A tip of the hat to Arthur Gilroy, whose recent words of inspiration so eloquently expressed a hope that our collective thoughts in the blogosphere may have significant meaning.
I read the whole Iraq Study Group Report. I preface my remarks with this qualifier because Tony Snow made such a fuss about it yesterday, as David Gregory from MSNBC was drilling him.
GREGORY: [The report says] stay the course is no longer viable. The current approach is not working. The situation is grave and deteriorating. . . . Can this report be seen as anything other than a rejection of this President’s handling of the war?
FOX NEWS SPOKESPERSON FOR THE FREE WORLD (hereafter SNOWJOB): Absolutely. And I think you need to read the report.
GREGORY: I have.
SNOWJOB: You’ve read the whole report?
GREGORY: No. I’ve gone through a lot of the recommendations.
SNOWJOB: Well, I’ve read the whole report.
Well la-dee-fucking-da. Snowjob has read the whole report. And Bush has been on this game plan for months. Next fucking question.
Watch the clip if you’d like. It’s fucking instructive on how the neo-con reality is in no way related to anything in the real world. Our government is a Fox News re-run, looped in a cycle that is approximately seventy-two hours in duration, as far as I can tell, interrupted by NFL games and 30-minute epidsodes of talentless singing, dancing and/or suitcase selection (whatever the fuck that show is about — and when did fucking Howie Mandel go all Telly Savalas).
The reality is, a kid I fucking knew pretty well, is getting shipped off to fucking Ramadi in January where he will face random threats to his life from bullets and high-explosives, and he may die at a young age, thus ending his personal evolutionary viability for. . . .
For what exactly? Not a goddamned thing. There is nothing left. But platitudes and hollow reports about prospects for victory and defeat, with really lame or non-existent definitions for success or failure. A sound and fucking fury signifying absolutely nothing. Except dead kids. Theirs and ours.
And make no mistake. The forecast calls for dead kids. It doesn’t rain men anymore. That was so ’80s. It is going to be a continuing drizzle of our dead children, and a blizzard of dead Iraqi men, women and children. But you can’t do much about the weather.
And like predicting weather, you might as well buy a magic fucking 8-ball. It would give you a better idea about how many more plots to open up in Arlington. My god those white crosses are going to look good to some kids on a field trip a hundred years from now. All symmetrical and pure. Probably inspire a few of them into the folly of their own day, where they can end their own lives prematurely for no fucking reason.
Which is why I am personally nominating the Magic Fucking 8-Ball (“Fucking” is its full middle name, for those of you who may think I’m dropping the f-bomb for effect, and I’ve been told that you must use full middle names in making such nominations) for the post of Special Military Advisor to the Batshit Loopy President of the United States of America.
8-Ball will not lead us astray. And at some point, his little octogonal heart, floating in a bluish fluid (a liquid that will undoubdetly remind the former-booze-hound commander-in-chimp of a curacao-flavored cocktail from days gone by), will randomly tell the boy king to immediately end this war.
I mean, I could provide some simple common sense wisdom to the Smirking Emperor. Something that would tell any non-medicated human to end this disaster of his own making. A short bit of advice I learned from my father.
Son, when you find that you’ve dug yourself into a hole, the first thing you’ve got to do is stop digging.
Fuck. Such homespun bullshit might actually resonate with those few nuerons (the hearty brain cells that allow Bush to perform tasks which require only limited mental functioning, like clearing brush, choking on pretzels, and running down foriegn security officers with his mountain bike) that miraculously survived his self-medicating days as a fratboy and cheerleader at Yale.
And I’d be a hell of an advisor, too. Because way back in 2002, with no security clearance and only Internet access available at any public library, I was able to understand that 1) Sadaam had no WMD, and that 2) Iraq was not responsible for the al Qaeda attacks on 9/11. Better, using the same tools, and within just a month of the invasion, I was able to understand that absent a brutal dictator like Sadaam, the three major factions in Iraq were either going to fight one helluva war amongst themselves until some factions were wiped out, or until the country was partitioned. I was also able to say with some confidence that 2-3 U.S. soldiers would die every day, until we just left, and let Iraq settle back to whatever end is going to come. I’m sorry to say I was right about that one. But the number is at the low end of the range I predicted, and if you asked me today, I’d tell you I think the rate is going to rise some over the next four years of war.
Despite my uncanny ability to forsee this fucking calamity (an ability that, when I’ve had the audacity to demonstrate it in public by holding up really radical signs, reading things like “Peace Now,” has gotten me heckled, threatened, flipped-off, and flimed by my government), I will not seek the nomination for Special Military Advisor to the Batshit Loopy President of the United States of America. And though my predictive abilities have been far in excess those displayed by any member of the Iraq Study Group panel, I will not accept the position of Special Military Advisor to the Batshit Loopy President of the United States of America, even if I am drafted to fill it.
But with the Flying Spaghetti Monster as my witness, I hope that someone will second the nomination of Magic F. 8-Ball for this post. Because he’ll get us out of this fucking war eventually. And that is more than I can say for the proposal of the Iraq Study Group.
In the nine-months during which the ISG has pondered the problem, 2-3 soldiers, on average, keep on dying every day. And 50-100 Iraqis a day, on average. And it will stop only when we leave, and Iraq finds its bloody equilibrium. The equilibrium that we destroyed. For no fucking reason. The ISG plan will end us up in 2008. And we’ll be just like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day. The alarm will go off. We’ll wake up and read more reports about bombs and deaths. We’ll get the same phone calls, about shipping out for a war. There will still be empty platitudes about victory and success. And handwringing about how we can’t just leave those poor Iraqis to fend for themselves. Oh the instability we will have created in the world if we pull out now. Just try a little harder. A little longer. And wake up tomorrow, and do it all over again.
FUCKING NEWSFLASH! BREAKING, MR. DRUDGE. This is over. We’ve wrought destruction. No amount of super glue is going to put fucking Humpty-Dumpty back together again. This is Bush’s failure. Own it. And end it. Or re-live it again and again and again.
I’ve read the full report, Snowjob. And I’m not impressed.
Also available in orange.