Archive for the ‘Vietnam’ Category

The need to communicate.  To write.  Despite not having anything immediate to say.

I’m here in Carson City because I imagined it to be a haven of sorts.  If not that, then friendly.  Sanctuary from exorbitant bills and ridiculous drama.  I was weary of the drama and the bills.  Mostly the bills.  Spent am I.  Pun intended.  It started off okay.  Business prospects were promising.  I had irons in the fire.  Sibling drama did rear it’s ugly head but I was honest and above it.  Restrained.  I chose distance in light of the wildest cards and it served me for a time.  I’m smart.

Dad fell from a ladder, broke six ribs and a shoulder, madness prevailed on every level.  Soon after, sibling rivalry exploded like Krakatoa.  I wake up checking to see if I still have an ass.  I realize now I’m in deep depression once again.  I would risk the reader’s patience at this point were I to detail how often and how hard life has been punching me straight in the mouth in the last year or so.

I’s okay, I roll with it and drink a lot.

A carnival of nonsense.  My sanctuary a mirage.  I do tap the occasional oasis and it is like paradise by the dashboard light.  I get refueled, nourished and a chance to wash my face and hands.  I wash my stinking crotch and put on clean socks, put on a little lotion.  Don’t always know where to find those islands, but I know if I sail long enough……   No sooner than this and I’m waiting for vulgar to ring the bell.  Ugly will revisit any day.  It’s true I’m feeling sorry for myself but you can’t know what’s visited me in the last year or so.

It’s been pretty fucked up.

I am weary.

I hate most people and most things.  Sometimes.

Outside the wind rages, but inside Swirly Girl the Cat snores like a drunken boxer, whistling and snorting.  It makes me smile.  Her face flinches and flickers in the throes of a dream.  I smile some more.  Her paws are curled inward.  Her nose tucked between them.  We’ll move to the bedroom and she’ll sleep beside my head all night.  I am her father.  She is my beloved problem child.  She frowns and objects a lot.  I just love on her as best I can.

I have to care about what happens next but it’s easier said than done.  People really suck.  You have no idea.

I’ll take politics and world events for five hundred Alex.  If you visit regularly it’s most likely the reason.

Item one:

Can you believe this fuckhead Stupak?  Smoking tobacco is no different than smoking lettuce leaves.  He didn’t say that but I don’t care.  No real surprise that he rents a room at C Street and his head is misshapen.  Can you say hydrocephalus?  This guy is a dick.  44,000 people a year dying due to lack of health care insurance and he wants to make the whole thing about Roe v. Wade?  What an asshole.  News flash, we’ve got it covered with the Hyde amendment.

No worries dickhead.

To stir this brand of shit in light of just how important this issue is, is beyond irresponsible.  It’s plain stupid and I think someone’s ego needs a leash and a muzzle.  Thanks you peniswhipped cocktail.

Item two:

Sarah Palin and her new book and book tour.  She’s doing the “battleground” states.  Who cares?  Run the stupid bitch in 2012.  Please.  Run Romney and Huckabee and Limbaugh or Hannity.  The Keystone Cops, The Stooges, The Flinstones or maybe Tucker Carlson and Orly Tates and Wile E. Coyote.  Yep, bring it.  Give us a show.  I swear I equated Romney to Guy Smiley before the Daily Show did.  Bitches.  I’m way on top of this shit.  Sometimes.

Item three:

I’m very much encouraged to hear Obama has rejected all battle plans he’s been presented with for Afghanistan.  We don’t have the resources in terms of personnel and we don’t have the money to even attempt to support a government we know to be abstrusely compromised.  It’s a no win boys and girls.  The pooch was raped seven years ago.  People die for no reason everyday.

Time to take the long way home.  Russia failed.  England failed.  No invading force or country has ever prevailed despite it being among the poorest countries on earth.  We’re certainly no smarter and likely even dumber than those who’ve come before us.

We have no clear objectives or realistically realizable goals.  No one can define “victory” or a “successful mission”.  We are lost.  Strangers in a strange land fighting for what?  Use the money we are spending there, to increase security here, if the idea really is to be proactive.

I’m not talking about taking off your goddamn shoes or limiting the size of your toothpaste or shampoo containers before you board a flight from Burbank to fucking Reno.  I always travel to Reno at the behest of Allah because I don’t shit where I eat.  Ha!  Such policies are useless and miss the point entirely.  It’s all about demonstrating that someone, somewhere, is doing something to show the dumbest among us that someone, somewhere is doing something to protect us.  Nevermind that it represents nothing more than an inconvenience and an egregious breach of logic.  Somewhere, someone is doing something.

In the meantime, more people die everyday because of lack of health care or insurance than in our elective wars.  Pretty fucking stupid, huh?  It’s no wonder the world thinks we’re a big stupid bully.  It’s no wonder Sarah Palin still has a realistic shot at the presidency.

The only way to even find out if the conflict in Afghanistan is solvable is to escalate it to the level of the Vietnam conflict.  That means 50,000 dead Americans and millions of dead Afghanis, many of whom will be civilian.  Good plan.  Time to walk away.

Wait.  That’s actually more than we lose every year due to our health care clusterfuck.  Oh boy.  Now we’re cooking with butane.

Item four:

I don’t really care if the Ft. Hood massacre is defined as “terrorism” or not.  It was terrible.  Horrible.  Horribalism?  Anyone?  It’s a fucking tragedy and Republican efforts to label it as terrorism amount to nothing more than a cheap shot as well as shameful exploitation of what is simply an American tragedy.  Somehow these pricks believe that if they can succeed with the blatant polemic nomenclature of terrorism they can claim that a terrorist event occurred on Obama’s watch.  Good luck with that you fucks.  Your’s happened two months earlier under your watchful and diligent eyes and you lost three thousand in an event so contrived that I doubt we know half the truth.  We lost thirteen.

Idiots.

Drinks for my friends.

Robert McNamara shuffled off his mortal coil yesterday.  Ninety three.  Architect of America’s abject folly in Vietnam.  In his time, he was humankind’s most  notorious failure.  He confessed to understanding as early as 1965 that the war was unwinnable.  Without Mac, there’s a chance the world would never have suffered his contemporary, Donald Rumsfeld.

Almost 60,000 dead Americans and some two million dead Vietnamese.  For nothing.  Well north of 4,000 dead Americans and as many as one million dead Iraqis.  For nothing.  A zero sum game with the exception of the enrichment of our military industrial complex.  A serious hole when you look at things as diverse as money and reputation lost.

The 2003 documentary “The Fog of War”, although fascinating, falls limp as a mea culpa.  It serves as more of a rationale for a despondent and tortured man than anything resembling an explanation or apology.  I believe he suffered.  Most people would say it’s lucky to live for ninety three years.  I’ll bet Mac didn’t think so.  He was haunted.  Every day.  He deserved it.

As near as I can see, we’ve learned nothing.  America is still a swamp for this brand of reptile.  Soulless  technocrats in charge of carnage.  Captains Crunch.  Obsolete but we still breed them.  By the hundreds of thousands.  Mac was a far bit smarter than Rummy so he had a way higher body count.  Maybe they’re getting stupider.  Maybe.  But if that’s true, then so are we, because we just got fooled again.

I don’t believe in Heaven any more than I do in Hell.  But if there exists a destination for a soul this guilty, it is my hope he ends up there and that Donny boy Rumsfeld ends his days suffering and tortured just like Mac.

Fuck these guys.  They sucked.

Drinks for my friends.

Our man has delivered a budget. That word reads so simple. A budget. It’s more than that. A philosophy. He has huge balls. He’s not here to fuck around. It’s a lot of goddamn money. An unbelievable, unimaginable amount of money. Three and a half trillion at least. History will repeat itself like pi before you and I can realize a number like that.

Hoo ya!

“In keeping with my commitment to make our government more open and transparent, this budget is an honest accounting of where we are and where we intend to go,” Obama said at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building next to the White House before the budget was officially released. He said previous budgets have “not told the whole truth” about spending and that “large sums have been left off the books,” including war costs that have been funded by separate emergency supplemental appropriations.

“And that kind of dishonest accounting is not how you run your family budgets at home; it’s not how your government should run its budgets either,” Obama said. -truthout.org

It’s spooky ambitous and ideological even. It’s visionary. The symbolism of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building is not lost on me. Long term thinking as opposed to thumb in the dyke stop gap chicanery. He’s made the very bold and cold shower honest move of including the cost of our wars in the official accounting of our government’s spending. The first time since we began to wage this unjust war. It begs the question of why it hasn’t been included so far. Did they think we didn’t know? Did they think we didn’t understand they were spending more money than you and I can make?

That all the while the rich were getting richer and we didn’t know?

“I have serious concerns with this budget, which demands hardworking American families and job creators turn over more of their hard-earned money to the government to pay for unprecedented spending increases,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said in a statement. -truthout.org

That is a lie. He is a Senator and he is lying. He sucks. His lament was for the wealthy. He presided over what will be the bulk of your debt for the last eight years. He’s an asshole. Google him, you can tell by looking at him. He was the kid you beat up for trying to tax Jello or maybe sell you gum by the stick.

These asshat Republicans have forced us to double down. They act like they left us a pile of chips. They left a pair of red panties on the green felt. Cotton granny drawers XXL.

Get out of the way while we play bold because it’s the only option you left us. Peniswhipdrinks. Go sit by the pool but you can’t put your drinks on your room.

We intend to use the rollback of tax cuts to the absurdly wealthy as our marker. Spreading the wealth around indeed. 80% of the world’s wealth in the hands of 1% of it’s people. Socialism my ass. Looks entirely equitable and ethical to me. Again, you haven’t left us much choice.

Here lies some proof in the moveable feast of the pudding. We spend ten times more than our closest competitor on guns, bombs, missiles and fighting men & women. America is responsible for forty percent of the entire global outlay of guns, bombs, missiles and humans. It’s ridiculous and obsolete. The single biggest component of that expense is humans. The world has changed. The ideology and geography of huge human armies is obsolete. Wars like this are no longer sustainable. If they prove to be viable at all, we will lose them. Good Morning Vietnam. A lesson we should have learned forty years ago.

“WASHINGTON (AFP) — President Barack Obama Thursday unveiled a 663.7 billion dollar defense budget, up a modest 1.5 percent on 2009, but projected a sharp decline in spending on wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in the coming years.”

Somehow under the new administration, it’s ok to photograph and reproduce images of coffins containing our dead service members. You may call the changes so far symbolic, I call them substantial.

We’re not in Kansas anymore. Kansas is no longer Kansas, despite how bad the people who live there want it to be. The world has changed and continues to do so. Pay attention. Nobody is in Kansas anymore.

We need to be as fierce in battle as we are gentle in friendship. I stole that but I don’t remember where.

Maybe next we’ll talk about education and health care.

Drinks for my friends.

A cautionary tale.

Had Hitler had not suffered from the delusional ganduer of acute and chronic hubris, we might be speaking German these days. The Germans were way on the nuclear tip. Their rocket technology and know how was far beyond what anyone else understood. They pounded the shit out of London with the V2. They were mere months away from a jet aircraft.

Hitler took on Russia in the winter. Napolean made a similar mistake more than two hundred years before. Russia was Hitler’s demise. Napolean’s as well. Pride and stupidity all the way around.

We lost, as a country, over half a million men in WWII. Lives. Russia spent somewhere in the neighborhood of twenty million. Lives. Twenty million lives.

All I know about Korea is it was ugly and we gained nothing. Net zero. Wait, a pretty good TV show. And Kim Jong-il, he’s the best whackjob on the international stage. I bet the military industrial folks were happy.

Vietnam saw us lose over fifty thousand. Lives. Who really knows the number of Vietnamese lives lost? Millions of Vietnamese lives.

Iraq has seen over four thousand American lives lost, but by some estimates as many as a million Iraqi lives. Lives.

I’m telling you this because it’s relative. It’s relevant.

Vietnam was at best, a misguided idea. The bad idea was allowed to become a huge mistake. The only benefit was enjoyed by the military industrial complex. Ike warned us a decade before but it didn’t take.

The rain falls on the just and the unjust alike.

I’m just gonna skip to a point. WWII was a bloody, horrible conflict. A proud German populace sought to rise above a flogging by the world after the first big stupid war and ended up wading into cruel and vicious zealotry. Evil reared it’s disgusting head. Japan came along and America had itself a war of epic proportions.

As near as I can tell, we had no choice. What we did was impressive. We mechanized all available industrial capability and trained millions to fight and build the engines of war inside of a few years. America didn’t sacrifice the lives or pay the price other countries did, but we were awesome. Pivotal. We got together as a country.

We still paid a heavy price.

It was a good thing, don’t forget, something for which there was no other choice.

As far as I know, WWII is the last just war we fought.

Let’s talk about this one.

Iraq.

They can’t define victory for this scenario because for an occupation, no defintion of victory exists. How to win an occupation? No answer. If there was a definition of victory to be had at all, it would be the public lynching of Saddam. Found him in a hole. Long time ago. Hung him. Been there, done that. Killed his sons. A shameful hour of amateurism. Sad, crude and ugly.

Don’t go all hawk on me. He was a complete bastard that deserved the taste of his own blood.

You know, war is way more fucked up than any of us who haven’t particiapted can possibly understand. That’s why it’s so devastatingly awful, so tragic and insane when war happens for reasons stupid or none at all.

Reasons for this war in Iraq are bogus or not at all.

Imagine being lucky enough to be one of the millions of Iraqis driven from your home as opposed to perishing inside it. Now, if you have the resources, your only option is a foreign country. The only possible safety. Ninety eight percent of these people didn’t ask for this and don’t deserve it.

It is without a doubt, the stupidest thing we’ve ever done. Most Americans are not even aware of the damage wrought. Cities reduced to rubble and the suffering and the blood and death and the horror. American families never again to see sons, daughters, husbands, wives, fathers and mothers.

The world reels, slaps it’s forehead and collapses into a chair. Much of the world, our fellow humans, don’t understand at all.

For what? WMD? An imminent threat that could come in the shape of a mushroom cloud? These jackasses so goddamn inept they didn’t even bother to stage some miraculous discovery to justify such madness. I was convinced they’d contrive some WMD epiphany.

By the way, where the fuck are Condi and Darth? I get nervous when we can’t see what their up to.

What I’m trying to point out here, is that when war is waged for reasons unjust, the end result will never be viewed as any kind of victory by any definition. It’s impossible. America is in the middle of right this now.

Once again, the only benefit enjoyed is by private military and security contractors, and well, the newest wrinkle in global conflict, big oil and the rest of Dick-in-Bush’s filthy friends. This at the expense of well over ten billion dollars a month when you factor the vigorish. Your children will be be paying this debt and the vig for decades. Ask yourself and your friends for what?

For fucking what?

It’s enough to make me projectile vomit with a velocity that allows for not but a fine mist of regurgitate to spot my liberal pinko blouse. A little soda water and I’m as good as new.

This all brings us to the goddamn surge. Far too much gravitas is afforded here. I’m getting sick and tired of Doubtfire taking credit for saving Iraq. It is not saved, safe or won by any means. What it is, is stupid.

A movement dubbed the “Anbar Awakening” among Sunnis in direct opposition to Al-Qaeda in Iraq began in early 2006. The tribes got together to decide enough is enough. They also announced that “this sucks”. They began to cooperate with each other and America.

The United States Government is paying between a hundred and a hundred and fifty thousand Sunni fighters about $300 a month to abstain from engaging US forces and otherwise stop stirring the shit. Part of the deal includes the Sunnis being integrated in to the emerging Iraq infrastructure and new Iraqi government.

This all pre-dates the surge by six months or so.

The crippling flaw is the the abscence of an emerging infrastructure and a vacuum of new government.

Dick-in-Bush have signed a lease that guarantees participation in this clusterfuck for years to come. We walk away and those Sunnis run amok. Chaos, destruction and the stink of death take on a whole new momentum and meaning.

Maher posits the Americans have become so narcisisstic that we expect our President to be just like us. Stupid and underinformed. It’s not so much about Race with Our Man, Americans are reluctant to vote for anyone smarter than them. Fuck me. I want a President that can whoop my ass in a game of chess, checkers, maybe Monopoly or Chutes and fucking Ladders.

Hey McCain, fuck you and your fucking surge. Tell the truth and stop wearing the one unpopular thing you’ve done in a decade as some preposterous badge of honor. You sir, are an idiot. Not so much for the sheer size of the whopper lies you foist upon us, but I pray stupid enough to underestimate an average American’s capacity for the bullshit they represent.

Stop prentending you couldn’t or wouldn’t sell us out. You already have.

You’re a dick.

My threshold of awe is only consistently breached by the fact that Doubtfire is still competive in the polls. Unbelievable.

Imagine what a third world war will look like.

Drinks for my friends.

First up, Cindy Stepford McCain. Oh boy. Can’t wait.

Out she comes with the whole dam fam minus the Bootlicker and introduces them before dismissing them. She goes to Gustav victims. She speaks like she’s on something. She’s an empty vessel. Maybe her batteries are low. I wonder what she looks like without her face plate.

“If only the Federal Government would get itself under control and out of our way”. She’s boring. Cut to What’s Her Name telling her daughter to “smile for me”.

Sappy, predictable and obvious. Offered in dulcet tones of halcyon. She comes from the house that Anheuser built. She steals mustard packets from fast food restaurants. She always has kleenex on her somewhere.

She manages to highlight the profound lack of substance in every speech thus far at this convention, in stark contrast to the style AND subtance served up by the Democrats last week. No mention of the beleaguered middle class, the suffering poor, health care et al, nor a whiff of what they intend to do about any of it.

Doubtfire is next. I’m looking for policy, metrics, specifics……….

I’m not holding my breath. That’s not to say I’m not touching myself. It’s purely platonic. Intellectual. You know what I mean.

The video introduction is heavy on the POW thing. Ok, I fucking get it. Enough. Oh yeah, and he’s a maverick. Lotsa black folks in the video. Whatever. Talk about a desperate whore for a brand.

He ambles geriatric to the dais. The knot in his tie is mediocre and the garment itself is yellow. Cut to a sign that says you can’t win an occupation. Another cut to a sign that says McCain votes against vets. Chants of USA. He actually mentions Dumbya for keeping us safe or something; offering us proof that although his phallus is withered and dry, his balls touch the water in the bowl.

So far it’s all fluff. He goes on and on. Family, yadda, yadda yadda yadda. He tells us he won’t let us down and he’ll earn our trust. Some grace when talking about Our Man. A little humility even.

Tumescence anyone?

Prosperity and peace is the message as dissenters are manhandled out of the venue. He calls it “ground noise and static” and they laugh. He’s going to stand on our side and fight for our future and he’s found the right patrner to do so. He proceeds to lie shamelessly about her. He’s creepy when he forces a smile after making it a point to lie.

Change is coming he tells us.

Time for a smoke.

He’s gonna veto pork barrel spending. I guess that’s how intends to solve our economic woes. Republicans are astonishingly anti-union.

And then,”rather lose an election than a war”. Fuck me. I’m shirtless so I haven’t ruined my pinko liberal blouse. The communist in me smiles and heads to the bathroom to wash up.

He fights for us he says. He’s nearly as dull as his wife. We’re going to get back to basics. We’re all God’s children and we’re all Americans. A culture of life. As opposed to what? Judges who don’t legislate from the bench. Families and communities. A government that doesn’t make your choices for you.

Uh huh.

Lies about Democrats and taxes. Democrats will close markets. His tax cuts will create jobs. I assume he’s talking about the Bush tax cuts. Good luck with that one Doubtfire. More lies about taxes and healthcare. They eat it up. A bureaucrat will stand between you and your healthcare. Um, ok. That’s different from now how?

Oh, how the great unwashed covet and then adore to feast on the lies.

He offers a follicle of policy without specificity. We’re on to education. His answer is a choice for parents as to where they send their children to school. Good luck with that John. Don’t try to fix it, walk away. Privatize it. That’s breathtakingly stupid in light of the egregious impact deregulation and privatization has visited upon the struggling and downtrodden.

You know, your base, fuckhead?

Good show Bootlicker.

He’s gonna battle big oil. Is that despite the money he takes from them? Drill baby, drill. Again, a modicum of policy in the broadest and most ambiguous of terms.

Terror, terror, terror. Russia and more Russia. International lawlessness. Ha! He knows how the world works. He knows how to secure the peace. He hates war. Good to know.

Vietnam.

Time for a smoke. And a cocktail refresh.

I’m getting sleepy. More POW stuff. War stories. Again, respect an admiration but enough is enough. It’s not a qualification for President. I’m sorry, it’s just not. It’s a courageous story. He may be a better man than me or possibly you, but in light of all else that is requisite, it’s simply not enough.

It makes him suspect.

The camera finds a sign with the word maverick spelled wrong.

He wraps it up with some sentimental euphoria, the balloons and confetti drop and the families take the stage and they play Barracuda by Heart. Wonder how Anne and Nancy feel about that.

Who cares. I give him a D minus. He barely passed. I am not impressed.

At least What’s Her Name was entertaining.

“Don’t let your sly eye ricochet off the silver in a hobo’s pocket”. -Colbert

Drinks for my friends.

It is wholly appropriate for the velocity of the RNC to be so compromised by a hurricane falling to land on the Gulf Coast almost three years to the day after a hurricane named Katrina did the same. The response, to that storm, which Republicans fucked up so badly, it’s become a stain on the party and an avatar of of their compassionless failure and clueless ineptitude.

They didn’t even know how bad they’d screwed it up until it was almost over. By then, they didn’t care.

“The Republicans can’t seem to get a break when it comes to August and when it comes to the weather,” Karl Rove, -TPM

How convenient it morphed into a reason for preventing Dumbya and Darth from bearing witness; pariahs both in their own party. A little gift from Mother Nature to the Republicans. They clearly weren’t looking forward to that kind of steerage. Nevermind the cartage.

Laura Bush gets up and kicks it off by touting the unfunded mandate we know as “No Child Left Behind”. She says that apparently some fifty million people now live in freedom in Iraq and Afghanistan. Sheezus. First huge lie.

Still, I kinda like her. She has an absent minded dignity that’s a little infectious.

I only say that because somewhere, I have sympathy for her.

Next, we get Dumbya on the satellite. More POW bullshit. Standard bogus boiler plate lies. Empty words from an empty suit. Requisite references to 911. Yawn. I’m reminded for the millionth time that his eyes are too close together.

Thankfully, both speeches are brief.

Lotsa empty seats.

Well then, it’s the obligatory tribute to Reagan. A man who became the catalyst for the devastation of America’s middle class. A man who brought Russia to her knees by outspending them at the expense of America’s workers and the enrichment of the military industrial complex and therefore, the wealthiest among us. Trickle down economics my ass.

Reagan sucked. Why do Republicans insist on being so gay for him?

Fred Thompson’s speech blows. Sarah Palin. What a joke. He tells us the choice for her as VP has panicked the Democrats. Good luck with that. It does crack us up. What a tool. He touts her ability to “field dress a moose”. Do I need to highlight the obtuseness of that? I hope not.

We hear more about Doubtfire’s time in Vietnam. I respect his service and his sacrifice, but that’s where it ends with me. I’m impressed. But that’s it. He gives credit to Republicans for balancing the budget and rebuilding the military. Good luck with that too. He’s lying. The second huge lie. I think that was a guy named William Jefferson C.

John McCain will not feel the need to apologize for America. Arrogance. Then, what has become beyond trite and cliche, the tax scare and abortion. Republicans are still that stupid. Fred Thompson is that stupid.

What’s up with all the empty seats?

All the crowd can manage to chant is USA. They can’t seem to wrap a rythm around two syllables or four.

I guess Benedict Fliptop (Lieberman) is up next. Oh boy. I really hate this guy.

He goes to the economy and terrorism right away. He takes a swing at unity. The camera pans to Gingrich a handful of times. Curious. The camera finds a Black guy standing and clapping. Bonus.

Colbert would demand an Asian.

Lieberman tells us he’s a Democrat. Bullshit, He’s an Independent. Democrats abandonded him because he’s an idiot. Whatever. His speech is completely empty. No substance. I see a Democrats for McCain sign but ‘Democrats’ is spelled wrong. Take what you will from that.

I must tell you that although I’m an aspiring pacifist, I fantasize about punching Benedict Fliptop in the mouth. Hard. A haymaker. What a douchebag. The only reason he’s there is because he wants war to continue, he wants it to grow. All I see is a man who cares far more about Israel than he does America. I loathe him.

They have nothing. The Repubilcans have shown up to a firefight with those cool Star Trek toy guns that shot little plastic discs. Remember those? If not, please substitute squirt guns in your mind’s eye.

What we have here, is a failure to communicate.

There’s some post convention interviews on the floor as I leave CNN’s coverage. A group of delegates from Texas all dressed in matching outfits. They say they are proud of Dumbya for what he’s done for pro life issues and faith based institutions. They say it was painful to applaud to applaud Bill Clinton.

Forgive me here, but you’ve got to be fucking kidding me. All that goes on in the world every goddamn day and that’s the top of their goddamn list?

By the way, Campbell Brown rocks. She pissed on Tucker Bounds’ lunch. She did it with restraint and discretion and still cleaned his clock because he was woefully unprepared. I guess it cost Larry King a McCain interview tomorrow night. What a pussy is Doubtfire.

The demonstrations and the arrests continue to gain mass and attention. This may end up being half the story.

Drinks for my friends.

So, it’s Memorial Day.

Happy Memorial Day.

What’s that supposed to mean?

No matter which side of the the current conflict you’re on, how could anyone possibly be happy about it?

Today we’re supposed to reflect on and be grateful for those who have served and survived as well as those who have fallen. I am. I am grateful. It is a sacrifice that I cannot imagine.

I remember my uncle Danny. He came to stay with us after serving in Vietnam and an honorable discharge from the army. I was five or six. He was quiet but happy to be home. We slept in the same room and the dial of his radium painted watch glowed perpetually in the dark. He had a bullet scar on his shoulder. He was the youngest of my mother’s ten siblings.

A number of my uncles were in the military and even a few cousins. My father’s brother fought, my father was declared 4F. Besides my father’s brother Eldon, who fought in WWII and whom I didn’t really know, uncle Danny was the only one in my extended family to see combat.

Funny how they both ended up abusing alcohol.

As far as I know, he’s uttered aproximately two sentences about it in forty years. I was present for one of those sentences last summer at a family renunion. I was drunk and so was he, I don’t remember what he said.

I then got drunker with cousins Angie, Todd, Rob, shithead Rod, Derrick my coolest inlaw cousin and his wife Marlow………….it goes on and on. Tyke and Bobby, Fred and Sharon, John and Jody, Birdy and Ken, Jim and Carlene, Uncle Larry and Und uncle Skip (Skid), Shirley and Bob…………….It was a big ass collection of at least half crazy white people in the woods of eastern Washington State. You would not have wanted to stumble into that camp after dark if you were a stranger. Most of the Hardings keep a gun close by and so do most of the inlaws. I digress.

Uncle Danny is the sum of my experience with a combat veteran. Like I said, he hasn’t had much to say.

So I’ve got no legitimate personal stake in this. But it really chaps my ass. It’s wrong. Everyone is starting to realize it. Finally.

Once you buy that it’s a lie, and that’s a crucial step because it is, there’s really not much left other than the loss of life.

The emperor is naked and really disgusting to look at. He and his administration are why everyone is dying and having their limbs blown off and brains spilling out of their fucking heads.

The world used to love us because of our global exploits in the name of “Freedom”. Now, they hate us.

Newsflash you asshats: They don’t hate us because of Rosie O’donnell, they hate us because of Dick-in-Bush. And so do I.

Just yesterday I heard some fucktard on the radio trying to make a case for Rosie not supporting the troops and equating them to terrorists. This empty, jingoistic, rhetorical whaleshit is beginning to fossilize.

In other words, that dog don’t hunt. That brush don’t hold no paint. I’m gonna go out on a limb here and say that if you disagree with the previous two sentiments, you’re either stupid or ignorant. Perhaps willfully ignorant, a fate worse than passing a stone.

It’s all over but the dying. How long that goes on is up to our elected and our ability to sneak smoldering coals into their anal clefts.

Nearly thirty thousand Americans wounded and approaching thirty five hundred dead. Estimates of Iraqi dead are well north of a half million. Nothing accomplished and for no fucking reason. In fact, not only nothing accomplished but an actual deficit in that regard.

This is really stupid and so are we. I agree with Sean Penn. They should all be in fucking jail for what they have done.

Drinks for my friends. Happy holiday.