Sunday, February 16, 2003
 

So, I see that The Bushwhacker is bound and determined to declare war, in spite of all national and international protests to the contrary. And he sends Rice out to tell us all that. Guess he was too busy playing with his little soldier toys to come out and address the nation himself. And the machine of war rolls on, and we can't even see who's propelling it.

Phil Ochs: "It's always the old to lead us to the war / It's always the young to fall."

Rant follows: I've heard the word Nazi thrown around, but I don't use that one lightly, so I'll stick with calling him a fascist, at least for the moment. As I keep saying, whatever logic is at work here, I don't see it. It seems like more than the usual bombs-for-oil blitzkriegs that the United States has been engaging in pretty constantly since 1989; if that was what was going on, I don't think we'd be creating all this international uproar. I'm becoming more gnostic by the minute, at any rate. So he says that he's going to touch off World War III regardless of protests, including those in his own country. Gee, let's think about this a minute (assuming that thinking hasn't been ruled unconstitutional yet). When the denizens of other countries are "repressed" by their regimes, the United States bombs, invades, or levels citizen-crippling sanctions on them (assuming, of course, that it's in their economic interest to do so). The rhetoric that justifies these actions is that they're giving the citizens in the country their freedom of expression, democracy, the ability to have a voice in the government. Sooooo . . . when the United States ignores the citizenry and starts employing its armies for highly dubious purposes (c'mon, people: Saddam is a secularist. Osama bin Laden ranks secularists right down there with the USofA. Do you reallythink he's vacationing in Iraq?), who's gonna liberate us? You know, by bombing the living daylights out of our villages, deploying soldiers to rape and pillage everything in sight, and by setting up whatever regime suits their fancy. If they take the United States for their role model, that is. Or perhaps this hypothetical country (or, more likely, union of countries) will skip that whole freedom's-superhero-deliverer-from-evil-bunk about noble liberation and start handing out just desserts. I frankly wouldn't enjoy that. I doubt most of us would. Which is no doubt one reason (among many) people are out and protesting.

Protesting to deaf ears. Because whatever agenda is being worked out here, it's over our heads. Which shouldn't stop anyone from doing whatever they can to protest the impending war. It looks like we're going down, but we can go down fighting. And I don't mean fighting Iraq.

Vote No War
MoveOn.org: Democracy in Action

Elvisette philosophized at 4:42 PM