Official National Mourning

Waves and waves of inconsolable grief have washed over the Federal workforce in the wake of the death of former president Gerald Ford. So sharp and profound is the feeling of desolation among the troops of the bureaucracy that most of the gummint, including the post office, is closed today.

We can only hope that extra traffic police are on duty today to deal with the congestion around the various memorial services that all these coffee-break-takers will be attending. The sense of dislocation that attends the extension of their holiday weekend by an extra day must also be taken into account. No doubt, many thousands of grief counselors will be working overtime today, talking the civil-service folk through the process of finding renewed meaning for their lives in the absence of Gerald Ford.

Ah, the oceans of tears being shed today! The uncountable waves of gut-wrenching grief! Ah, the humanity! You and I should be humbly proud to do our part for our public masters servants by paying them for yet another day of no work.

The Odometer of Time Rolls Over ...

... at least, in an extremely minor way. I'm sitting here, nursing a Diet Coke and typing up some problem solutions for my class, and it's about midnight. It's the beginning of AD 2007, more or less.

I wish I could predict some sort of wonderful upcoming year, here in the land of my birth. But I see no reason to think we'll have one, nor any particular reason why we deserve one. What we do deserve hardly bears talking about. So, I'll be hoping for some kind of chastening that might have the effect of waking us up and making us see what we have become, and what our situation really is. May the sun set on the American Empire very, very soon. May we all turn from our "culture" of death and idiocy even sooner.

Not going to happen, is it?

Here's an Idea, George ...

I see where your Mesopotamian puppet regime has dusted our former Iraqi employee. So here's what you do, George, you pathetic and vainglorious pup. You declare "mission accomplished" once again (better think of a new phrase, though), and you immediately withdraw the legions -- every last one.

Hey, now you can say you won and everything! You can be SO much more of a man than your old Dad, and settle up that Oedipal scenario that's been playing itself out in what's left of your coked-out and booze-rotted mind.

But act fast! The glorious moment won't last ... wait until next week, and attention will only tend to return to the blood-soaked chaos you've made out of the former Iraq. Get out while the gettin's good, boy!

"Progress Death Is Our Most Important Product"

I see in the news where Our Glorious Wartime President will soon be able to trumpet yet another Imperial success: another death. Sometime in the next few weeks, Saddam Hussein will be hanged.

What for? Well:

His lawyers, who released the message, said it was written on 5 November, the day an Iraqi tribunal sentenced him to death for ordering the killings of scores of Shias Muslims in Dujail.

Hmmmm. "Scores." Let's see, a "score" is an archaic way of saying "twenty." So, someone who ordered the killing of "scores" must presumably have ordered the deaths of, say, two to ten twenties. Forty to two hundred people.

This, it seems to me, establishes -- or at least reminds us of -- a potentially-useful precedent. Any reasonable estimate of the numbers of Iraqi civilians killed in Bush's war is in the hundreds of thousands (or in the five thousands of "scores"). So: how many times does Il Duce deserve to be hanged for his misdeeds? How about his British lap-poodle, Tony Blair?

If only this precedent could be generally applied! What a peaceful world we might have.

Chimpy's Bedside Manner

OK, it's Christmas time. You're a soldier, and you've been wounded in what is now nearly universally acknowledged as a raw face-saving exercise on behalf of the draft-dodger who currently infests the White House. (That's as opposed to that other draft-dodger who was the previous tenant. Is there a theme here?)

Can you think of anything that would make you feel any better than to receive Official Comfort™ from the Chimp-in-Chief himself?

You have to wonder what the pre-Official Comfort™ screenings and briefings must have been like. After all, it wouldn't do for The Exalted to visit some ungrateful wretch's bedside and get some kind of dissent talk. I wonder what the pre-screeners and briefers say to those wounded folks? I wonder how explicitly the threats are made.

Democrats for Peace?

We can probably take for granted that no Republican who takes a principled stance against aggressive wars is likely to seek the GOP presidential nomination. After all, the only (quasi-)Republican officeholder that I know of who meets that standard is Ron Paul, the libertarian/Republican congressman from the 14th district in Texas, and he's not seeking the presidency. So that leaves the Other Major Brand. The Democratic Party "swept" its way into razor-thin working majorities in both houses of Congress a couple of months ago, propelled by some form of national disgust over the blood-soaked fiasco that is Iraq. Which Democrats seeking the presidency are actually anti-war?

Well, there's Sen. Hillary Clinton. Heh, heh, heh, heh, heh. Driven by a need (unfortunately, a realistic one, I don't doubt) to seem even more manly than the men, her public statements have rivalled Bush for bellicosity.

What about everyone's cuddly-clean non-racial / post-racial diversity celebrity, Sen. Barack Obama? He's condemned the war as "dumb." However, he's sure he can do it lots better. Nope -- no change there.

Really, I think Dennis Kucinich is about as good as it gets on the Democratic Party side; and that's not very good. His campaign web site suggests that his primary critique of the war is that it isn't being prosecuted by the United Nations. I'd need something a good bit more explicitly-principled from him before developing any enthusiasm.

Conclusion: we're screwed, again. As are a lot of foreigners who deserve being screwed again much less than we deserve it.