Dick's Ego Kills Eighteen*
* Preliminary casualty count.
The AP story, as printed in the GUARDIAN (UK):Cheney OK After Explosion in Afghanistan
Go ahead and read it. While you're gone, it'll give me a chance to go puke.
Well, it finally happened: One "surprise" visit too many, one rubber turkey too many and one act of hubris too many -- and now eighteen human beings are dead.
The right-wing stooges on CNN radio news are, naturally spinning this as "The Vice President wasn't hurt." Yeah. Like that's supposed to be GOOD news.One U.S. serviceman has been identified among the dead, for you racist bastards who only consider a human death tragic if it's an "American" who died. One American and perhaps seventeen others (but we may never get an accurate count, what with the "spin" cycle and all).
Yeah: Dick Cheney decided to let the world know he was visiting our troops in Afghanistan, and after visiting Pakistan. And a suicide bomber tried to kill the prick, but killed eighteen decent human beings instead.
"Decent"? You ask.
Yes.
Decent because they weren't Cheney. Decent because they were stuck at some godforsaken base in Afghanistan defending a mission that seems increasingly indefinable, and decent simply because they weren't that vicious prick Dick Cheney. Where they might have been from we may never know.
I guess this is the answer to "Operation Mount and Thrust." (One good bang deserves another?)
So: here's a little trip down memory lane, from all three incarnations of this blog, foretelling this EXACT kind of mess. Foretelling the resurgence of the "Taliban" (viz. any Afghan who doesn't want us in Afghanistan. Think about how you've been gamed by the propaganda.)
So, here was my warning about these brain-dead macho trips, about the ONLY member of the Bush Maladministration who seems to have any actual balls.
Thursday, November 24, 2005
GIZZARD SURPRISE
or, IT'S THE GREAT TURKEY, CONDI BROWN!
You don't suppose that Bush is going to pull one of his patented rubber turkey surprises for Thanksgiving, do you? You know, show up with "our brave troops" and display the latest military-drag Commander-in-Chief outfit and accessories addition to his wardrobe?
It's not at all possible that this week Condi Rice was doing an advance tour for it, I realize.
But -- given this cult of the photo-op and their need to grab the spotlight away from ... well, scandals too rife to enumerate -- repeating some trick from the previous stage show isn't beyond them. (Heck, it's their modus operandi.) They DO tend to repeat themselves beyond the life of the magic trick, after all.
So, might there be another rubber turkey surprise visit to the troops in Iraq or Afghanistan?
Could be. We should know by halftime of the Dallas game.
Happy Thanksgiving, no matter what your turkey happens to be.
Courage.
or, IT'S THE GREAT TURKEY, CONDI BROWN!
You don't suppose that Bush is going to pull one of his patented rubber turkey surprises for Thanksgiving, do you? You know, show up with "our brave troops" and display the latest military-drag Commander-in-Chief outfit and accessories addition to his wardrobe?
It's not at all possible that this week Condi Rice was doing an advance tour for it, I realize.
But -- given this cult of the photo-op and their need to grab the spotlight away from ... well, scandals too rife to enumerate -- repeating some trick from the previous stage show isn't beyond them. (Heck, it's their modus operandi.) They DO tend to repeat themselves beyond the life of the magic trick, after all.
So, might there be another rubber turkey surprise visit to the troops in Iraq or Afghanistan?
Could be. We should know by halftime of the Dallas game.
Happy Thanksgiving, no matter what your turkey happens to be.
Courage.
And here is ONE of MY warnings that considering Afghanistan secure was a grave historic mistake:
http://www.hartwilliams.com/blog/2006/06/potpourri-or-how-come-i-started-blog.html
30 June 2006
Potpourri, or How Come I Started the Blog Again
1. The Phallusies of Dick and Bush
As noted in my blog, I predicted that the Taliban in Afghanistan were about to pull a John Paul Jones: they have just begun to fight. This was not prescient. This has been their pattern over the last 7,000 years. The invader invades and scores an "easy" victory. They wait. They watch. They expel the invader.
But what scared the heck out of me was the "year in the planning" offensive against the "Taliban." Note how conveniently any Afghan who opposes us is "Taliban." How about those Afghans who, in their ancient and venerable AND successful tradition, don't want to be occupied?
(Note: I have been informed that the Russians are back in Afghanistan, via a veteran who recently returned from that theater. Most frighteningly, when asked about the Russian presence in the only web research 'hit' I've found so far, the ever-parsing State Department Spokesperson stated this spring, "There are no Russians in Afghanistan, today." Note the "today." The Russians, it is no secret albeit under-reported, are massed along the Afghan border, ostensibly to keep the "Jihadists" from entering the former Soviet Union -- Russia doesn't border Afghanistan, of course. The vet's story was horrific, more about it later).
The name of our operation? "Operation Mountain Thrust."
Hey, 'Operation Mount and Thrust' is a porn movie title. And in the political pornography of this braggadocio of bullies (as in a covey of quail, a pod of dolphins, etc.), I don't think it's an accident. They might have thunk it up subconsciously, but I think they noticed. Too bad the media hasn't.
But it sure as heck is the kind of "Macho" sort of bluster that a bunch of draft-dodging chickenhawks would come up with, don't you think?
posted 2:44 PMAnd, finally, here is a very clear warning about what was at stake, historically: both for the U.S.A. and the Afghans:
Wednesday, November 23, 2005
THE PAST IS FUTURE
or, AGAIN THE DEJA VU
I read a lot as a kid -- not just books, but periodicals as well. Because I read TIME magazine, I noticed a story on the ore-ship the Edmund Fitzgerald, and noticed again several months later when Gordon Lightfoot turned that story into a song that's seemingly become a classic. I like the song, so it's a happy story.
But there is a horror in this line of inquiry as well. My parents subscribed to READERS DIGEST, which I always found rather trite, but I'd browse them for the three or four stories that might actually be interesting to me.
And there was one of those punchline stories, the low-rent version of O. Henry about a fellow getting out of prison and ashamed to return to his hometown. I read the story and thought it was syrupy and corny and tried to forget it, focusing instead on "I Am Joe's Philtrum" before setting that issue down forever.
About a year later, I heard a dreadful tin-pan-alley song on the top-40 radio that dominated the airwaves. After deciding that the song was awful as music, I realized that it was that same dumb story about the convict.
I hoped that it would go away. But I was horribly, awfully wrong. It did not go away. It became a big hit. And for nearly a year, I would have to plug my ears whenever that dreadful ditty polluted my acoustical environment.
And then, for years, it went away.
But no, the performers got their own TV show, and don't cha know? they ALWAYS sang that awful song based on that awful story to conclude the show.
They were finally, mercifully, cancelled.
And more years of bliss.
But then, the Ayatollah Khomeni returned to Iran, after years of exile in Paris. And the Shah was deposed, with the greatest high-tech arsenal in the Middle East falling into the hands of the Revolutionaries, and our Embassy staff was taken hostage for 444 days.
ABC News began a nightly newscast, marking the days that the hostages had been held. This newscast was anchored by Ted Koppel, and it's run, from that time, for twenty five years now.
That song came back during Koppel's first year on Nightline. Some addled Midwestern couch potato had remembered it, and for some reason, it became the "anthem" for our collective national hope that the hostages would soon be returned.
And I began to understand that "Tie A Yellow Ribbon ('Round The Old Oak Tree)" had purposely and malevolently dogged me from the first moment that I read it. It passed into cornball Valhalla. When the first Gulf War was fought in '90-'91, it became permanently enshrined as some kind of patriotic song of homecoming, and either Americana has horrifically poor taste, else I am opaque to the muses of the rubes.
We've managed to establish an Islamic Republic in Iraq, and, for the first time since that hostage crisis, Iran is a regional power again, politically, religiously, militarily. And, soon, atomically.
How had that yellow ribbon dithered so disastrously since it was first tied for returning embassy hostages a quarter century ago?
At the time, Iran was our "great friend" and grand ally, with our latest tanks, guns and fighter jets in the happy Shah of Iran's armed-to-the-teeth forces. Saudi Arabia were friends, but we had the "central square" in the great cold war game of chess in the Middle East.
And then it went south. All those U.S. lend-lease aircraft and weapons were in the hands of the Ayatollah's incomprehensible fanatics. We were thrilled by (and secretly backed, with the USSR) Iraq's eight-year-long war with Iran.
We chuckled to ourselves at the Soviet Union's quagmire in Afghanistan, as we watched their nation slowly churn a death odometer after a rapid conquest. They had laughed at us over Vietnam, and now we were watching them slowly bleeding in Afghanistan, whose holy warriors, the "Mujahadeen" were amply financed and stealthily supplied with the latest hand-held stinger missiles by us.
So how did it get to this? We occupy Afghanistan AND Iraq, the former Mujahadeen are now Al Qaeda, Iran has more influence within Shia-majority Iraq than they ever had before, and, seemingly, the Shia-Shia bond may be stronger than old blood feuds between two nations that spent a huge chunk of the 1980s slaughtering each other. Or perhaps not.
But that Yellow Ribbon is on just about every other bumper now, and we've got 170,000 troops hostage to Iraq and Afghanistan, with no date in sight for their release, repatriation and all those bands playing that awful song.
So, it must be a weird feeling for Ted Koppel to sign off after a quarter century, still covering the top story, which seems to be about our foreign policy blundering in old Mesopotamia and Persia.
Still.
Even that awful song may finally pass away before we manage to get this one right, it seems. Good grief.
Courage.
or, AGAIN THE DEJA VU
I read a lot as a kid -- not just books, but periodicals as well. Because I read TIME magazine, I noticed a story on the ore-ship the Edmund Fitzgerald, and noticed again several months later when Gordon Lightfoot turned that story into a song that's seemingly become a classic. I like the song, so it's a happy story.
But there is a horror in this line of inquiry as well. My parents subscribed to READERS DIGEST, which I always found rather trite, but I'd browse them for the three or four stories that might actually be interesting to me.
And there was one of those punchline stories, the low-rent version of O. Henry about a fellow getting out of prison and ashamed to return to his hometown. I read the story and thought it was syrupy and corny and tried to forget it, focusing instead on "I Am Joe's Philtrum" before setting that issue down forever.
About a year later, I heard a dreadful tin-pan-alley song on the top-40 radio that dominated the airwaves. After deciding that the song was awful as music, I realized that it was that same dumb story about the convict.
I hoped that it would go away. But I was horribly, awfully wrong. It did not go away. It became a big hit. And for nearly a year, I would have to plug my ears whenever that dreadful ditty polluted my acoustical environment.
And then, for years, it went away.
But no, the performers got their own TV show, and don't cha know? they ALWAYS sang that awful song based on that awful story to conclude the show.
They were finally, mercifully, cancelled.
And more years of bliss.
But then, the Ayatollah Khomeni returned to Iran, after years of exile in Paris. And the Shah was deposed, with the greatest high-tech arsenal in the Middle East falling into the hands of the Revolutionaries, and our Embassy staff was taken hostage for 444 days.
ABC News began a nightly newscast, marking the days that the hostages had been held. This newscast was anchored by Ted Koppel, and it's run, from that time, for twenty five years now.
That song came back during Koppel's first year on Nightline. Some addled Midwestern couch potato had remembered it, and for some reason, it became the "anthem" for our collective national hope that the hostages would soon be returned.
And I began to understand that "Tie A Yellow Ribbon ('Round The Old Oak Tree)" had purposely and malevolently dogged me from the first moment that I read it. It passed into cornball Valhalla. When the first Gulf War was fought in '90-'91, it became permanently enshrined as some kind of patriotic song of homecoming, and either Americana has horrifically poor taste, else I am opaque to the muses of the rubes.
Americana, who art in the HeartlandAnd I was struck, staring at a magnetic yellow ribbon on the back of an SUV -- with a "Bush-Cheney 04" sticker leering derisively from the window -- that Koppel's Nightline career started with our utter incapacity for understanding the peoples of Persia and Babylon, and a quarter century later, we STILL have no real understanding.
Hollywood be thy name.
Thy kingdom come,
thy will be dumb,
On Earth as it is in Peoria
We've managed to establish an Islamic Republic in Iraq, and, for the first time since that hostage crisis, Iran is a regional power again, politically, religiously, militarily. And, soon, atomically.
How had that yellow ribbon dithered so disastrously since it was first tied for returning embassy hostages a quarter century ago?
At the time, Iran was our "great friend" and grand ally, with our latest tanks, guns and fighter jets in the happy Shah of Iran's armed-to-the-teeth forces. Saudi Arabia were friends, but we had the "central square" in the great cold war game of chess in the Middle East.
And then it went south. All those U.S. lend-lease aircraft and weapons were in the hands of the Ayatollah's incomprehensible fanatics. We were thrilled by (and secretly backed, with the USSR) Iraq's eight-year-long war with Iran.
We chuckled to ourselves at the Soviet Union's quagmire in Afghanistan, as we watched their nation slowly churn a death odometer after a rapid conquest. They had laughed at us over Vietnam, and now we were watching them slowly bleeding in Afghanistan, whose holy warriors, the "Mujahadeen" were amply financed and stealthily supplied with the latest hand-held stinger missiles by us.
So how did it get to this? We occupy Afghanistan AND Iraq, the former Mujahadeen are now Al Qaeda, Iran has more influence within Shia-majority Iraq than they ever had before, and, seemingly, the Shia-Shia bond may be stronger than old blood feuds between two nations that spent a huge chunk of the 1980s slaughtering each other. Or perhaps not.
But that Yellow Ribbon is on just about every other bumper now, and we've got 170,000 troops hostage to Iraq and Afghanistan, with no date in sight for their release, repatriation and all those bands playing that awful song.
So, it must be a weird feeling for Ted Koppel to sign off after a quarter century, still covering the top story, which seems to be about our foreign policy blundering in old Mesopotamia and Persia.
Still.
Even that awful song may finally pass away before we manage to get this one right, it seems. Good grief.
Courage.
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