The Comedy of Errors

Every so often we liberals get a break from our constant anguish and get to laugh at the Administration for blatant stupidity. When I read the headlines tonight about Cheney nailing one of his billionaire friends with his shotgun, the image of Elmer Fudd hunting Daffy Duck leapt into my mind, and even though I was at work, I could not stop giggling. The press ever so politely described the victim as having been "peppered". Is that some new medical term for having your face blown off? Or perhaps some Republican spin like "collateral damage" used to describe civilians accidentally vaporized because we had bad intelligence about the location of the terrorists?

It could not be true that Dick used poor judgment, or was reckless in any way, maybe he was acting on bad intelligence again. Maybe Daffy was hiding in the woods, but was being protected by some rogue waterfowl. It was probably just one of those things, a guy got in the way of a target, and now half of his face is collateral damage.

OOPS.

Even if you ignore the terrible judgment and reckless behavior of the decision to invade and occupy Iraq, even if you ignore the dodgy intelligence and and in some cases, forgery, the execution of the war from the very beginning has suffered from poor decision making and the inability to learn from past mistakes. The fact that Baghdad was given up without the street battles we were anticipating should have sent warning signals up and down the chain of military command, someone should have figured out that the highly trained troops didn't just go to Syria for the weekend. I'm not a military person and not a criminal, but if I were going to go breaking and entering in someone's home, I wouldn't assume that because I couldn't see the owner, he wasn't home. Many military folks told the Administration at every stage of the illegal action that more troops were needed.

How stupid was it to dissolve the Iraqi army and send highly trained soldiers home without jobs? How stupid was it to try and contain the first stirrings of the insurgency in Fallujah with heavily armed former Baathists? Was anyone surprised when that brigade disappeared with thousands of assault rifles and trucks? Who's bright idea was it to use such cruel methods of imprisonment and interrogation? Did the graduates of WestPoint think that a bunch of kids from Iowa should be given orders to soften up prisoners? When the Fallujah problem persisted, these reckless and dangerous men used White phosphorus to level a heavily populated city and reduce it to rubble.

Republicans are supposed to be good at this war stuff. In the olden days, Daddy Bush went back to correct his stupid mistakes with overwhelming force in Panama looking for that drug dealing US trained Noreiga. During the first Gulf war, Daddy Bush knew better than to open the can of worms in Iraq. Maybe that's because Daddy actually served his country in a real war, where as Dick and George had other things to do.

These guys who have never served in any armed conflict are the ones Americans have decided to trust with the biggest guns on the planet. What's funny is that even after they were completely and undeniably wrong on the reasons for war, and were comically inept at the invasion and occupation of a battered third world country, Americans elected them yet again. These guys who have never put their lives at risk for this country are in control of not just shotguns that they can't handle, but some of the most deadly weapons on the planet. I don't know about you, but that makes me really nervous. What will Cheney hit the next time he aims at Daffy Duck?
If life were a cartoon, it would almost be funny. But it's not, and now it's time for us grown-up Americans to take the guns away from these men older than our fathers with poor vision and judgment.

Do you want to wait and see who they shoot next?

| +Save/Share | |