Friday, October 19, 2007

Clowns of Death

Quick question before I take my pre-karaoke nap. This is the sort of thing that I ponder for substantial periods of time while I'm at work:

Okay, so if a kid comes to my door on Halloween and says Trick or Treat, and I produce a rabbit out of a hat, am I then allowed to say, "Good day to you, then," and close the door?

After all, the kid is saying Trick or Treat, which implies that he'd rather have the trick than the treat, since he is giving primary treatment to the Trick half of the option?

This is not unlike a criminal saying, "Your money or your life." He would much rather have the money, but will take your life, but only as a last resort, if a deal cannot be reached with regard to the money.


AIM: therbmcc71

Liars Everywhere

So, I was bopping around the internet, as I commonly do on nights like this, where I just can't sleep, and I noticed the news story about the Turkish killings of a number of Armenian people, and how Congress is trying to figure out whether or not it's genocide, and whether or not they should condemn it. And this is one of those parts where we realize that Congress, despite being run by the Democrats now, they're still the lapdogs of the President.

No, seriously. The Democrats campaigned and won almost a year ago on this notion of change and getting things done, and –this was their big one– ending the war. The closest they've gotten to getting shit done all year is sending a bill to the President to give more kids health care, which the President promptly vetoed, at which point the Democrats celebrated victory. It's totally fucked up out there in Washington, and nothing has changed. The last nine months are proof positive that the Democrats are just as inept as the Republicans, just as self-serving, and it's not like next year is going to get any better, because they're going to have to spend the next year fund-raising, rather than actually working, because it's an election year.

Case in point: Congressman Joe Knollenberg (R-MI) wants Nancy Pelosi to rally the Democrats to essentially 'vote yes for genocide.' Okay, that's poorly phrased, and deliberately so, but Joe Knollenberg is the same guy who's introduced a House bill to promote Mandarin language instruction. No shit. Seriously, the guy wants you to be able to personally train the Chinese man who's going to take your job back to Asia and do it for thirty cents a day. So, of course, Knollenberg is the voice of reason, and so we should take his word that a vote for genocide is a vote for ... exporting American jobs? Something like that.

I mean, it's genocide. It totally fucking is, and there's really no denying it, although Turkey has managed to for about the last century. I think their official position is, "It wasn't genocide; it was merely a forced deportation and massacre of only about 1.5 million Armenians. That isn't genocide. It's not genocide until you hit Hitler kinds of numbers." It's absolutely laughable that Congress is bowing to Presidential pressure to not label this as genocide, because we won't be able to fly over Turkey in order to continue the war in Iraq.

Let's flash back a year, here, and remember that the Democrats were all for ending the war in Iraq a year ago. Today, they're perfectly willing to continue the war and, as a bonus, allow Turkey to continue to labor under the delusion that their people have always been morally upstanding. I mean, it's not that the war would end if Turkey suddenly cut off access to its airspace, it would just be less convenient. And yet the Democrats allow this shit to keep going on.

They're all liars. Democrats, Republicans, delusional third-party Presidential candidates. Liars, one and all. They promise us a better America, and then they can't deliver on their main campaign points. They can't even start to deliver, because they're afraid for their own jobs. They can't cut the war budget, because that would be equated with accusations of, "This soldier died because the country didn't give the army body armor to stop that bullet!"

You want the best way to save soldiers' lives? Get them out of the way of the bullet by getting them the hell out of Iraq. This is not rocket science. It's not hard to understand. The notion of, "If we don't get them over there, they'll get us over here," doesn't hold water, because logistically we can't invade every country that has a sect of people who don't like us. Furthermore, I don't remember the United States invading, sanctioning, or condemning Saudi Arabia for producing the majority of the 9/11 terrorists.

Of course, if there's one thing we can be sure of, it's this: As long as Saudi Arabia still has oil to sell us, the United States isn't going to be condemning them for much of anything. I mean, I condemn them. Hell, I condemn them on women's rights alone. It doesn't take much to get me to take the moral high ground against ass-backward countries that will be relegated back to third-world status about three days after the oil runs out.

So, in conclusion, Turkey has us over a barrel. If Congress declares their actions to have been a matter of genocide, they have every right to cut off our military access to their airspace. I say, "Fuck 'em." Pull the troops out of Iraq, ship them home, tell Turkey they suck and that they're bad people, and take the $200 billion that Congress appropriated for this year's war in Iraq, and we'll build the best thousand schools in the world.


AIM: therbmcc71

Sunday, October 07, 2007

We Care A Lot

So, I'm typing this post on my nifty new iPod Touch, and it's kind of a rough go, but I'm getting faster by the minute, and the predictive spelling is very nice on the regular occasion that I mistype a word. It's really a neat device, but I don't imagine I'll be using it for this sort of thing very often, as it really is a bit of work. And I have no idea how you kids do text-messaging on phones that don't have real keyboards (of the QWERTY sort). This is neat, though; everyone should get one, or an iPhone, if you have sixty bucks a month to blow on your iPod.

AIM: therbmcc71