When Johnny comes marching home again

Here I was this morning, sitting at my desk drinking some instant Maxwell House coffee from the machine down the hall, reading the news of the land and elsewhere, all geared up to bitch and moan about Donald Rumsfeld winning an award named after Dwight D. Eisenhower, which I found really offensive, as Rumsfeld and his Gang of Fuckwads have shat upon pretty much everything for which the great president stood. Several hours later, as I prepared to write my blog for the day, I came across something that pissed me off even more -- and that's saying an awful lot.

Apparently, John Kerry has found the time to start bitching about the '04 election. In 2006.

See, John-John, here's the thing about all that... You lost! Not only did you lose, you lost a virtually unlosable election! How in the blue hell did that happen? And stop telling us, "Oh, poor me, there were Republicans there dampening the vote." Mr. Senator, with all due respect, fuck you. Dampening the vote is not a Republican strategy; it's a political strategy! And besides that, if there were as much of a problem with Ken Blackwell's "improprieties," why didn't you do something about it before you conceded the goddamned election? Mr. Kerry, you lost, you fucking moron. Now you're second only to Joe Lieberman in terms of who's making the party look worse.

Here's the other thing: If any -- and I mean any -- Democrat is even about supporting another presidential run from John Kerry, I've got two words for you: Duck Hunt. Yes, the fabled game of mythic proportions is also what I say lost him the election. Did Kerry bother to appeal to the tens of millions of Americans who just said, "Fuck it" on Election Day '04, deciding instead to stay in to watch that week's episode of Gilmore Girls? No, he tried appealing to pro-gun conservatives. John Boy, you're not a fucking hunter! Hell, you're barely a manly man! But you could've done something wonderful in the last election: you could have, instead of waiting for President Bush to set up the argument of soft on terror versus hardcore, framed it as a question of intelligence. That's right! Think how it could've been different...

Bush: ...what my opponent doesn't want you to think about is that he's soft on terror. (heh heh) He thinks that we oughtta've let Saddam stay in power. And I jes--I jes don't think that'd be the way to win the War on Terror. We were attacked on 9/11--

Bill Moyers: Mr. President, your time is up. Mr. Senator?

Kerry: Mr. President, I don't know what planet you're on, but on this planet, according to every single person besides yourself with any sort of intimate knowledge on the subject, Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with 9/11. Which leads me to think one of two things: either the President hasn't read any of the reports issued, or he hasn't paid attention. I sincerely hope that it's simply a matter of sloth, because if the President isn't paying attention to what's being said by the experts, we're in serious trouble. It would definitely be smarter of him to--

Bill Moyers: Time's up, Mr. Kerry. Mr. Bush, your response?

Bush: I--uh--I do read the things they give to me. But it's more important for me to listen to my generals on the ground (heh heh heh). And when they tell me that things are going fine, I have to take their word for it.

Kerry: Mr. President, the only general saying things are going swimmingly in Iraq is General Franks, and you have misdirected or relieved of duty any general saying things are not going well. Where is your credibility? Me, I fought in a war that shouldn't have been fought, and when the Commanders-in-Chief stopped listening to the generals who said things were going badly, everything went to hell, which is exactly where we'll be headed in Iraq if we don't do something to change the course.

Bush: You don't change horses mid-stream, John.

Kerry: You do when the horse is drowning, Mr. President.

See??? Kerry could've been great. But no, he pandered, apparently learning nothing from the Gore debacle of 2000. Karl Rove didn't engineer any of these victories; he simply got the Democrats to shoot themselves in the feet. So when do the Democrats grow some balls?

I really don't know. It'd be ballsy to nominate somebody interesting for president, somebody with something to say. I'm thinking of Russ Feingold, Barbara Boxer, hell even Joe Biden -- somebody that's not going to just pander to every stupid neocon who bitches about Jesus or guns or race cars. I don't know who that is, but I can almost guarantee that s/he won't be getting the Democrats' nomination. They don't learn anything, and they just continue to make things worse for themselves.

We're not gonna take it anymore

I read a rather interesting commentary in the Chicago Tribune over the weekend. The article, entitled "Where's the Outrage?," questions why the general populus of the United States hasn't challenged the rape-murder of 14-year-old Abeer Qassim al-Janabi, an Iraqi schoolgirl (so to speak), by US soldiers. It wasn't just any rape-murder, either; the poor little thing was repeatedly raped, then set on fire. Her family was also killed.

The article believes that the reason this isn't My Lai II is because the anti-war Left doesn't want to be branded anti-soldier. But that's ridiculous. Criticizing the soldiers who did this horrific act (which, by the way, is a hell of a lot worse than what happened to preteen pop-tart JonBenet Ramsey) is not only warrented; it's necessary.

This is not an aberration, though. The lack of criticism has less to do with fear of being painted anti-soldier, I believe, and more to do with the general ignorance of our population. The girl was Iraqi; therefore, despite even the President's protestations to the contrary, she will be somehow linked with terrorism. And yes, I know what I'm saying: that the American people still equate Iraq with terrorism.

Oh sure, upon further examination, every sane person in the U.S. would say that these crazy soldiers should be locked up and have their nuts put on a chopping block in front of a capacity crowd at RFK Stadium -- make a Pay-Per-View event out of it, even. But the fact remains that this little girl, like many little girls of color, did not get the attention of JonBenet Ramsey or Elizabeth Smart.

Now I don't blame the general population, per se. The media is public enemy #1 in this. It's much easier for them to get the upper-middle crust of white folks they so desire to watch their crappy 24-hour programming if they feature kids who look like their kids. Is it an eerie coincidence that the two biggest kidnapping stories of the last decade, Ramsey and Smart, were both blonde-haired, blue-eyed, white adolescent females? I don't think so.

But there's another problem, too, and one that runs far deeper than the Great Racial Divide that's turning Arabs into millennial niggers. Take a look at what the Army's done over the last five years: since recruiting for this worthless war took a greater nose-dive than JFK Junior's plane, the Army has relaxed its standards more than once to ensure that they meet, or come close to meeting, their annual quotas. You know what that means? It means we can send the problem children, the mentally unstable, the nutters, into a world where they'll be performing acts for which they'd be jailed at home.

Think about it, people, seriously. It's not anti-troop to say that the standards of the United States Armed Forces are pathetically low because so many troops have been used and abused by this morally- and financially-bankrupt power-grabbing machine of a presidency. I'm not insulting the soldiers when I say that a good number of the women and especially men in uniform should not be in Iraq for reasons unrelated to the war's incompetence.

Look at it this way: You're hiring a nanny to watch over your kids. Do you take A) the applicant who was kicked out of high school for setting cars on fire, B) the applicant who went to jail for stabbing fifteen people with a pen-knife during a barroom brawl, C) the applicant who has records dating back to the third grade regarding disciplinary problems, D) the applicant who has a history of bipolar disorder, or E) the applicant who is gay?

I'm serious about this, folks, and I think we all deserve an honest answer from the government. In the US Armed Forces, all except E) are allowed. In what universe does that make sense? The men and women in uniform are literally baby-sitting the Iraqi people, and the ones who aren't suitable to watch over these poor-as-shit sons-of-bitches are the homosexuals? Jesus Christ. I mean, Jesus Fucking Christ!

Meanwhile, can anyone explain to me -- at all -- why we keep focusing on the fucking Middle East when countries in Africa are the ones who are en route to kicking our asses? Look, the War on Terrorism has proven two things: one, you can't defeat terrorism, because it's an ideal; two, you can't defeat the United States, because we'll just bounce back and bomb the fuck out of you (that's right, my faithful liberal readers, I still believe that if somebody comes after us, we go after, and beat the holy snot out of, them. It's only honorable). But terrorism isn't the way of the future. No, the Iraqi insurgency isn't going away anytime soon, and yes, al-Qaeda still wants to fuck our country up, but terrorism never ever succeeds in what it sets out to do. Trust me; look at the Irish. For almost a century, the IRA was bombing the living bejeezus out of the unionists. But it was only when they decided to disarm that things started going back in the general direction of what I truly believe will one day be "a nation once again."

So if terrorism never works, eventually, people are going to follow the example India set with the Brits so many moons ago. But even as terrorism falls apart, something much more frightening, much more brutal, is going on in Africa. Remember the Communist dictators we saw in Central and South Asia between 1939 and the fall of the Soviet Union? They're coming back. It's scary, 'cause even a democratic election like the one currently happening in Congo is under assault thanks to two candidates, each of whom controls part of the army. And while the Congolese are busy killing the shit out of each other, Sudan has jailed a Chicago Tribune reporter -- you know, Sudan, possibly the biggest sponsor of terrorism in the world today. Oh, and let's not forget about the Moroccans, who have it so bad that they're running across the water-logged border between their country and Spain faster than you can say "illegal Mexican." And it's not like they're coming to a place like the U.S., where jobs, though impossibly hard to find at times, are in relative abundance; there's fuckin' no work in Spain right now!

And why would all of this be happening? Oh, right -- dictators! We're not talking about Hugo Chavez, do-it-for-the-80%-of-my-people-who-live-in-poverty-and-fuck-the-rich-assholes-who-used-to-run-this-country dictators as defined by the Scott McClellan School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. No, we're talking about real, true-blue dictators who seem hell-bent on emulating Pol Pot (you know, wherein the government gives you two cows, then takes them both away and shoots you). Totalitarian states are on the rise in Africa, and if we don't do something about them soon, we're going to be in a hell of a lot more trouble than anything we've seen in Iraq.

We're gettin' near it

It has been quite a long time since I last wrote a good entry detailing my twisted psyche and genius political attitudes. Much has changed. I am now a college graduate, employed, and thinking about going to law school in order to one day work in politics. I am happier than I have been in a very, very long time, thanks in no small part to the myriad wonderments going on in my personal life.

But enough about the personal B.S. What the hell is going on in the world? I know that personally, I'm kind of freaked out. Every time I think that the Bush Administration can't possibly do anything more wrongly than it has thus far, they up the ante just that much more. How the man's approval rating is higher than 6% (representing, of course, the 6% of Americans who are completely insane) I'll never understand.

Yet there's an even bigger issue at hand. Y'know, I don't like Sen. Joe Lieberman all that much. I think he's wrong more often than he's right, no matter how often he agrees with his Democratic partners in the Senate (remember, the Democrats are wrong almost as often as the Republicans). But every Republican, from supposed mavericks like Sen. John McCain to raging imbeciles like Gov. Mitt Romney, has pretty much bent over backwards for President Bush. Recently, the President refused to endorse the Republican running against Sen. Lieberman and upstart Ned Lamont, probably because Sen. Lieberman agrees with about 65% of what the President says about the war, which is more than a lot of Republicans. Through this whole time, many pundits, most of whom skew neoconservative, have criticized the Democrats for being divisive, praising Sen. Lieberman for his supposedly unwavering (it's not) support of the President's War on Terror.

One question: Can anyone explain to me when exactly conservatism, as Republicans supposedly practice, became explicitly defined by the support of pre-emptive wars and failing strategies?

Even the neoconservatism of Ronald Reagan has gown down the toilet. Sure, President Reagan was horrendous in the opinion of anyone but neoconservatives, but at the very least, he was a decisive leader who accomplished exactly what he set out to do (that he nearly destroyed America in the process is, at least for this argument, irrellevant). George W. Bush, however, has abandoned any domestic agenda -- his ridiculous veto a couple months ago notwithstanding -- in favor of scare tactics. And even those are beginning to whither.

So when I tell you all that I am not at all surprised at how much conservatives have turned on the Bush-led Republican Party, I don't exactly expect that everyone will freak out. However, when I tell you that I could potentially vote for a Republican in 2008 (depending, of course, on the Democrats' nominee), I expect many of you will go into little fits of twitching, muttering, and foaming at the mouth.

You see, there is one Republican out there who is a true Republican. He's a fiscal conservative, believes in a strong military and strong overseas presence, and supports many moral-based initiatives. However, he is by no means a neoconservative, and he's swelled into the role previously held, then surrepititiously vacated, by Sen. McCain. He's Sen. Chuck Hagel, and he might just be the second-smartest man in the Senate (only Russ Feingold and Barbara Boxer have him beat by my count).

Yet Hagel's potential bid for the Presidency is looking less and less likely. He's now come out against the Bush Administration's position of simply "staying the course." You know what? That's the smartest thing he could say, and any Republican too stupid or too engrossed in partisan politics to see that Bush is barely a man, much less a Republican one, is deluding himself or herself. The War in Iraq was over when President Bush landed on that aircraft carrier with a banner reading "Mission Accomplished." Now, we're mired in la-la land, between Disarmament Alley and Civil War Lane. It's a position we weren't supposed to be in, for which our boys and girls fighting overseas weren't trained. And Chuck Hagel is the only Republican Senator with the balls to say, "Oh, wait, maybe just staying the course isn't exactly the best idea we've ever come up with."

Now, I don't expect that I'll be voting for a candidate like Chuck Hagel any time soon. That's moreso because the Republican Party is made up of a bunch of corporate fools and religious nutjobs so blinded by some semblance of false patriotism that they can't see that opposing the continuing War in Iraq and "Global Struggle Against Extremism" really isn't just a liberal value any longer; thus, the GOP will likely never go to Chuck Hagel as their next nominee. But put him up against Sen. Hillary Clinton, let them duke it out on TV and in front of the world in a true (or even not-so-true) debate, and see who comes out on top. My guess is that Hillary wouldn't have a snowball's chance in the seventeenth layer of hell.

But then, what do I know? I'm the one who's been saying since November 3, 2004, that there is no way on gods' green earth that the Democrats are going to make the fatal mistake of nominating Hillary Clinton as President. I haven't been proven wrong yet, but I'm not liking my chances anymore.