I can barely steady my hands enough to type right now, I am indescribably furious and can only request leniency for the inevitable rhetorical excess to follow. I checked the Daily Kos this morning to see what new petty crime was brewing, only to discover that 58 senators have something worse in the waiting than scandal and corruption. Worse than bribery. Worse than deficits my grandchildren will be lucky to see the back of. Worse than standing by while that odious gang of thugs in the White House (and btw, Rep. Hoyer, you are a cowering toad) takes unto themselves the powers of a monarchy.
This morning, when I saw that Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-WA) was one of the cosponsors of a crapulous pile of hypocritical legislative ooze pathetically wrapped in a nice, chocolate-covered title of the Iran Freedom Support Act, let me just say that I saw red. Red like the blood of men, women and children spilled in Iraq. Red like the fresh wounds of soldiers rushed to Walter Reed. Red like the eyes of family members who will ask themselves every day between this breath and their last why they outlived people they loved as much as their own lives.
The bill includes a section advocating regime change, under the guise of supporting democracy. While it’s true that the US government has had a moderate budget for coup-plotting in Iran from what I’m aware is every year since the revolution, at this time, with this president, under these terms, passage of this bill would be tantamount to authorizing war with Iran. As the linked diarist notes, Condoleezza Rice has already been caught out sniffing for local countries from which to base an attack, which we only know because Bulgaria, Greece and Turkey have already declined to be part of the latest planned Bush regime killing spree.
I don’t think I need to document the propaganda we’ve all heard in painful detail: Preposterous allegations that Iran might be within months of a nuclear weapon, when in reality they’re years away from even being able to refine enough nuclear material for a single bomb. The notion that the ruling clerics would allow the mouthy, populist Ahmedinejad to destroy their relative peace and economic progress by becoming the first Iranian regime to start a war of aggression over a span of time that exceeds living memory. The ridiculous hyperbole suggesting that the former mayor of Tehran is a more wily and ideologically dangerous opponent than the Ayatollah Khomenei, who once personally set off a briefcase bomb in a chamber full of the moderate parliamentarian types who looked set to take over the government after the Americans were pushed out, literally beheading the most effective opposition to clerical rule. The screamers comparing Ahmedinejad to Hitler, a man who murdered millions and laid waste to what were in his day the cream of the world’s military, coming undone largely due to overreach on his part in Russia and Africa and supported by some of the finest military minds ever to have walked the earth. The useless sods incapable of learning the tiniest lesson from Iraq, insisting that really, the Iranian people will greet regime change from the nation that laid waste to two neighboring countries as a liberation.
Have I got a bridge for these credulous mothercopulators. How many people have to die before these overblown, fearmongering, petulant wastrels figure out that you can’t bomb your way to paradise? Isn’t that supposed to be our central ideological complaint about a certain cave-dwelling, virgin-in-the-afterlife-dangling Saudi maniac?
Don’t try to keep feeding me this bull about spreading democracy and freeing the oppressed. You want to free some oppressed people, get off your sanctimonious buttocks and do something about Darfur. Go try to keep some peace in the Central African nations where rebel armies of brainwashed children run around murdering and mutilating without pity. You want democracy brought to a people who are crying out for it, put some pressure on the king of Nepal to stop using insurgency as an excuse for autocracy and help those people put an end to the bombings that have rocked Kathmandu for heedless years. You want to save somebody, fix Afghanistan. That country we already invaded, where the Taliban are swarming back, no foreign aid worker is safe and where we already have a military presence. If you want to flip the bird to a tyrant, free Uzbekistan from Karimov and his torturers.
Or are there just not enough good targets in any of those countries? Because God knows, even in those cases that probably could be resolved at a negotiating table, the Bush administration’s diplomacy skills couldn’t fix a tiff between identical twins over who wound up with a better set of birthmarks.
And maybe, HELLOOOOO, we could spend some time and money fixing this country. Pay the deficit down. Get some more healthcare. Support education. Start acting like you care about the public good, instead of trying to sell the internet and the parks and everything that isn’t nailed down to your favorite contributors. Try to get back to the Clinton era prosperity that saw people being lifted out of poverty every year, instead of casting people down below the bright line in ever greater numbers, as we have now. Use your time to educate the public to be informed citizens with a sense of perspective about the issues facing us instead of playing on the fears of a debt and work-weary public. Restore support to the victims of Katrina, really victims of criminal negligence on the part of the government they relied on to prevent cities from drowning or at the least bring in emergency services on the double afterwards, and attend to the needs of every former resident of the devastated Gulf Coast instead of only the ones who can afford lobbyists. Deliver on the healthcare, pension and disability support promises made to the veterans that have served this country honorably, in spite of the fact that the 100 (at least) most powerful people in their government aren’t fit to lick their boots.
If we as American citizens can’t get these basic government services out of our democracy, it should be prima facie evidence that we have no business trying to export government to other people. People all over the world governed themselves for absolutely ages before patronizing white people came along to tell them how to fix everything for the low, low price of all their natural resource profits. And if you’re still just crying to spend billions of American dollars to bring change overseas, pay off the national debt of a couple countries too poor to bring their citizens water, fund tropical disease research or support the rebuilding of educational and professional infrastructure in countries where AIDS has decimated the population of 18-49 year olds.
We have devastating problems in our world, including a shifting climate that already poses a serious threat to the global food supply. We have, here in the most prosperous country in history, cases of poverty and injustice that bring tears to every eye that sees them. We have loads of countries whose citizens are in such dire straits that they would beg to live in the conditions now present in Iran, short as they may fall of our own ideals and preferences. There are people trying all over this planet to solve these problems seriously and patiently, without resorting to violence, who would love a helping hand.
If the supposedly educated Senators of the United States of America can’t find a better use of their time than laying the groundwork for another war of choice courtesy of the Worst President Ever, then I have a hard time seeing where hope lies. If a Democrat running for office in a very blue state, can’t think of a better solution to this international micturation contest than to join Rick Santorum in supporting a bill that any country on earth would rightly regard as an act of war in and of itself, then there had better be miracles. Because this planet is in direst need of them.
And Senator Cantwell, pull my finger.