Loan me some troops? I'll pay you back Tuesday.

Saaay Bejing, if these guys aren’t real busy, maybe we could, y’know…

(FYI, this is an aromatic mélange of previous comments and new content, because Reality just gets realer and realer every friggin day. And test posted yesterday…where it blow by right rail off the page. Maybe it’s fixed now, maybe not. Either way…new shooter comin’ out.)

So we’re still in Iraq. For two more years. Minimum. And when Big Don Rumsfeld clambered down out of his plane yesterday and started merrily slapping the government in Iraq around (Bring me a towel and tell me about the Oranges, Talabani!), after they unpacked his bags they found that he hadn't packed his"Exit Strategy" (doesn't travel well apparently), but a lovely "Victory Strategy" instead.

To go along with the Victory Gin and Victory Cigarettes I suppose. A matched set.

But we’re still in Iraq. For two more years. Minimum. And we’re way, waaaay short of troops. Everyone knows this, but apparently the National Strategy is to loudly whistle “Let The Eagle Soar”, hide in the bedroom under the coats and hope that somehow it all works out.

(Don’t laugh: it was just these kinds of bold, aggressive flights from reality that worked so magically well for Bush in school, in the Texas Air National Guard, at Arbusto, in the Governor’s Mansion, etc. so why the Hell not give ‘er a go here, eh?)

OK, bad seed that I was, I ignored all that good, conform-or-die advice from Health Class about Evolution -- “Look Out, Its Darwin! Duck…And Cover!” -- and took a near-lethal hit off the Scientific Method bong before the pod under my bed could do its work. So before I had a chance to learn that gravity and orbital mechanics and the Big Bang are all secular bearjizz, and the Earth actually rides majestically along on the back of a very large Turtle, I had a big, loud bullshit detector stuck in my head.

Also it utterly messed with my cipherin’ skills. Never could add up all the begats in the Old Testament properly, or do the conversion between antediluvian AARP members (with multi-century life spans) and we poor post-flood bastards. Still, when it comes to my take-away’s and gazintas, I can usually get it right after a few tries.

So I sat down a few months ago and tried to figure out where we could come up with a Division – or at least a couple of brigades -- of fresh troops, ‘cause where we’re at now is starting to have a faint Volksturm, Berlin, 1945 stink to it. Where oh where…?

Well it turns out, in 1994, the military drummed 617 soldiers out of the United States military because they were gay. Fully qualified troops – at LEAST as qualified as old men and diabetics – kicked out of an army that they joined voluntarily. Eagerly! As patriotic as any other soldier. As willing to be shipped off to war to defend his/her country as any other soldier.

But thanks in no small measure to the shrieking homophobia of the GOP, the Fundie power structure, Talk Radio and the other members of the Axis Of Asshats we have that strict No Dykes/No Nancies policy here in ‘Murica. Don’t want no fags eyein’ farmboy fannies in the shower, no sirree. And it would TOTALLY piss off Jesus knowing our Marching Christian Soldiers had some, um, mincers in the ranks.

Which was cool because, its not like we were ever going to use the army or anything, right? Certainly not against anyone we couldn’t whip in a video-game-friendly war over a three-day-weekend.

So in ’94 it was 617, which was about 100 more troops than our allies from Denmark have committed to Operation Endless Fuckup. In ’95 we kicked 772 ‘mos to the curb…which is more that the total troop commitment from Japan.

In ‘96 it was 870. In ’97 it jumped to 1,007 and if you add that to the total for ’98 (1163) more that exceeds the total number of coalition casualties as of the end of 2004.

In ’99 it was 1046. Taken together, ’00 and ’01 come to 2,514, which is 14 more than the peak commitment made by Poland (And you thought liberals “Forgot Poland!” :-) )

In ’02 it was 906. In ’03 it was 787.

All in all, as of the end of 2003, we had kicked 9,682 of "those people" to the curb, and a cost of God alone knows how many millions of dollars, apparently because the number one concern of soldiers under fire in a killzone like Iraq is whether of not the person dragging your shattered body out of the line of fire is looking at you “that way”. Or something.

9,682, by the way, is roughly the same or slightly higher than the number of troops that the UK had deployed in Iraq in December of 2004. Toss in whatever the total was in 2004 and you start getting very close to a full Division.

Now while our troops have performed well (for the most part) throughout Operation Epic Clusterfuck, the lies and willfully blind, batshit-crazy dry-drunk-global-empire D.T.s that sent them there – and have trapped them there -- are unforgivable. That a big, fat swath of this country are such intellectually underperforming headcheese that they actually cheer these inept Administration fucktards on, that’s unconscionable too.

But to have thrown away troops because of a bigoted, illiterate, comic-book religion…well, mere invective fails me.

All I can muster is: Way to go, asshats! Have a jolly fucking slalom into the retrograde, Dark Ages abyss you seem to crave so desperately, but would you kindly get your stinking paws the Hell off my country before you go?