Boots and Saddles
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An interesting item, the lede from Inter Press News Service, written by Dahr Jamail:
“Iraq war veterans now stationed at a base here say that morale among US soldiers in the country is so poor, many are simply parking their Humvees and pretending to be on patrol, a practice dubbed ‘search and avoid’ missions.”
Jamail’s full story can be found at antiwar.com, probably the best all-around news site on anything relating to current wars, and we do mean wars as in extreme plural: Nasty, atrocious, little affairs, all brimming with killing and dying, from most-reported Decider George’s little pieces of shitfire-horror in the Middle East, to Myanmar (now on war’s back burner), the Congo, Sri Lanka, Uzbek, among a vigorous red-ant-hill of other conflicts covering the planet. War sucks, despite all the hype.
As wildfires in Southern California create yet another dream-like disaster scenerio — the evacuations considered the quickest, largest, single migration of humans in all of history — Decider George has jumped, or maybe leaped, into the forefront in an attempt to create an immediate anti-Katrina glow. That dog won’t hunt, however: Where’s the Guard and all it’s accompanying equipment?
Disaster upon disaster with no readiness or prep. The US has been put on the back burner while Iraq descends into a horrifying, surreal slice of a Twilight Zone episode coupled with a plot from Boots and Saddles, a 1957 TV series depicting calvary troopers on patrol in 1880s Arizona, Apache country.
War is a human whiplash-offshoot of Cain and Abel, albeit on a grand scale. Nation states fight other nation states just as Cain fought and killed his brother, all over greed, and in the right-now, it’s greed for energy. In nation-state wars, however, many, many times the average citizenry is slaughtered because a leader is inept, or corrupt, or both, as in the case of current US history.
A lot has be written and said about supporting the troops: Yellow ribbon around the old tree trunk. It’s not the young GIs on the ground in Iraq, but the assholes sitting on toilets in Washington, D.C. The only way anyone can truly support the troops is to proclaim in a loud, boistrous voice: BRING THEM HOME NOW!
There’s something to be said about Cool Condi Rice getting up-close-and-personal with an antiwar demonstrator in a crowded congressional chamber: Force the issue.
Never has a nation with seemingly so much sent its young citizens off to war with so little. Does dumbshit Donald Rumsfeld care or even consider frontline troops lacking basic, proper equipment? “…you go with what you’ve got…” as square-jawed Don said, as if he was sending off some hikers into an urban park without good walking shoes.
A lot of the GIs are not trained in the kind of warfare being conducted in Iraq and Afghanistan, the equipment is breaking down, friends, buddies, killed or horribly wounded, or just shot-at-and-nicked, guzzling energy drinks, trying to survive.
And top of all that shit there’s the Total War affect: Kill and destroy anything even suspected, creating on the ground the grim agenda of unrelenting tension in a foreign country. Bombing strikes from US military aircraft has hugely increased this year, forcing soldiers to also go through continous piles of rubble containing women, children, old men, maybe sometimes a known insurgent or two, animals. A practice to ensure a GI’s troubled daily outlook as a witness to the futility of it all.
So such, no surprise then in reports of “search and avoid” patrols: Find a nice spot, kick back, smoke some cigarettes, listen to some music, pretend patrol. Just an example of the military’s breakdown overload in the Iraqi misadventure soley formed in the twisted, arrogant brains of Decider George and his weasel-hole vice president, Dufus Dick Chaney, along with an inbred host of other insolent assholes, but assembled and held in place by the lives of sons and daughters of average US citizens.
And a goodly portion just Guardsmen and Reservists. Even more average US citzenry. In the horror everything can be rational.
‘Lily Pad’ The Counterfactual Empire
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As the worldwide price of oil subtly neared $90 a barrel and two US wars in the Middle East are quickly, horrifically going-to-shit in slow motion, Decider George obtained a good laugh yesterday at a press conference arrogantly avoiding a question on how he was going to rein in Blackwater, his Christian mercenary army.
Although at about the same time yesterday, the US officially rejected a UN report that Blackwater employees and others of their persuasion were in fact performing military duties, instead of just being security guards, which in turn makes them mercenaries.
Self-important irony is a stock-in-trade for Decider George.
A 1989 UN accord outlawed the use of mercenaries. The US and Iraq, among many others, did not sign it. So there’s no guilt there, just a good laugh from the scribes-in-waiting-to-the-king White House press corps.
Also yesterday a Reuters/Zogby poll showed Decider George’s approval rating fell to 24 percent, even worst than last month’s all-time record low for a Zogby survey of 29. Those polled really hate Congress, worse even than a dangerous, mentally-deranged president: An 11 percent approval rating.
Of course, a great deal of the rightful resentment for Congress stems from a sense of betrayal, a heart-felt stab of the Judas kiss by all those power-hungry, toe-the-line Democrats who exploded into office last November by a surge of voters proclaiming “Get Out Of Iraq, Now!”
And near a year later, the US is now ineradicably entrenched in Iraq.
Despite all the failings, despite the scorn, the disbelieve from the US general public (polls don’t really reveal the fearsome gloom and doom attitude of the man-in-the-street), Decider George still considers hisself “relevant.”
According to a story today at washingtonpost.com on Wednesday’s press conference:
“Stuck with the lowest approval ratings of his presidency with just 15 months left in office, Bush presented himself as still in command of the Washington agenda and rejected the suggestion that he has grown “increasingly irrelevant,” as a reporter put it in a question.
“Quite the contrary,” he said. “I’ve never felt more engaged and more capable of helping people recognize . . . that there’s a lot of unfinished business.”
Defending his rejection of a popular children’s health program expansion, Bush said his veto power gives him leverage. “That’s one way to ensure that I am relevant,” he said. “That’s one way to ensure that I am in the process. And I intend to use the veto.”
And, of course, Decider George accepted absolutely no responsibility: It’s them low-down, pond scum Democrats. “I think it is their fault that bills aren’t moving, yeah,” he said. “I’m not part of the legislative branch. All I can do is ask them to move bills. It’s up to the leaders to move the bills. And, you bet, I’m going to put veto threats out.”
Yeah, and I’m Johnny Rocco, too. Yeah.
Still out of touch with reality: “We’re finding common ground on Iraq,” Decider George also quipped at the press conference. “I recognize there are people (in) Congress that say we shouldn’t have been there in the first place. But it sounds to me as if the debate has shifted.”
Shifted? The original location is still there. Words decribing it have changed. And thousands continue to die every day, just as they have since March 2003.
The US is in foreign places to stay. Even Iraq. Case in point: Balad Air Base, located about 60 miles north of Baghdad. A giant, sprawling complex where many of the US personnel never leave the base, where Subway Sandwich shops, a Pizza Hut and a 24-hour Burger King makes the installation just another slice of back home for the 30,000 troops stationed there.
Air Force F-16s, Army helicopters and unmanned drones use the base’s two runways, which can handle even the giant, C-5 cargo planes.
The base is an example of the staying power of US interests in the region, and around the world. The US has built a military empire stretching from Japan and Korea in Asia to Germany in Europe, though, an empire counter to the real facts. US power to instill fear and keep control, an empire’s way of life, from Rome to the UK, to even Darth Vader and the Death Star.
Balad is part and parcel for future US military operations: Giant bases all over the world where trooops, material and firepower can be stored until ready to use. These giant bases would allow the military to ‘lily pad’ from one to another without ever having to set foot on the ground in between.
And of these giant edifices? Not surely to win hearts and minds of the locals. One report allows that seen from the air at night, Balad resembles Las Vegas. While, of course, out in Iraq the locals get maybe eight to 10 hours of electricity a day.
Maybe Decider George thinks of hisself as a giant frog sitting on a giant lily pad waiting for Osama the fly.
‘Greatest minds’ Support The Troops!
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Just when one thinks all the worst aspects of the US military system has been revealed, here comes another.
Even with the well-documented horror about equipment, body armor, and prolonged tours in war zones, the medical ‘don’t-give-a-shit’ care exploding from Walter Reed and just about every other military hospital, the recruitment of anyone who can breathe, the near 4,000 dead, near-30,000 wounded, there comes an additional story that insists Decider George and his warmongering dogs really don’t care.
From CNN this morning:
“The 2600 members of a Minnesota National Guard unit that returned from Iraq in July after serving there longer than any other ground combat unit were shocked to be told that their total time overseas of 729 days was one day short of the number needed to be eligible for expanded educational benefits under the GI Bill.”
Not only do US troops have to fight and die in an illegal, horrific war, but the US government, which screams ‘Support The Troops!’ and maligns anyone as soft on terrorism who objects to being in Iraq (and not slobbering about bombing the nuclear shit out of Iran), in a real, true, physical sense, do not support, nor care about the soldiers. This entire scenario from Afghanistan to Iraq to Iran is a complete, cold-hearted lie.
While Decider George slowly (maybe not so slowly) goes insane and his lackey boys keep picking at the festered wound of Al-Qaeda, the victims least mentioned are US troops.
They enter battle with probably the worst weapon is the world, the Vietnam-era piece of shit, the M-16, which can malfunction at the slighest inconvenience, while the enemy totes around the insurgent-resistent AK-47, so simple, so easy to use, even a child can easily rattle off rounds.
In the GI bill misadventure, one can tell these gonads running the military — the top dog here is the “commander-in-chief” Decider George — are so incompetent and are so riddled with corruption they could not find their ass with both hands.
As CNN continues:
Lieut. Col. Darryl Darden at the Pentagon said: “We know there has been an injustice and we have put together a process … to seek redress for this bureaucratic mixup. … We believe that by January 8 they should be able to receive their benefits.”
When asked again why the soldiers couldn’t receive the money now, when they need it for their college expenses, and why the orders can’t be fixed without each case being reviewed individually, Darden insisted, “You’ve got some of the greatest minds up here working the issue. … The best course of action is for each one of these soldiers to go through this board.”
Darden has to be one sarcastic sonofabitch! ‘Greatest minds’ You have to be shitting on us and claiming it’s freakin’ rain!
These so-called greatest minds don’t care just as Decider George don’t care.
Support the troops by bringing all of them home this afternoon!
Sputnik, Nutnik: ‘Poor Kids, First’
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Fifty years ago today our world was way-way smaller. We here at Compatible Creatures were smaller: Only eight-years-old. Howdy Doody, the puppet. Lee Marvin as a TV detective and those Pall Mall commericals ending with…”outstanding! And they are mild.”
And now fifty years later, our world is even-more smaller. We, however, are way-way grown. In 1957, the US population was just under 172 million, the world as a whole contained only 2.8 billion people. Now there’s 303 million Americans occupying the same space; a total of 6.6 billion populate the same planet.
Telephones in October 1957 were huge, awkward things. Always black requiring big cradles to rest between loud, charring rings. Leave It To Beaver had become our favorite TV show (premiering that fall) as our family acquired its first TV set sometime during that same year.
Decider George had turned 11 that previous July. (Just to keep all this historical bullshit in perspective).
When the Russkies launched that little space load (less than 200 pounds) off the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, the shit really hit the fan. And appears to have never ceased. The US responded by racheting up everything from more science in schools, more nuclear payloads on SAC bombers to a full-fledged space program, and even more Red-Scare silliness with bumper stickers like ‘Better Dead Than Red.’ The freakin’ Russkies can now rain nuclear horror down from space!
In 1960, Kennedy bellowed about reaching the moon within the decade. Nine years later lo, and behold, a man walks the moon.
One facade arising from Sputnik was the extreme-high value placed on education. Decider George, we, and millions of other like-aged Americans were almost-formally instilled with a fever of school, grade school, high school, especially moving on to college: The ages-old Protestant Work Ethic as applied to the classroom, but in this case, however, without all the hard-ass, freakin”-work, and no-freakin’-gripin’ attitude of the ‘Great Depression’ generation, and their predessors.
This so-called ‘Boomer’ population is most-likely the laziest, most-affluence-influenced people on the globe, and in a true ironic twist: the first presidents from this boomer bunch is Wild Bill Clinton and freakin’ Decider George. And they both went to college, Wild Bill with at least some desire to read, and Decider George…well, he had money.
And a very-sure bet was Decider George didn’t wait until 1957 to see his first TV. The little asshole might have had one in his own room!
So the very true act of Decider George this week popping a veto on a health care program for those caught in that potent financial purgatory between ‘poor’ and ‘non-poor’ should have come as no surpise, or produce anger.
Hypocrisy and moral blindness, however, does still cause one to flinch. And get pissed!
The State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP), a state/federal program, helps bankroll health insurance for nearly 7 million people nationwide, most of them children. The program’s aim is to aid those whose paycheck amount is both high and low: Too much for Medicare, too little for private care.
The US Senate passed SCHIP in September and sweet Decider George had told the general public he’d veto the bill if it got to the White House. And damn-well, shit-fire, sure-enough.
One giant step towards socialized medicine, that’s Decider George’s excuse, and would be too expensive.
In a recent poll by the Washington Post and ABC TV, about 72 percent of Americans backed the legislation, which allow almost 4.5 million more children to receive at least minimal medical care. Offsetting the $35 million cost of SCHIP over five years required raising tax on cigarettes from $.62 to a dollar a pack.
Seems like a good piece of legislature.
No, I don’t think so, so says Decider George and his boys. The program would make the not-poor become lazy and want to switch from private insurers to government-financed coverage. And just who does Decider George decide is actually “poor” or are just faking it.
A rally in Lancaster, PA, yesterday: “Poor kids, first,” Decider George told supporters as if he could actually sense the freakin’ difference between ‘not-really-poor’ and ‘really-poor.’ He also said a compromise “that focuses on the poor children” and, we surmise, not those not-poor, should be worked out in Congress.
The biggest load of shit on top of the truth. “…the policies of the government ought to be,” Decider George blubbered, was to “help people find private insurance, not federal coverage. And that’s where the philosophical divide comes in.”
In that hypocite/imbecile landscape: “…help people find private insurance…” actually means to keep tons of hard-earned money boiling into that freakin’ medical provider/insurance industry, a major rip off on its own.
In using the veto, Decider George again displayed his arrogance, shallow intellect and low-social skills.
An asshole act, however, can sometimes link together enemies.
Democratic Sen. Edward “Eddie Haskell” Kennedy practically screamed: “..the most inexplicable veto in the history of the country” and charging “it is incomprehensible, it is intolerable, it is unacceptable.”
On the other side of the pew, Sen. Orrin Hatch, a longtime, hardline Republican: “If we’re truly compassionate, it seems to me we’d want to endorse this program.”
And if not truly compassionate?
Maybe deep, down in his superficial soul, Decider George longs for a return to those much-easier than his later-easy days of yesteryear, in the fall of 1957, and have the ability to scream at them Russkies and their nasty-little Sputnik — ‘Bring it on!’
‘The Leader’ Nose
Filed Under Orwellian, War & Politics | 1 Comment
“President George W. Bush’s paranoid megalomania is so rampant that close friends and supporters worry about the man’s sanity and fear he has lost his tenuous grip on reality.”
— Doug Thompson, www.capitolhillblue.com, June 1, 2007
Even as Decider George’s Gestapo, right wing, gun-nut-buddy Erik Prince testifies Tuesday on Capitol Hill in a Congressional inquiry into private security operations in Iraq, especially Prince’s own trigger-happy brute squad known as Blackwater USA, a dark, dangerous age has arrived: War/decay in never-ending, increasingly-intense cycles.
Prince Erik will no doubt continue the bullshit. This is a watershed period in history, not just for the US, but for the entire planet. And on the cutting edge of this unfolded piece of already-futurama is Decider George, who will soon force the world onto another level when he strikes at Iran.
On NPR this morning, Seymour Hersh, discussing his latest investigative piece in The New Yorker on the changed Iran strategy decided by Decider George. No longer aiming at nuclear shit, now they just want to bomb the hell out of some select ‘military’ tagets. The “justification” for a war with Iran will also be different.
Yesterday on MSNBC’s Countdown, Hersh said Decider George and his vice president, Dufus Dick Chaney, want the conflict with Iran, lusted after it above all else, including above US lives, and even the GOP.
“Cheney and Bush don’t give a rats ass about the future of the Republican Party when it comes to this,” Hersh said.
When “surgical” airstrikes inside Iran start, everyday life for everyone on the globe will also transform downward, spiraling quickly.
And what about that dumb, jackboot John McCain? Last Saturday, the bloated-headed McCain told an online religious news site that the US should be led by a Christian.
“I just have to say in all candor that since this nation was founded primarily on Christian principles, personally, I prefer someone who has a grounding in my faith,” McCain said. “…in all candor…?”
A ‘Christian’ nation led by a ‘Christian’? What have we had the past 220 years? And the ‘Christian’ now occupying the White House is a convolted, almost-surreal like nightmare could true.
During their darkest days, presidents have been known to depart reality — LBJ and his loathsome horror of Vietnam, Dick Nixon and his almost-comic stupidity of Watergate, and now Decider George. Reports surfaced this past summer of Decider George and his declining mind set. Mostly found online blogs and news sites. Stories of him pumping his chest and proclaiming aside to friends during some White House event, “I am the president. I am the president,” who is on such a God-directed course that even his successor cannot stop, or even modify.
Even being an asshole about it. An item earlier this year: During a White House party for all the newly-elected Congress people (most of them Democrats), Decider George asked Sen. Jim Webb how his son, who was then in Iraq, was doing there. Webb said his son would probably like to come home. Decider George’s retort: “I didn’t ask you that. I asked how he was doing?”
Yesterday, the US Senate okayed a $648 billion defense policy bill. The act keeps Decider George and his wars alive and kicking. There’s just no stopping the sonofabitch. Members of Congress should be tarred-and-feathered, run-out-of-town-on-a-fence-post and otherwise treated with absolute disdain.
On the campaign trail last week, the Demos running for Decider George’s job couldn’t make a comment about getting US troops out of Iraq, even with empty-campaign promises, before 2013, after their first term. 2013? Sounds like a Predator, Aliens movie.
And speaking of how a leader who leads knows all the facts: Woody Allen’s really-funny 1973 movie, Sleeper, depicted a US 200 years in the future (now at about 135 years) as a brutal, authoritarian state led by a FDR-like ‘The Leader,’ seen only on late-night TV. Although highly-dated — references abound of early-1970s pop culture, from Howard Cosell to Playboy magazine — the film plays uncanningly well today with Decider George and his ilk.
In the movie, the general public is unaware a fire months earlier had destroyed The Leader except for his nose, a living bit of organism that could be used to clone The Leader back into his full decider self.
Allen and his cohort, Diane Keaton (of who some here at Compatible Creatures from this film first developed an intense, intellectual and physical-longing crush — information which has absolutely nothing to do with the subject at hand, but put forth only as ‘deep background’), through all kinds of adventures, become part of an insurgent-rebellion and stop government scientists from cloning The Leader.
Return to Decider George and 2007: No stopping the process here! This sleeper of a lie has no happy ending.
No control from Congress, no influence of polls and public opinion, no humility, no real sense of good and bad. No care or concept of the horror unleashed.
It’s not what the leader knows, but instead the putrid, abhorrent odor in the nose of those nearby.
Silly, but not really cute or funny at all!