Thursday, January 10, 2008

Holy Joe and Saint John Wish Us All



A “Happy Surgeversary”. (Holy Joe shown above explaining to a Dirty Skeptical Hippy exactly How To Surge, and why it is working just awesomely!)  [Update: Original video was zapped by YouTube]

From today’s Wall Street Journal, America’s Antique Mavewick and his War Bride
The Surge Worked
By JOHN MCCAIN and JOE LIEBERMAN
January 10, 2008; Page A15

It was exactly one year ago tonight, in a televised address to the nation, that President George W. Bush announced his fateful decision to change course in Iraq, and to send five additional U.S. combat brigades there as part of a new counterinsurgency strategy and under the command of a new general, David Petraeus.

At the time of its announcement, the so-called surge was met with deep skepticism by many Americans -- and understandably so.

After years of mismanagement of the war, many people had grave doubts about whether success in Iraq was possible. In Congress, opposition to the surge from antiwar members was swift and severe. They insisted that Iraq was already "lost," and that there was nothing left to do but accept our defeat and retreat.

In fact, they could not have been more wrong. And had we heeded their calls for retreat, Iraq today would be a country in chaos: a failed state in the heart of the Middle East, overrun by al Qaeda and Iran.

Instead, conditions in that country have been utterly transformed from those of a year ago, as a consequence of the surge.
Except “Surges” don't have anniversaries, do they?

But occupations and escalations do.

The endless, agonizing, corrupting, bankrupting occupation of an oil reserve nation we should not be in in the first place is all these clowns have to offer you. Because you can look the entire paean to tactical, military success up one side and down the other and find the phrase “political progress” only once.

And we learn that it “has been slow”.

Really? How about virtually non-existent?

And how about this “political progress” that merits only one, brief aside is the Entire God Damned Point of executing a Surge in the first place?

How about your fucking Surge is breaking the piggy bank to buy us a new suit of Sunday Go To Meetin’ clothes for a trip to a church that will never be built.

It is pissing away the rent money on a new car to drive us to a town that does not exist.

It is trading our last, few health-care/infrastructure/new school pfennigs for tickets to a play that will never be written, at a theater that will never be created, with actors that will never show up.

Because stripped of the purdy words, Conservative analysis of their President’s Iraqi Debacle is simply this:
  1. Surge make violence go down.
  2. Down good.
  3. Yay!
That’s it.

They never finish a fucking thought; they get two turns around the mental block, shut down completely and shout down anyone who dares to ask “OK, now what?” Zero cognitive function beyond that point because the abyss that awaits them around the next corner is so utterly terrifying.

That the Surge was our very last handful of Magic Beans; trading more American lives and blood to water a Miraculous Beanstalk that Iraq would climb up, up, up to the sky, past the clouds and into to a pluralistic, tolerant, stable, peaceful American client-state where the streets are paved with Golden Eggs, and lined with grateful supplicants.

Which was never going to happen, and which nothing about the elemental political dynamics in and around Iraq in the last year has changed.

Shit, if you charged enough American troops and armor into the Fourth Circle of Hell, I am absolutely certain they could drive Plutus and his minions underground and force the damned to stop crushing each other with moneybags.

No doubt about it.

And I am equally certain that once those troops left, Plutus would pop right back up again and the tormenting of the damned would resume.

Why?

Because it’s Hell, and a 20,000 or 200,000 or a million American boots are never going alter its fundamental character unless they stay there for Eternity.

Which certainly seems to be the Republican plan.

And so today brings us around to the first anniversary of the Surge; an anniversary that tradition dictates be remembered with Paper.

So to Holy Joe and Saint John I give the gift of Paper:
Paper …for the paper tiger we have become everywhere else in the world thanks to the Dubya Administration locking up virtually all of our military assets in their Iraq quagmire.

Paper …for the material which is of greater value than the words we print on it thanks to our Dear Leader’ decision to spend seven years pissing away out international reputation.

Paper …as in the ocean of rapidly collapsing fiat money our entire economy now floats atop.

Paper …as is bad paper. As in the checks we have kited all over the world to some very, very bad people to keep paying for our filthy habits and obscene wars.

Paper….as in a certain Downing Street Memo; that still-tragically-relevant smoking-gun evidence of impeachable High Crimes, quietly hammered down the Memory Hole by our lackey press. No hearings. No testimony. An act of outright treason caught on paper, now rendered as quaint and forgotten as phrenology.

Because impeachment is only on the table when Democrats are in the White House.

Paper …as in funky Olde Timey Paper. Like our Bill of Rights. Our Constitution. Writs of habeas corpus. International treaties. All now debased, devalued and used daily and publicly as ass paper by an Administration that sincerely believes the rule of law should be drugged, gagged, tossed in the basement and replaced by the Rule By Neocon Whimsy.

And finally Paper as is “on paper”. Which is the only place on Earth the Fictional Iraqi Government actually exists.

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

Victory or forever, whichever comes first.

Anonymous said...

OK. PhysioProf blog is up and running.

http://physioprof.wordpress.com/

I'm still fucking around with stuff, so bear with me for a while.

Drifty, you are in my blogroll. Can I be in yours? (Did I do that right? Is this "blogwhoring"?)

Anonymous said...

No irony that you mention Pluto: Lord of the Underworld, "The Wealthy One," the deity that governs power, hidden resources, nuclear power, behind-the-scenes-intrigue- in short, all the hallmarks of BushCo, and deeper than that, all the hallmarks of US foreign policy since the Monroe Doctrine.

Pluto did not take well to his recent demotion to "minor planet" status, and his forthcoming transition into Capricorn indicates the structural transmutaion of organizations of all types: political, religious, social, corporate, etc.

Fun times ahead.

lostnacfgop said...

one can only hope that the by-line of this wonderfully apocryphal op-ed piece is a portent of things to come on the ol' campaign trail. As in:
"Surging McCain Campain Picks Joe Lieberman as running mate - A Maverick Becomes a Uniter."

Or some other delicious roadapple delight.

Myrtle June said...

Paper. I whipped up some handmade paper out of whats left of our Constitution and had all nicely re-printed for the McLie Brothers. I don't think they'll notice though. fuckers.

Isn't the second aniversary daggers? Jes wonderin'*blush*

Phisioprof - That's great news! :-)

Anonymous said...

metaphor

as

FREIGHT TRAIN

damn...

not WORDS not BOMBS

but words

AS

bombs..

Unknown said...

Paper... as in the toilet paper they turned our constitution into...

Drifty, do you ever read Joe Bageant?

"the last last thing conservative forces such as finance, military, both political parties and all of government want is meaningful change. However, it is quite allowable to talk about meaningless change, which is the purpose of the Democratic Party. Such talk absorbs the energies and diverts attention of genuinely concerned and progressive Americans. Meanwhile, all the Republicans have to do is openly resist change. Voila! The manufactured illusion of democratic choice!

Yes, we have much to be bitter about. But let's not entirely blame ourselves, because that's exactly what big group think wants us to do. Say we were naive, confess to a failure that was in truth, being defeated by coordinated repressive forces. The results we now witness. We are all state held consciousness prisoners who cannot see the very bars that hold us. Indeed, we even happily purchase those bars at Wal-Mart and the gas pump.

But along the sidelines of this spectacle, this black circus of the super state, some of us weep."

In art and labor,

Joe

dguzman said...

Brilliant post. And I need to check out this Joe Bageant guy.