Politicians are little more than the human equivalent of tapeworms. They stick in your vitals, feed off your sustenance and generally have a rather slimy look and feel to them.
Sadly, the current gang of thieves to occupy the best-defended piece of public housing in the country are more than parasites sucking away at the lifeblood of the average mouth breather. They are the ones responsible for sending 281 men and women (the last two deaths occurred while this column was being written) to their deaths in Iraq to fight a war based on lies.
It was a war brought on by a cabal of Neo-Conservatives in the Department of Defense, “frothing at the mouth” Christian Zionists numbskulls who viewed this war as another step to bringing about the return of Christ and a good deal of the braying donkeys who populate the airwaves on talk radio and cable news (not to mention the armchair theorists at several leading magazines, who don’t deserve to be named here).
They all wanted the war for their own reasons, be it oil, Israel or to claim America’s role as the juggernaut in world affairs. Naturally though, even as debased and placid as the average Americans are, they knew they couldn’t sell the war based on economic, theoretical or theological grounds. So, they simply concocted a propaganda coup that I’m sure would elicit a smile from hell by Joseph Goebbels or Ilya Ehrenburg, those two titans of Nazi and Soviet propaganda.
Stirring up the average idiot out there has never been too hard. Sometimes the cry is “witch,” other times it has been everything from “German” to “red.”
In order to scare the better elements of this country, a declining order whose loss has us further falling into the muck, one must find a way to get to their deepest fears.
The current regime exploited this with what was perhaps the most audacious series of lies since old Woodrow Wilson brought us into the Great War; lies that turned a battered third world country into being seen as a danger on par with the Soviet Union and reality television.
Let it be said that I, to my shame, believed some of these lies. Though I opposed the war, I bought into the whole weapons of mass destruction foolishness. Like a good Christian, however, I have repented of my error and am now firmly in the camp of atheism on that issue. I was never agnostic, however, on the issues of Al Qaeda, links tenuous at best, which have now been revealed to be such utter rot (which is, of course, believed by about half the American people) that it would not be surprising to me that those who believe in it also have stock certificates for a bridge in Brooklyn.
Now we’re in our fifth month of a war that has moved from conventional to counterinsurgency. We’re no longer fighting the conscripts who were so easily slaughtered, or even the elite Republican Guard, who were outgunned by our superior numbers and soldiers. No, we now face a combination of loyalists, foreign volunteers and ordinary Iraqis who have nothing to lose and everything to gain by fighting.
I mean, what’s a guy going to do after he’s been a torturer for 20 odd years (although he could always find work as an airport security screener, as he would have the brutality and the stupidity to match our most bloodsucking new federal department), especially if he rightly fears that a dead father’s son will be coming for him in the night. The foreign volunteers (thanks to the actions of the great, wise man, his elective majesty Lieutenant, George W. Bush MBA, our soldiers are now facing the sons of the Mujahadeen in Iraq) are highly motivated men who believe they are doing the will of Allah by liberating their fellow Moslems from, what they would term, the infidel occupation. Lastly, we face the real revolt of certain Iraqi citizens. With unemployment hovering around 60 percent at last check, and literally hundreds of thousands of young men with military experience, we have a real powder keg with the gunpowder trail already lighted.
Meanwhile, Americans are still dying, and for what? So we liberated people from a tyrant. Big deal. The amount of sheer imbecility about the flourishing future of Iraqi Democracy is enough to choke a believing man, and bring a cynic to tears of laughter. The government, which has taken your friends and family for this war against a nation that never harmed us, is now going to be taking yet more treasure, perhaps to go as a chaser to the blood. I am no great fan of socialism at all, but I wonder, if we’re going to have confiscatory taxes, why not at least try to benefit the citizens of this country with it, rather than throwing it into the oil fire that is Iraq.
As flippant as I’ve been in this column (and expect it to continue because, let’s face it, if I couldn’t laugh at the sheer stupidity of the modern world, I’d be spending my entire mighty Reveille salary at the bar every night of the week) I would like to focus on the one truly sorrowful thing in this whole issue: our dead. As we live on a campus dominated by a memorial for those men of this state who died fighting in the Great War (led by a man who had messianic delusions even greater than Bush) we should truly stop to reflect on those who have died in this war and will, because of the utter inhumanity of the policy wonks and the mighty beltway solons, continue to die in this war.
Go to www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2003/iraq/forces/casualties/ and look at the faces of those who are gone (about the fifth man I looked at was a 20- year-old Private first class from Lake Charles).
Don’t buy the nonsense that they died for our freedom or anything of that nature because they didn’t.
They died, to paraphrase Kipling’s Common Form, (written in memory of his son who was killed in the Great War) “Because our politicians lied.”