Friday, November 21, 2003
(1:20 AM) | Anonymous:
Rudie Can't Fail
So, recently Richard Perle, the pentagon's hawk strategist, and one of, if not the, main advisor to Donald Rumsfeldconceded to a room full of anti-war fans that the invasion of Iraq broke international law.
He basically said, for those of you who don't like the clicky-clicky, that yes, international law was broken, but, it had to be in order to do "the right thing."
This, of course, completely goes against what everyone in the administration has been saying. They have always said that it was preventative, and thus justified, or that the prior UN resolutions where Sadaam had to reveal all his holdings allowed the US to be the executor.
I'm not that surprised, although literal gasps were heard in Pearle's audience. But, did anyone see The Daily Show a few days back, where in back to back clips they played the white house press conference talking about how we are definitely leaving Iraq in June no matter what, with the conference Bush was having with 5 Iraqi women leaders in which he said "we are definitely not abandoning you, we will stay in Iraq until the job is finished." The two events happened almost simultaneously.
Really, the whole rhetoric on the war is reminding me of that glorious scene from The Wizard Of Oz, where Toto rips away the curtain and the "wizard" continues to say, "Please ignore the man behind the red curtain..he is nothing.." when plainly everyone can see him pulling the levers and switches and saying the words. The gig is up, and yet he continues. It's one of the most beautiful scenes in American Cinema, because it is just so human!
This seems to be happening more and more recently. In conversations I've had the last few weeks, I've heard "The Government is not supposed to help its citizens" when talking about health care and welfare and that homeless in California get 300 bucks a month and a cell phone.
I've also heard that "only 400 or so people have died in Iraq." I soon pointed out that at minimum, 7898 Iraqi civilians have died, and at maximum 9729 have died. This does not count US servicemen or Iraqi soldiers. The person responded by telling me he meant the US servicemen, and that the Iraqi civillians "brought it upon themselves by letting someone like Sadaam Hussein reign so long." I didn't dare mention that I thought the thousands upon thousands more Iraqi military officer deaths might, you know, also be a bad thing. The total number is between 21,000 and 55,000 people dead.
In that first instance, the one about the homeless people, I asked the person about Christ, as a person with no residence who insisted on carrying little money and taking no actual occupation, who, not-coincidentally, often many, many times advocated "selling all you have and giving it to the poor"..(i.e. not instructing them how to work and what not, just..you know, giving it to them)
I was met with the response that Jesus has a steady income coming from his ministry. Thus Judas was the money-keeper. Also, I was told that I had been ruined by "those liberal college professors." None of my professors are explicitly liberal.
I mean..really..the British are burning Bush in effigy, and his response is not to look at why, or to doubt himself for a second. Instead he says:
"It was pointed out to me that the last noted American (magician David Blaine) to visit London stayed in a glass box dangling over the Thames," Bush said Wednesday in the hall where another head of state, Charles I, was beheaded in 1649. "A few might have been happy to provide similar arrangements for me." When the laughter ended, he added: "I thank Her Majesty the Queen for interceding."
It is pretty funny, but it is also a condescending shrug off of the blatantly obvious fact that a lot of people find things seriously wrong with what he is doing. This isn't standard fare..and yet nothing will make him stop to look at everything.
I am lost.
However, so everyone knows, a new DJ Daterape track is up, entitled "The True Ones Were Time Travel," It incorporates a childhood memory for all from Michigan, thanks to Mr. Kotsko. It also incorporates these crazy new things called "drums", and I think it sucks less than all my other work combined.
