who lose their lives, their property, or their health, in consequence of it: finally, he is guilty of a crime against mankind in general, whose peace he disturbs, and to whom he sets a pernicious example.
Hmmm. Seems to me that Dear Leader is going through a Chapter XI Moral Bankruptcy.
I'm sure Abu Gonzalez considers all this "quaint" though.
It's a hell of a read. King Bumblefuck pretty much seems to offend it anywhere possible. Thousands of years of human development thrown to the winds of ego. Amazing that anybody still supports this sort of bullshit.
Yeah, I know, I'd find it hard to look past Lucy's panties myself, but once the door to the darkened boudior closes behind you, and you hear Roseanne's voice, it's time to get while the gettin's good.
drifty speaks for many of us who cannot be that outspoken in our homes, workplaces, or blogs. This has to be said, apparently over and over again, until more of the walking dead awaken.
The Riverbend piece almost made me cry. There are countless victims of this so-called war whose feet Bush was not fit to kiss. He is the evil smell in the elevator. He is the gray-scummed bubble that popped up out of the sewer of neo-con planning. He is... Well, you get the idea. Now we are starting to discover who all was in the elevator, what exactly is lying (lying) down in the sewer, etc.
I clicked the link to the Wikipedia page on Phelps. Shee-yit. This man belongs in a facility for the criminally insane.
Americans are only now encountering a phenomenon that Europeans have experienced for hundreds of years: The Idiot-Prince-become-King they can never get rid of. He mires his people in foolish wars, puts the economy at the service of his courtiers, refuses to recognize any limits on his vanities, and considers his delirious word law. Here's hoping there's enough of the franchise left for honest people to rid themselves of him and his leech-like cohorts.
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