Around the Horn

[Guest guest]

Around the Horn

A little of this, a little of that

 

© Bryan Zepp Jamieson

5/29/06

http://www.mytown.ca/zepp

 

 

I’m going to kind of skip around today, so if you

are subject to

vertigo, or terrorists or Al Gore really scare

you, you might want to

read this slowly, and maybe just a little bit at

a time. Go easy on

yourself.

 

If there is one thing the “shots in the capitol

building†incident makes

clear, it’s how easy it is to panic the US into

immobility. Some guy is

working with an air gun in an elevator shaft, and

a dim bulb Republican

congressman with sharp ears sandwiching a dull

mind – who believes the

“terror threat†is real – panics and the seat of

government is locked

down for six hours.

 

Keeping America paralyzed with terror would be

the simplest thing in the

world. You don’t even have to break the law. Just

make a loud sudden

noise near any Republican, and he’ll take care of

the rest. If he

doesn’t call out the SS squads, he’ll at least

introduce a bill making

it illegal and a terrorist activity to make

sudden loud noises. The

whole point of terrorism is to make governments

overreact and do stupid

things, after all.

 

If you want to stop America dead in its tracks,

you don’t need to hijack

planes and fly them into famous buildings. Just

leave a shoebox with

wires trailing from it in a trash can at a

sporting event, or stuff

potatoes in the exhaust pipes of squad cars.

Terror! Omigosh! Terror!

It’s them terr’ists!

 

White powder in the mail works well. Although the

police seem to have

decided that white powder in the mail is right

wing terror, and thus ok.

If you’re going to blow up any buildings, don’t

make them federal

buildings in red states. Republicans will just

chuckle fondly and

observe that boys will be boys.

 

That takes us to the massacre at Haditha, in

Iraq. Marines are accused

of killing two dozen people in their homes, many

of them children. The

initial report was that they were reacting to a

roadside bombing a

half-hour earlier, but since then, it turns out

that they may have been

simply seeking vengeance for one of their fellows

killed several days

earlier.

 

A number of columnists, including Maureen Dowd,

have pointed out that

the Marines had reached a breaking point, and had

been ill-equipped and

poorly supported and under immense pressure. Dowd

points out, quite

correctly, that police work is entirely different

from attacking

opposing armies, and that these guys were never

trained for this kind of

work.

 

That doesn’t excuse what they did. I don’t care

how much pressure you

are under: when you take a three year old girl,

tie her hands behind her

back, make her kneel, and then shoot her through

the back of the head as

a lesson to her bound parents before shooting

them too, you know you are

doing something wrong.

 

That the crime happened is beyond dispute. What

the courts have to

determine is who did what to whom. And, poor job

placement

notwithstanding, I hope those found guilty all

get life in prison for

what they did.

 

It’s also quite true that had they not been lied

to and forced into

those circumstances, it’s very unlikely that any

of them would have

committed murder.

 

Therefore, I call upon the justice system to

indict George W. Bush, Dick

Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, et alia

as accessories to

murder, and try them, as well.

 

Now, it’s one of the oddities of the American

political landscape that

you can bet that many of the people who are

horrified at the idea of

putting murderers on trial for murder if they are

wearing US military

uniforms are the very same people who want to

criminalize tens of

millions of people just for existing.

 

To that end, they speak of “illegal aliens,â€

including all the people

who simply snuck across the border seeking work.

Sensenbrenner and all

the other semi-simians in the GOP House want to

make “being illegal†a

crime. In other words, they are saying that

because it is illegal, it

should be criminal trespass, as well. If it’s

illegal, we should make it

against the law, TOO.

 

Which reminds me: DNA analysis of both human

evolution and the

relationship between HIV and SID, the simian form

of AIDs, shows that

there’s been a lot of cannoodling between humans

and chimps over the

millennia. Can we get DNA samples of Putsch and

the rest of the GOP? I

wanna test something.

 

Except, of course, it isn’t a felony to be an

undocumented worker. It’s

an infraction, like a parking ticket. And of

course, if an alien is in

the US improperly (that’s the correct term,

incidently; see USC 8-12-II

Section 1325, “Improper entry by alienâ€) then the

US has the right to

toss them out.

 

A phrase like “improper aliens†doesn’t stir up

the haters and

xenophobes the way “illegal†aliens does. The GOP

has to appeal to their

base, you know. And those are the basest guys

around.

 

But at the same time, Republicans are aghast at

what that court did to

those nice guys, Ken Lay and Peter Skilling. They

could get twenty years

in prison! It’s not like they shoplifted or

something REALLY criminal.

In fact, if you compared the amount of time they

face for the amounts of

money they “lost,†compared to the 25 years to

life you can get on a

third count of stealing a loaf of bread, it works

out to...

 

About four tenths’ second a loaf. OK, never mind

that.

 

Is it agreed then? We’ll make it illegal to be

Mexican in Los Angeles,

and improper to steal billions or commit mass

murder! Makes perfect

sense to me!

 

Speaking of perfect sense, there’s Al Gore. Now,

both Joe Conason and

Paul Krugman (and now Frank Rich) wrote excellent

pieces this week on

why Gore was right all along, and the people who

ridiculed and smeared

him were wrong. I won’t try to add to their

excellent pieces, but

instead note a specific incident that shows just

how furtive, futile,

nasty and bitchy Gore’s detractors can be.

 

Right wing blogger Matt Drudge, of semen stain

fame, ran a story

accusing Gore and his entourage of driving less

than 500 yards in a

fleet of limos to promote his documentary, “An

Inconvenient Truth.†The

Gore camp hotly denied the story.

 

Drudge pulled the story, snarling that he “had no

reason†to believe the

Gore people were lying, and then promptly put up

a ten year old story

about how much fuel Gore consumed traveling to

the Kyoto conference.

Bitchy, bitchy, bitchy.

 

Then the next day, a story showed up on Drudge’s

page, headlined that it

was PROOF that Gore lied about driving to the

movie theater. Just the

WAY it showed up made me suspicious: it was down

in the lower right hand

corner of his page, in standard 12 point text. It

claimed the story

“proved†Drudge was right about Gore driving the

500 yards to the movie.

 

Mind you, Drudge is in a major snit, and is

seeking exculpation.

Normally something like this would be a 36 point

underlined banner, in red.

 

So I read it, and recognized the story, which

came off the Reuters of

INDIA wire, as being the very same one Drudge had

posted. The “authorâ€

had changed “yards†to “metres†and made a few

other cosmetic changes,

but it was just a repeat of Drudge’s original hit

piece. Drudge had run

a barely-concealed rewrite of HIS OWN STORY as

his “proofâ€.

 

When I checked a few hours later, that story,

too, was gone. Drudge just

fell from the level of the Blairs and the Novaks

to the area occupied by

Newsmax, World Net News and Free Republic.

 

Now, finally, some truth for truthiness’ sakes:

when “An Inconvenient

Truth†comes to my area, I plan to drive to go

see it. I live 18,000

yards (or “metres†if Reuters of India picks this

up) from the movie

theater (theatre), and am not a baseball

(cricket) or football (rugby)

athlete.

 

I just hope Matt Drudge doesn’t find out.

 

 

 

 

--

" Now, by the way, any time you hear the United

States government talking

about wiretap, it requires -- a wiretap requires

a court order. Nothing has

changed, by the way. When we're talking about

chasing down terrorists, we're

talking about getting a court order before we do

so "

-George W. Bush, April 20, 2004

 

Not dead, in jail, or a slave? Thank a liberal!

Pay your taxes so the rich don't have to.

 

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