Thursday, September 06, 2007

The Great Iraq Swindle

Bush didn't invade Iraq to find weapons. Hell, he was told there were no weapons there, and didn't care. He didn't even do it for the oil. He did it because the neo-cons orchestrated the largest swindle of American taxpayers in the history of the country.

Operation Iraqi Freedom, it turns out, was never a war against Saddam ­Hussein's Iraq. It was an invasion of the federal budget, and no occupying force in history has ever been this efficient. George W. Bush's war in the Mesopotamian desert was an experiment of sorts, a crude first take at his vision of a fully privatized American government. In Iraq the lines between essential government services and for-profit enterprises have been blurred to the point of absurdity -- to the point where wounded soldiers have to pay retail prices for fresh underwear, where modern-day chattel are imported from the Third World at slave wages to peel the potatoes we once assigned to grunts in KP, where private companies are guaranteed huge profits no matter how badly they fuck things up.

And just maybe, reviewing this appalling history of invoicing orgies and million-dollar boondoggles, it's not so far-fetched to think that this is the way someone up there would like things run all over -- not just in Iraq but in Iowa, too, with the state police working for Corrections Corporation of America, and DHL with the contract to deliver every Christmas card. And why not? What the Bush administration has created in Iraq is a sort of paradise of perverted capitalism, where revenues are forcibly extracted from the customer by the state, and obscene profits are handed out not by the market but by an unaccountable government bureauc­racy. This is the triumphant culmination of two centuries of flawed white-people thinking, a preposterous mix of authoritarian socialism and laissez-faire profit­eering, with all the worst aspects of both ideologies rolled up into one pointless, supremely idiotic military adventure -- American men and women dying by the thousands, so that Karl Marx and Adam Smith can blow each other in a Middle Eastern glory hole.


Go read it. And then I dare one of you fucking Republican Bush lovers to come back here and tell me why this glorious clusterfuck is good for my children, who will be paying for it.

Saturday, September 01, 2007

There's a Word for Lying to Continue a War (or to start one)

Treason. When they lie to keep Americans in a hopeless situation, it's treason. Just like it was treason to get us there in the first place. So, any of you arguing that the surge is working, or that if we leave it will be genocide, or that a bunch of third world Muslims are going to follow us home and take over this country, forcing their religion down our throats, just remember who's feeding you that Bullshit.

Cheney.

Name one thing he's been right about, and then tell my why you want to keep listening to him.

One thing.

Fact is, the numbers they're spewing now are just more crap, and any of you who eat it up and vote Republican again are treasonous, shit-eating mother fuckers too. Go fuck yourselves. Your glorious Grand ol' Party of racism, hate, and kill-them-allness is spiraling down the drain to a very ugly place... Good riddance.