We Got Him!?
Long-term costs to the crippled American economy post-9/11 and the subsequent trillions of dollars in past and future military expenditures times the federal reserve’s tinkering and devaluation of the dollar in order to make all the numbers come together (as well as the risk to our country’s future as a country) may eventually top out at about 50 cents for every single one of Bin Laden’s cells. They tell us he’s dead, God willing.
More proof of our gormless American leadership being hustled like a five-year-old at the fair, this time out of more than $12 billion in “aid” by Pakistan and the likes of former leader General Pervez Musharraf who it seems himself was living close enough to the Bin Ladens to be put in charge of watering the plants and collecting the newspapers from out front while Osama and family were out of town. Skiing? Holidaying?
Say what you will about Donald Trump—madman, buffoon, joke, or “carnival barker” as Obama said, the man with the tackiest taste since Liberace seems like a man who would not give in to the world’s tricky three-card monte games by buying the cards, the table, the sidewalk, the street as our policy now seems to dictate. Trump is a dog with a hard-on humping your grandmother’s leg, sure. But when was the last time an American leader intimidated anybody? Granted, most foreign leaders tend to be a bit more self-landed and sophisticated than terminally brain-busted Gary Busey or the soi-disantly “highly educated” women of a Star Jones-caliber, or even the bullyboy hair-o-shima himself, an alter-ego and completely manufactured fiction called “The Donald,” it seems like if we don’t do something drastic like tell the world we’re not paying off any of our debts and it can go screw itself in a while like right now then our future as a country will be something out of Alex Jones’ stand-up act: rightly twice as terrifying as when he’s intentionally trying to be.
The killing of Osama Bin Laden (code name: Geronimo; skull allegedly stolen by Prescott Bush and Yale Skull & Bonesman) brought out the mobs of cheering Americans for a good ole time funeral shout-down ala Fred Phelps, the sad freakshow sadist leader of the Westboro Baptist Church, who blame homosexuality for the death of American soldiers and regularly picket funerals with their God Hates Fags signs. Seems the Seals got “Geronimo” once in the head and once in the chest reportedly, though the details have begun to unravel and unnerve some of us who’d have liked to see the FBI’s #1 terrorist put on trial and made to suffer for his crimes, not given a free trip around the board to land right on “Paradise: 72 Virgins.”
Amazing more people don’t get upset at the $2 billion a week we are spending in a war for a country that’s not worth a tenth of that, except perhaps to the opium growers, like Karzai and his brother. Allegedly. Spelled out, that’s $2,000,000,000. A thousand bucks a year for those of us who pay federal income taxes. I love schools. I like infrastructure. Roads. Even levees and canals and bridges. At some point we’re going to have to replace our fleet of big yellow school buses, all bought in 1960, and it’s gonna take money. But if we’re going to be engaged in expensive nation-building anywhere in the world, we should start right here and finish this one first. We’ve got 737 military bases scattered around the world in 130 different countries. Anyone who says 50% can’t be cut right off the top of the trillion dollar defense budget is a hopeless huge government romanticist, not just big, but huge.
We could certainly “create a more secure, democratic and prosperous world for the benefit of the American people” as USA foreign policy dictates by starting here. And I really don’t mean spending $75 billion a year for the Department of Homeland Security, which didn’t even exist for most of my life and yet I somehow managed to keep my homeland secured. Even if it means we have to fondle ourselves at the airport. Alternatively: Ladies and Gentlemen, welcome to Kabul, proud host of the 2062 Winter Games. I wouldn’t be surprised if the Afghanis swept in bi-athalon.
Exporting democracy doesn’t work. Of the three dozen or so admitted US interventions from the end of WWII to 2011, only one country imported what we were selling: the once great narco-state of Columbia.
Anybody with even a cursory understanding of Islam would know that Islamic law does not work with the principals of democracy. If Allah is the authority, then what can a 32-year-old junior senator from Waziristan say about hacking off heads even though there’s a definite civil law against it as well as a definite “NO HACKING OFF HEADS” sign right next to the head-hacking. Sorry, one-worlders and peaceful, reasonable NPR listeners, it’s a big, unreasonable square peg that reeks of BO trying to fit in a downy round little hole that’s screaming “NO! NO! NO!” Does NO! mean yes. No, of course not.
Bin Laden was killed on the second floor of his Fuhrer Bunker next to a cache of perhaps Everybody Loves Raymond DVDs and computer Risk. The word from street-wise CIA head Pinetta: Geronimo: EAKIA. “Action” may have meant sleeping.
Back at home, the almighty Corporate Universal Dog and Pony Show worked its way through the Halls of Congress, drowning out the bi-partisan guffaws and yammers of the spendthrifts trying their damn hardest to break our once mighty country in fearlessly mind-blowing displays of openly obstructurist murk and poo-flinging for the CSPAN cameras. Gavel this and table that, we still can’t seem to even begin to engage in serious debate about the perilous straights the American Armada is sailing through. It’s serious enough to defy cute metaphors: Ladies and gentlemen, our nation is in serious trouble. We spend too much money. We owe too much money. Our money will be worthless if we don’t stop it. Now.
Our problem, say the guys on the TV, O’Reilly, Hannity, Huckabee, Chris Matthews, Rachel Maddow, Whoopi Goldberg—you know, experts, is that we don’t produce anything here anymore. We lost our manufacturing base. Well, mostly. But we do carry 40% of the world’s weapons. It’s a military-industrial complex made in heaven for death profiteering corporations growing mutated cow teats, not even any bodies, just full-on teats full of goodness.
America has become one big black project, so, yes, it is refreshing when Donald Trump tries to pat down some of the pomposity that grows in Washington by demanding we see our leader’s birth certificate and says things like “Fuck China,” or “we should be taking control of the Iraqi oil wells.”
Something must be done. And fast. As a nation we must fire our collective Gary Busey. Because “too late” isn’t an answer any of us want to live with and the world is not going to grant us a “do-over.”
If we’re not going to use our superior military to take what we want, then we might as well start dismantling it and living like the wimps we have become. As it is, we’re being bullied by nerds, when they should be doing our homework for us and we should be getting the credit for it. I hate how this sounds, but I needed to say it. I love my country, but I’m not “in love” with it anymore. It let itself go. It got fat. It stopped trying. It’s embarrassed to take off its shirt at the pool. It can’t maintain an erection. It needs anti-depressants. It has life boiled down to either doing the “corporate grind” or opening up a gourmet coffee, beer and muffin shop with a name like “Guilt” or “Soma.”
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