It's Pat!

No, not that lame Julia Sweeney character she parlayed into a lamer feature length movie back in 1994. Shit Lorne Michaels has been doing for almost 30 years just so Comedy Central has content to cover those hot useless Saturday afternoons in July.

No it's Pat Robertson. Yeah, that one. The bag of pus who basically agreed with that other bag of pus Jerry Falwell who said that we were attacked on September 11, 2001 because we had it comin'. You know because America, the most church goin' nation on earth. The America where 85% of its citizens say they believe in a merciful, just and loving God. Well, America had turned it's back on God because of the ACLU and the abortionists and feminists and pagan environmentalists and shit. You know basically the 48% of the national electorate. All 51 million of us. We had it comin'. Like a passed out sorority girl who gets gang raped on the 2nd floor bedroom in the Sigma Phi house because she was rockin' those tight tight jeans in the bar downstairs. She had it comin'. And so did we.

I guess he kind of agrees with Osama there.

That Pat Robertson belched out on his 700 Club yesterday that America should, as a matter of state policy set out to murder the duly elected President of Venezuela. A guy currently holding office with a 70% job approval rating. No, really, Media Matters has the whole thing, they always do. The Reverend Pat Robertson who ran for the Republican nomination for President in 1992 ( so don't give my any of that just another private citizen shit, fucker has his own netowrk) explicitly advocated assassination of President Chavez.

And what, pray tell, is President Chavez exact crime? Hmmm? Did he order the executions of hundreds of thousands of his fellow Venezuelans? Are there mass graves ringing Caracas containing the dusty bones and mangled corpses of these innocent citizens? No. Has he launched any preemptive wars against his neighbors Colombia, Guyana, or Brazil? No, not so much, no. Not at all, really. Did he mail anthrax to the National Enquirer or CBS News. Well, not that we know of, no. But pretty unlikely.

So why, oh why, did Reverend Shitbrick order his execution. Because, because, well, there's just no other way to say it Hugo hearts Fidel. That's it. Pretty much. Oh, and Venezuela has oil, lots of it. And Hugo doesn't heart the US Government either. More precisely he doesn't care much for our own dear Kristian Kultural Konservative Leader the Right Hand of God hisself President Shrub. I'm pretty sure that the rest of us 291 million Americans are OK with him, it's pretty much just Shrub and Shitbrick at this point.

Look, this is our future boys and girls. We're gonna need that oil, us and the Chinese and the Indians. And if'n we have to pop a few heads of state well, in the words of Tom Cruise, "Matt, Matt, Matt, you just don't understand about these things..." And Jesus will bless us for doing it according to this cornpone Soprano Reverend Robertson.

And right about now I'm wondering what exactly is the difference between Shitbrick and Osama. Well, Shitbrick can issue his fatwas from the comfort of his own network and only goes home to one wife.

Fuck the Bill of Rights, I need to fill up my Hummer.

I gotta go.

The Duke

Arthur Wellesley, the Duke of Wellington who defeated Napoleon at Waterloo in 1815, and later became a Tory Prime Minister of Great Britain once said when confronted with the chickenhawks of his day, that "Great nations do not have small wars". You know when the shootin' starts shit can get outa hand, or words to that effect.

I mean the hornets are buzzing and the stings are going to leave more than welts on your elbow. As you tuck little Keegen, or Madison, or fuckin' Ashley into bed this evening ask yourself what life for them might be like 10 years for now. Wars can escalate, especially in the part of the world where we are currently engaged. That's where I'm coming from, yo. Here's where you can agree with your conservative friends Iraq is not Vietnam. Really? No shit.

Vietnam was a tiny little geostrategic backwater at the time and we had 500,000 people there at the height of it. We've got less than half that in Iraq now in the most volatile region on the planet. On the cheap, this is how they went about it, oh and off budget too. We keep having to pass these emergency spending bills this way everybody is complicit and those that don't wanna play along well, you can accuse them of not supporting the troops. Sound at all familiar.

Right, right. Great nations, small wars, huzzah, huzzah, freedom, freedom, freedom, stay the course, stay the course, yada, yada, yada. Hope is neither a strategy or a plan and that's all this administration is really going with. No constitution yesterday, so we'll hold our breath until next Monday, the 22nd, when the Iraqi drafting committee is supposed to report out a draft constitution that 2/3 of the Parliament can get down with. And hilarity, as they say, will ensue. There's supposed to be a further series of elections over the next couple of months, but really, unless you're paid to how can anyone keep up with this shit.

Now, no matter what these elections produce, which, let's face it is likely to be more chaos and enmity among the Kurds, Shia, and Sunnis, we are getting out of there for the most part beginning in the Spring. For a variety of reasons, not the least of which is the 2006 midterm elections in this country. No, no not all 138,000 of 'em (in addition to a division or two around each election to totally lock the place down) but I bet half will be back by Labor Day 2006. The other half- well, holed up in the desert out by the Baghdad Airport in a semi-permanent base that will be in operation for 20 years. Also, the type of deployments our Army and Marines are engaged in are no longer sustainable. Our armed forces are half the size they were 35 years ago. Hell, 40% of the people over there now are reservists. And they are not happy and at some point it becomes illegal to deploy them any further. Again, if we had been attacked by these people none of this would be even an issue. Laws would be changed, sacrifices would be asked of all of us. But that's not the case here, the only ones being asked to sacrifice are the people in uniform and their families, while the tax cuts continue to bleed the Treasury down to it's lowest revenues as a percentage of GDP since 1959.

Wars change not only the nation on whose soil the battles take place, it changes the nation whose warriors return from those battles. Remember Gulf War I gave us Timothy McVeigh and John Muhammed (the DC area sniper) and those boys hardly saw any combat at all, ground operations lasted 100 hours. We're coming up on 2 1/2 years of intense urban combat a hideous grinding stalemate in a place that in a word, sucks.

And if you're a liberal, or a news outlet other than Faux News, or Bill Clinton - well, it's all your fuckin' fault, motherfuckahs.

God, that's enough for now. I gotta go.

Puzzlement

Goddam that scotch is good.

Look I'm on vacation this week. The weather's good, daughter's got gym camp 3 days this week. I get to run in the morning. Afternoons at the pool with said offspring soakin' up sun and chlorine. Back home in the evening to fire up the gas grill and throw some marinaded meat on, corn on the cob and yes, fuck you Dr. Atkins, a starch. Life, ain't bad. Lovely wife and daughter, nice home, both cars running ok, for now. Of course it'll be catfood for Christmas when this housing bubble bursts but that's for another day.

Point is, and I do have one, I just can't get that worked up over shit this week.

Except.

Except I see this thing on CNN whereby Rummy, I love that fucker, well, you know love him like Dracula loves garlic, or O'Reilly loves Al Franken. Anyway, seems Captain Bligh over there is pointing a bony finger in the direction of the Iranians who, says he, are sending sophisticated weaponry into Iraq because them and the Syrians want chaos in Iraq, while everyone else in the region is totally down with the whole bringing democracy to the Middle East thingee. You believe that shit, yeah, me neither.

First, you didn't see any of this coming bro' . I mean we've been there for over 2 years now. 2 fuckin' years. Some of our marines are on their third pump. (Marine tours are 7 months, Army is usually 13 months, more or less - I'll get Research on that, clean it up and whatnot). Yeah, yeah I know "you go with the military you have not the one you wish for..." yada, yada, yada. Except, except. This wasn't Pearl Harbor, fucktard, we CHOSE the time and the place for this little adventure. No, you didn't see it but the people at State and CIA and your own freekin' uniformed personnel saw it coming, that's why they told you they wanted to go in with no less than 250,000 combat and support personnel. Ah fuck it. Sand over the desert, right.

Oh, right the Iranians, the new best friends of the Shia dominated government in Iraq because well, many of the current Iraqi government ministers spent their exile years, the Saddam years to you and me, in Iran. Hey, their pretty fuckin' friendly with those folks across the, say it with me, the Persian Gulf. Anyway, while our Shia are making nice with the Shia who happen to run Iran, we're losing 30 people a week to this Sunni insurgency. Because, for the Sunni, it just don't look too pretty. They been fuckin' the Shia for about 40 years and payback, as they say, is a beeyotch in Chanel. And the Sunni don't have any oil. The Shia in the south do and the Kurds in the north do but the Sunnis all they got to do is literally pound sand, you know.

And those weapons Capt. Bligh is referring to - shaped charges, you know the ones that are shredding our Strykers and HUMVEES. Shaped charges are doing a number on our overworked and underpaid uniformed personnel over there. They totally destroy the vehicle and everyone in it armor, hillbilly armor, whatever.

No the Iranians don't want chaos in Iraq. They just want us out. And until the shitheads in charge get a fuckin' clue more of our good people, our best people, are going to die while the Iraqis build themselves a nice little Muslim theocracy based on Sharia law.

Iran's got time and, well, money. They're the 2nd largest oil producer in OPEC right behind the Saudis, and with oil at $64 a barrel they got money. Play nice with the Europeans and us, why? They're building a nice little Shia superstate with their Iraqi brothers to balance out every other authoritarian Sunni regime in the region. They'll play nice when oil is at $20 a barrel. You see that happening anytime soon? Yeah, me neither.

Vulgarian out.

Anchors

Dan Rather, Peter Jennings, and Tom Brokaw.

As my wife has pointed out Peter Jennings was only 67 years old. Yeah, yeah, I know that used to be quite old. It used to be my grandfather in his '65 Impala telling me he could hit a major league fastball. Anybody could in his view. It was that breaking stuff that kicked many a big leaguer's ass. Needle or no. But since we're in our mid-40s that doesn't sound so, well, advanced.

But Peter Jennings was one of the 3 white men who brought us up to date each evening as we had dinner or changed for an evening run or game of tennis or, hey, whatever it is that one does between 7 and 730pm each evening across this land. Not to give too much away here but all times will be eastern until further notice.

To be honest Peter was actually the orange one with the Canadian accent. Dan Rather, well, Dan Rather will always be the man as far as I'm concerned. The last of his kind. I can't possibly imagine what it was like to work with the man but to watch him, oh to watch him, especially on election nights was like surfing on a razorblade. Finally, Tom Brokaw, the genial man who floated to the top at NBC with the funny accent and the thin-lipped smile. Capped his career with the Greatest Generation business - which, OK, gets to me. But later on that for now. I'll get to that. For now, for now, Peter Jennings and his departure and with it the literal death of network news. Do me a favor, next time you come across a teen or twenty-something ask them who any of those 3 men were and what they did. They won't know, but we will . We'll know that PJ spent 60 hours on the air after September 11, 2001. We'll know about the hellholes he and Rather in particular made their bones in.

Remember them because the world of TV News nowadays is a pastel imitation of what these men and the organizations they came from used to do. Pastels with screaming matches in between Nantucket retreats.

That oughta do for now.

The vulgarian