Short Stories, Long Odds

Remember last Thursday when I said Colin Powell made some remarks concerning Iraqi Aid money getting reshuffled to security? Well, the DoD is actually owning up to the other main reason for fiscal rebalance: the first was increased security in a war we seem to be losing, and the other is oil.

One interesting thing you may notice in these articles is that they all mention job creation programs. I don’t have the numbers in front of me, but I would love to know how many jobs Bush has created in Iraq.

Yes, security is important, and without security there won’t be any power or water or sewage. But what you haven’t heard alongside this story is an important impetus for these new financial considerations is the insurgents are starting to get smarter and now they’ve started bombing oil pipelines in earnest. I’m sure I don’t have to connect the dots for you.

None of this is a secret – oil is vital to establishing the new Iraqi economy and, through some strange accounting where we get profits from Iraq’s oil and at the same time forgive $4,000,000,000 of Iraq’s debt to us, the oil is vital to our continuing operations there. Which, I don’t mind complaining about, NO ONE HAS AN EXIT STRATEGY FOR.

Oops! Shit! Sorry!

We keep killing civilians, including Turkish civilians, in the Northern Iraq city of Talafar, which is pretty close to Turkey. The Turkish government says that if we don’t significantly change or cease operations there, they will totally stop supporting us.

Now, its true we had to buy their assistance anyways, but if we lose it now, it’ll be bad. We use one of their airbases, they maintain supply lines for us. Losing their support will cause our forces to suffer even more operational difficulty.

There’s no punchline to this.

On Monday, it will no longer be illegal to buy AK-47’s on the open firearms market in the United States. This is because the assault weapons ban expires after ten years in existence.

Before you call me a gun control pansy, please allow me to say that I firmly believe in the citizen’s right to keep and bear arms. With that out of the way, let me also state that the assault weapons ban didn’t do enough in the first place. Gun manufacturers changed the names or small specs to avoid selling the specific weapons named in the ban, and many weapon manufacturers utilized a loophole to grandfather many types of assault weapons around the ban as well. Obviously a better bill should have been written.

The fact that the bill got written at all was a good sign – these weapons are not meant for recreational use. They are meant specifically for killing people, for tactical ammunition advantage, and for warfare. A hunter worth his salt wouldn’t think of chasing down deer with a Tec-9.

The ban is expiring tomorrow because Congress did not move to renew it and Bush did not urge Congress to renew it either. Kerry could have made an election year statement by pushing for not only a renewal of the ban but a reworking of the bill to be more comprehensive and effective. He did not, of course, because being labeled a “gun control nut” is the last thing he needs. No one ever expected Bush to go after it.

So, even though the bill was somewhat inefficient, your elected leaders could have gone to some lengths to better protect you, the people. They did not. Bush missed an opportunity here, because one group that buys lots of AK-47’s and Uzi’s are terrorists.

Yes! Terrorists! Why couldn’t Bush, who works so hard to stop the terrorists on every front, remove the United States as an economic throughway for assault weapons? Why wouldn’t he take us out of the trade loop? Why wouldn’t he go on the offensive and impose trade sanctions against weapon manufacturers who continue to make assault weapons? Shouldn’t we engage in the same policy against gun manufacturers that make guns that terrorists use to kill people? I know they probably don’t buy the assault weapons right from the gun companies, but who cares? There’s no good reason for Ruger to make more mini-14’s with drum clips.

And don’t tell me you should have right to own an assault weapon. You have no reason to. You have about as much need for an AK-47 as you do for a bazooka. The second someone shows me an effective hunting technique using a bazooka against gamefowl, I’ll buy you an AK-47.

What took you so long, John Kerry?

Someone should have been pointing out the GOP’s manufactured collaborative relationship between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein a long time ago.

The rhetoric for putting the same face on bin Laden and Saddam Hussein is so highly charged, Rumsfeld got them confused twice in a speech yesterday. See, people like to claim that talking in circles and brazenly implying that bin Laden and Hussein are the same or that Iraq was funding and harboring al-Qaeda doesn’t work and isn’t subliminal advertising. Apparently it works well enough for those that know better to get caught up in it too.

Again, I’m not saying that either side was or is full of nice young men. Al-Qaeda and Saddam and his Republican Guard are murderous fuckwads all. I’m just saying that when the talking points re: WHY WE WENT TO WAR shifted from WMD’s to Iraq having weekend retreats for al-Qaeda, it was full of lies right down to the ground. Now the GOP does everything it possibly can to make you believe that the War In Iraq is part of the War On Terror, or perhaps even the War On Radical Militant Islamists, but it isn’t. The War In Iraq had nothing to do with the War On Terror to begin with. It was just a War In Iraq, against Saddam. That’s it.

If in Iraq we are now battling terrorists from al-Qaeda (which we are) or from Iran (which seems highly probable if you believe first-hand accounts) its because they’ve been given an opportunity to kill Americans by virtue of Americans being in Iraq. You have no one but Bush to blame for that. Anyone who acts surprised that tactical advantage belongs to and is being taken advantage of by insurgents and the general enemies of democracy and freedom is either a retard or willfully ignorant. I’m not saying this to be petty, I’m saying it because it is true – if the enemy had no tactical advantage, our soldiers would be home and safe by now.

So yeah, I’m finally saying it – this situation is a massive clusterfuck, and each and every death can be laid at the feet of the Bush White House. I feel like I’ve been able to restrain myself from such statements thus far, but today of all days I think its time the gloves came off and the truth be told. I’ve moved beyond giving a shit about a botched election or any other weird non-issues. I’ve become increasingly angry in the past three months over the unabashed usage of people that died horribly in my country for political gain. I wanted to initially say something like “Don’t these people have any shame?” but that seems too light. Now all I can think of to say is that monsters wear masks and look human but aren’t. They can’t be. There can’t actually be a heart that beats underneath all of that shameless propulsion using the dead as fuel.

Dick Cheney earlier this week said in a prepared and practiced statement that “if we make the wrong choice, then the danger is that we’ll get hit again.” After he let that ride for a few days, he came back and said that he didn’t say that if Kerry gets elected we’ll get attacked again, he said that no matter who gets elected will “have to anticipate more attacks”. Do you see what he’s doing? I don’t want to have to explain it to you. If I do you’re already lost to reason and judgement.

I didn’t plan on doing this when I sat down here. I was just going to give another short update on all the bullshit but then I opened a news site and I remembered what today is, and I got really pissed off. This whole fucking thing has gone sideways in the extreme and I have no idea what to do about it. The challenge of overcoming vast perceptual machinations and a political malaise which seemingly spans every living generation seems impossible. All I can do is ask you to look around and testify.