A Line Must Be Drawn.

…President Bush Finally Does Me In…

While I don’t recall taking an oath on the topic, I’m pretty sure that I had created an internal rule that I would not write anything directly about the President of the United States, or the war in Iraq. Had I slaughtered a ritual goat on the matter (as opposed to the goats slaughtered to show my kids who’s boss), I might now be facing the Lord of the Hoary Netherworld and needing to answer a few questions.

But I didn’t – I know that I should have – but I didn’t.

As a result of this, my 2.3 readers will be exposed to the severe, low-abdominal discomfort of another blog about the President of the United States and the war in Iraq. For the want of a bag of goat viscera and the intervention of the Lord of the Hoary Netherworld, you will now be subjected to an addition to nigh-infinite gloom pages about Mr. Bush and his band of Creepy Political Fluffers.

Originally, I was going to make fun of Food Network Canada…really.

As you may recall (but I really doubt it), I wrote about one of the many ill omens for Iraq a little more than a year ago. Not coincidentally, this was the last time that the President addressed the nation on the grand strategic vision for the war in Iraq.

At that time, the President was as optimistic as a drunk kid trying to get laid. Things were looking up, the Iraqi people had voted by the millions and the obvious implication was that all things were headed in the right direction. Democratization, in the form of the elections, would reduce sectarian divides and the troops of the United States would be well represented since the President was always listening to the “commanders on the ground”.

Now, 13 months later, that little drunk kid has just bubbled a little vomit onto his shirt and the girl he was sniffing after has disappeared with someone else. Keeping with my personal idiom of beating metaphors to death, the drunk kid has decided to solve the problem by having another 3372 six-packs. Having failed at every turn to predict and secure the continuity within Iraq, the President will now insert better than 20 000 new troops to kick off a definitive change in direction and a new start for the US campaign in Iraq.

Of alcohol, it can at least be said that its excessive use will present the persistent illusion of having solved your problems.

If you try this, be warned that you may end up naked in the middle of a traffic jam at 2a.m. engaged in a burping musical odyssey that combines the works of Jefferson Starship with the closing number from HMS Pinafore all while claiming to be a Jedi Knight. But even as you fail to hold off the police while making ‘whoosh, whoosh’ lightsaber noises, you’ll feel just fine.

I have long resisted calling the President either evil, or a liar because that simply requires too much internal knowledge of a man that I will never meet. While I don’t intend to change that pattern now, it does bear pointing out that there is a consistent piece of fiction that the Bush administration continues to fling around the room. Namely, that the President takes his cues on military deployment from the generals and other commanders in the field.

Before the war, General Eric Shinseki noted that the invasion of Iraq would require “something in the order of several hundred thousand soldiers”. His role in Central Command was subsequently de-emphasized. More recently, General John Abizaid noted that Shinseki had been right and joined General George Casey in noting that a further increase in troops would not be helpful in Iraq. They are now both on their way out, with overall command being given to General David Petraeus.

This can be excused, can’t it? During the American Civil War, President Lincoln went through a whole grocery store full of commanding generals. While it hurts my teeth to compare Lincoln and Bush, I get some relief with the immediate realization that the current President cannot possibly mean (or understand) what he says.
Bush cited troop levels as a cause for the failures, despite having supposedly granted the generals all the troops they asked for. Military men tend to be very practical, and it seems unlikely that they were free to ask for more resources in the face of catastrophe but chose not to. History is replete with Generals who asked for too much, but very few who didn’t ask for enough because they were shy.

More obviously, if Abizaid and Casey had both disagreed with the troop increase only to be relieved of command and have the surge go ahead anyway, the President obviously stopped listening to them at some point. Incidentally, Petraeus is being hired for the job based on his counter-insurgency expertise; this was gained by the way through prescribing and applying a ratio of soldier-to-civilian that the United States cannot hope to meet. Actually, it could meet it if it relied more heavily on the woefully unpredictable Iraqi army but I’ve not heard of any commanders advocating that the Americans place their faith in such a divided group that is itself beset by the same sectarian walls that trace across the entire region.

To me, that sounds like letting Lex Luthor’s henchman keep an eye on your kryptonite.

The Value of Your Breath.

A person I hardly know walks up to me with a distinct look of urgency about them. With a concerned, sincere and almost parental level of credibility they want to warn me of something very dire.

“The first Pope of the third millennium has died, and the Holy land is still divided. This is a sure sign of the end of days. The Apocalypse is upon us.”

A few things will happen at this point, I will attempt to remove myself from the conversation as quickly as I can. It’s not urgent, I’m not compelled to get away from the Armageddonist with the same need that would motivate me to get away from an amorous professional wrestler named Lumpy, but I’m still going to leave. I will be civil, and I may even thank him.

What I will not do is sprint home (as this would make the thick, rich fat in my veins boil causing me to burst) and consult my copy of the King James Bible. I will not double check the contents of the Book of Revelations. I will not worry and I will not fret. I could turn this into a poem, I bet.

Sorry.

The reason that I will not become anxious over this warning is not because I am not religious. As a “soft” atheist I am not inclined to believe in any god right now, but I also don’t think that I’m smart enough to rule the whole thing out. So my disinclination toward godliness will not be what tips the scale. Upon final consideration, what will throw this piece of eschatological prudentia into the garbage heap is that I can honestly say that while the Days End scenario was presented with a chain of evidence and a process of cause and effect, it is one with which I am sufficiently familiar and can therefore comfortably ignore. If I am relatively secure in my belief that such assertions are flawed from within, I’m not going to bother with it.

But say what I want about his evidence, his premise and his conclusion, I must at least concede this; at least he had these things in his message. Most people do not.

The very sad fact is that people who speak about far more mundane, but more verifiable things do so with little or no evidence at all. As for linkage between their premise and their conclusion, most aren’t even aware of the meaning of those terms. Given that I am a snooze-inducing centrist (Ignore La Revolution!) my next point will not come as a surprise. This is not a lefty problem; this is not a righty problem. This is a stupid problem.

It is a problem of stupid people, by stupid people and for stupid people.

There are people (my best guess is that there are two of them) who might read this and say, “Hey, this is about me.” My reply is that, if you think so, it probably is.

People I know will discuss religion, sports, politics, philosophy and a million other things. Some will have well-constructed arguments, some will be making crap up as they go along and still others will be belching out oily clouds of partisan hackery that they memorized from some horrid fecal engine like Michael Moore or Sean Hannity.

But even these people have linkage and something resembling a logical chain of cause and effect. It may be a weak and evil chain like the one that Moore has about those villains who stand between him and cheeseburgers, or the cheese-and-meat-head claims of Hannity as he seeks to prove that he almost certainly drinks from unflushed toilets.

They are vile and horrid Sophists and propagandists, but at least they have a point. While they conclude to awful things, at least they conclude.

What I am referring to is the intellectual bankruptcy of relativism; the pimply faced, shrill ugly child of the philosophical family. Fact does not matter because, well they just don’t. Facts are stupid and mean and don’t allow me to make unsupported claims at random about varying subjects such as how Chef Boyardee is out to get me and why the government stole my copy of Johnny Get Your Gun or whatever piece of indulgent crap you were reading.

If the only thing you showed up to say is that none of these assertions matter because they are all just opinion, well that’s just your opinion. As such, rather than bother me with your hollow and vacuous statements of intellectual surrender, go to your dermatologist buy some degreaser and be quiet. I have no use for you.

If you are a radical or a fool, I can argue with you. If you are a relativist, you are the intellectual equivalent of dandruff. You are the detritus of real discourse, a foul byproduct.

Go away