The Rude Pundit meets a snide pundit.
Just when I'm getting so enraged by the crimes of the Republican party that I feel like screaming, smashing something, etc., I look at his daily post. And I feel a little bit better. Because he always reminds me that if there's an afterlife in which the evil are punished for their misdeeds, every member of this administration is in for an extremely unpleasant time.
It took a great leader, said Cheney, George Washington himself, to rally the bedraggled soldiers and rouse them to fight another day: "'My brave fellows,' he said, 'you have done all I asked you to do and more than could be reasonably expected; you have worn yourself out with fatigues and hardships; but we know not how to spare you. The present is emphatically the crisis, which is to decide our destiny.' One by one the men stepped forward. They could not let their country or their fellow soldiers down. Inspired by leadership and renewed in their strength, they stayed in the fight -- and America won the war." Get it? Bush is like Washington, right? And the Americans are just fighting the British all over ag... (. . .)
Here's how the Revolutionary War was viewed, at least partly, in England: To fight the war, "Britain had first to raise the necessary forces, then transport and sustain them over 3000 miles of ocean, and finally use them effectively to regain control of a vast and sparsely populated territory. Recruiting men for an eighteenth century army was most difficult. The British Government had no power to compel service except in the militia in defense of the homeland, and service in the British Army overseas was immensely unpopular." How did the British make up for the lack of recruits? By outsourcing to the Hessians. Mercenaries, they were called then. Today, they're "security companies" or "Halliburton."
A slow child could understand the sheer idiocy of Cheney's analogy. Yet millions of Americans are somehow convinced that... well, here's an example. One of the counter-protesters in Crawford (interviewed by Ed Shultz) was moved by his deceased son's joy at being in Iraq to improve their lives. No water, dirt floors, poverty, etc. I pity the man the loss of his son, but he's delusional-- or merely ignorant of the facts. He can be forgiven for wanting to believe that his son died for a just cause. But few vocal W-drones have experienced such a loss.
And as for the argument that we're "bettering their lives" (formerly nukes, then WMDs, then terrorist links, etc.), it's utterly false. Billions of people live in squalor, and we don't "help them" by bombing their countries. These would-be good samaritans of the right are the same people who didn't and don't give (excuse me) a damp fart about genocides in Kosovo, Somalia, or Darfur. And now they're dewy-eyed and proud of invading a country, killing tens of thousands of innocent people, and leaving them with less access to water and electricity than they had under their brutal dictator. It's insane.
It took a great leader, said Cheney, George Washington himself, to rally the bedraggled soldiers and rouse them to fight another day: "'My brave fellows,' he said, 'you have done all I asked you to do and more than could be reasonably expected; you have worn yourself out with fatigues and hardships; but we know not how to spare you. The present is emphatically the crisis, which is to decide our destiny.' One by one the men stepped forward. They could not let their country or their fellow soldiers down. Inspired by leadership and renewed in their strength, they stayed in the fight -- and America won the war." Get it? Bush is like Washington, right? And the Americans are just fighting the British all over ag... (. . .)
Here's how the Revolutionary War was viewed, at least partly, in England: To fight the war, "Britain had first to raise the necessary forces, then transport and sustain them over 3000 miles of ocean, and finally use them effectively to regain control of a vast and sparsely populated territory. Recruiting men for an eighteenth century army was most difficult. The British Government had no power to compel service except in the militia in defense of the homeland, and service in the British Army overseas was immensely unpopular." How did the British make up for the lack of recruits? By outsourcing to the Hessians. Mercenaries, they were called then. Today, they're "security companies" or "Halliburton."
A slow child could understand the sheer idiocy of Cheney's analogy. Yet millions of Americans are somehow convinced that... well, here's an example. One of the counter-protesters in Crawford (interviewed by Ed Shultz) was moved by his deceased son's joy at being in Iraq to improve their lives. No water, dirt floors, poverty, etc. I pity the man the loss of his son, but he's delusional-- or merely ignorant of the facts. He can be forgiven for wanting to believe that his son died for a just cause. But few vocal W-drones have experienced such a loss.
And as for the argument that we're "bettering their lives" (formerly nukes, then WMDs, then terrorist links, etc.), it's utterly false. Billions of people live in squalor, and we don't "help them" by bombing their countries. These would-be good samaritans of the right are the same people who didn't and don't give (excuse me) a damp fart about genocides in Kosovo, Somalia, or Darfur. And now they're dewy-eyed and proud of invading a country, killing tens of thousands of innocent people, and leaving them with less access to water and electricity than they had under their brutal dictator. It's insane.
posted by Matt Sandwich | 12:27 PM
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